Shout! Omaha

THE MUSIC MARQET

BY MarQ Manner

There is a new business model out there for bands and musicians that totally eliminates the record labels. Will it work? I am not going to be breaking any news here as most people already know about Kickstarter, and recently I have run across the music centric pledge site.

Right now it is a great way to move out of the beginner stage and transport yourself with a lot of hard work and probably many years to the big time. Yes, there is still a big time, but it might not be that major record label deal anymore. The big time might be when you are actually earning big revenue in iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, and whatever else comes next in the “earn a quarter of a penny for your play” platforms. Of course if you are pulling in money on those platforms you are probably making decent coin playing shows also.

Here is how it works. You are playing horrible guitar riffs in your basement and annoying your parents to no end. They tell you to quit it. You then meet this guy that has his own house and basement and he plays bass. You start jamming there. Soon enough the drummer who has been kicked out of every band in town is knocking on the door. Your “band” scours the karaoke rooms and find the perfect singer for your band. Now you are ready to play gigs and you call up the biggest room in town and ask to play. You’re shocked when you do not get a response from the venue. So you start to play lowly bars and a year later you have 75 people that are coming to your gigs. People are talking about you on “Facespace” and you get offered a gig at that big venue. More and more of those gigs come, but you are not really making a lot of cash. The next step of course is to record and tour. How are you going to do that? You go onto one of these websites and raise money and essentially sell your record in advance plus special in- centives. This can be a living room concert, a thank you in the liner notes, cooking dinner for the big donor, or something even more creative. Now you have enough money to tour. Rinse and repeat over and over again.

Soon you are drawing a crowd on tour, you have a manager, a publicist, and maybe even a indie record label that is not really paying you but doing your work for you. You get asked to open a tour for a bigger band, maybe radio comes calling, maybe it’s YouTube that is driving listens, but now you are getting a nice looking paycheck from Spotify and iTunes. Kickstarter be gone! You play arena’s, festivals, win Best New Artist at the Grammys and everything is perfect until people are onto the next big thing.

You continue to tour, but that money is not coming through quite like it was. You go back to mid-sized venues use your name to easily once again raise funds on Kickstarter amongst your reliable hard core fans. Eventually the singer goes solo and does a collaboration album with Carlos Santana and he is off on his own and making the big bucks again. You try to book gigs with a similar sounding band name and hope your fans figure it out and show up. They don’t. You move back into your parents’ house and play guitar all night in the basement remembering the good times. Eventually they tell you to get a job and get out of the house. You get a job at the local bar with your notoriety and soon you meet an upcoming bass player.