Things changed a few years ago, however, when MySpace blew up. At that point, there were already lots of ways for musicians to make their music available online, but nothing compared to what MySpace made possible. Non-musician MySpace users were actually open to, and even excited by, the prospect of being able to hear the bands that, as the thinking went, record labels were too safe to sign. But in the short span of a couple of years, those users learned that most unsung bands sound more or less the same (i.e., not good), and that there are seemingly millions of them (most of which were also sending demos to record labels; as a result, most labels no longer accept unsolicited demos).

Now, in the wake of the lost cause that is MySpace, audiences have become jaded about the prospect of checking out DIY musicians. Audiences once again look to filters to help them decide what music to give a chance. Podcasts and broadcasts (All Songs Considered, Morning Becomes Eclectic), streaming sites (Last.fm, Jango, Pandora), review sites (Pitchfork, Onion AV Club, MP3 blogs), and vendors (iTunes, Amazon.com) all employ filters that make it harder for musicians – even those with label affiliation – to get heard. But the good news is that once you get heard, you’re taken more seriously than you would be as one of millions of self-promoting unknown bands on some social networking site that does not discriminate between “serious” and “I have a computer so why not?” musicians. True, the latter sometimes has better music than the former, but that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that most people are not willing to be at the first stage of the filtering system. Rare are the people with the time and psychological fortitude and endurance to search through a thousand musicians of wildly varying levels of quality to find that one with whom they’d like to spend more time.

What made me want to write about this topic was an email I got recently from IAC, a streaming site that pays artists on a per-play basis and is funded by advertisers and artist subscriptions. IAC features artists ranging from hobbyists to professionals. Their email announced that they are going to start removing artists whose presentation doesn’t hold up to some standard of quality and might therefore scare away potential listeners. I’m all for it, and would expect that anyone who takes their music career seriously would be all for it.

I should point out that I respect and encourage people’s desire to record music and post it online. There are plenty of avenues for that, such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. What I have a harder time with is seeing avenues through which serious artists can distribute their music becoming clogged with lazy, half-finished, amateurishly presented work that scares away potential listeners. It’s in all of our best interests to have a more stringent filtering system at places like iTunes, eMusic, Amazon.com, and IAC. Actually, IAC is the least strict of these. To be at those other places, you at least have to have an album, though recently this has just come to mean meeting certain requirements that no longer include having a physical CD (and only one song is needed to qualify as an “album”). As a vendor, iTunes doesn’t have to worry about a reputation for quality so much as quantity (though I assure you not just anyone will be included on their homepage), so we’ll have to see where an increasingly open-door policy takes them. Will they institute even stricter filtering systems like CDBaby (an exclusively “unsigned artist” vendor) has with their podcasts and newsletters?

Pandora, in contrast with iTunes, is a site that doesn’t sell music, but instead streams songs in full. It’s a place for discovering music, and, once you know how to use it, Pandora works really well to that end. Because they’re all about you discovering great music based on artists whom you already love, they have to cultivate a reputation for quality in order to succeed. To ensure quality, they have a listening committee that evaluates submissions. They rejected my first two albums, in fact, and, although I do think it’s their loss, I’m really ok with it. My third album (REATTACHMENT) was accepted, and I know that their users will give it more of a chance because they know there is a filter in place.

To be clear, musicians are not to blame for the situation I’m describing here. It’s the accumulation that’s causing the congestion, not the actions of any one individual. Musicians need to take this accumulation into consideration when planning their promotions and when being rejected by a filter like Pandora, or when being completely ignored by critics and the online public in general. I think what IAC has come to terms with is the fact that they are better off (i.e., better able to avoid bankruptcy) having fewer musicians selling a-little-to-a-lot of music to a loyal and potentially expanding fan base rather than having thousands of musicians selling zero-to-a-little music to a small circle of friends. In this way, a difficult filtering process makes us work harder as artists as well as marketers (an inextricable part of being a working musician).

The slippery slope argument against stringent filtering is that we would end up with only a small selection of new music to choose from, all of which has been selected based on the taste of a class of self-proclaimed elitists. I believe that this would happen even less than it did before the digital age. In fact, now that the options are greater than ever, filtering could just be a way to help balance the scale to a more even slant in terms of which label-affiliated and “homemade” bands are being offered to the public at large for consideration.

In conclusion, it’s clear that the digital age has affected the music industry in more ways than making it easier to get a library of music for free and to carry that library around on an iPod. We have also seen an incredible decrease in what it costs to record and distribute music, which has resulted in an immeasurable increase in the amount of bands pushing their demos to record labels, reviewers, live venues, and the public in general. This increase, especially when coupled with technology itself, has resulted in a pickier than ever, jaded listening public with a short attention span (see my previous blog about the Slow Listening Movement). With this in mind, it seems it would be in the best interest of any serious musician to be in favor of stringent filtering processes that would attract audiences as opposed to repelling them.