Good news on the independent musician front
The good news is in - there is still room for innovation and being an independent musician and getting your music to the world.
Earlier this year, we wrote about The Boxer Rebellion, an independent band from the UK, who had gone out on their own after a rocky debut release on a label. Their digital release of their new album Union was lucky enough to score great promotion in the form of an iTunes front page tile, the free single of the week. No money was spent on marketing. From the single of the week promotion, the album sold an amazing 560,000 downloads in the first week. The band had a direct deal with iTunes UK, but the single of the week tile can be achieved by any artist with a great song and great promotional material to support it.
Now, on to the good news from Behind the Music - The Boxer Rebellion boys have not bowed to the old school industry and have instead decided to keep on blazing a trail of their own. Obviously, after they made such amazing sales, they fielded numerous offers of label deals - but turned them down. When demands for their music started to come in from physical stores (taking a call from HMV in Canada), they were honest and thought outside of the box. They told them that, as an independent band, they didn’t have the money to fund the volume of discs HMV were asking for. They then cut a deal with HMV directly, where HMV funded the production of the discs for a cut of the sales and a promise of travelling to Canada to perform in-store across the country - certainly beneficial for both parties. This quickly followed in the UK.
The takeaway message from this is that there is a lot of room for a band with good songs to rock the boat and use the industry to their advantage, not just feel down-trodden by the (old-school) systems already in place.
Follow this with Amanda Palmer’s latest twitter achievement, her planned-in-20-minutes, flash-mob sourced, ultra-cheap video of a cover of Cat Steven’s “If you want to sing out” and you have two artists really changing the face of how musicians interact with the industry they work in (around?).
The question is - how are you thinking outside the box? The first step is understanding what is already going on in the box, so you can step out of it. Reading industry blogs and contributing to these forums as well as listening to others working in the industry will give you a great idea of what is going on and will allow you to take your own (informed) position on it.
So, start building a team of lateral thinkers around your band - who can help you blaze a new trail in the industry? If you aren’t particularly good with the business side of the industry, who can help you with that?
August 10th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
The Boxer Rebellion in playing at Falmouth Sound in a couple of week in the UK
August 17th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
The Boxer Rebellion are an awesome band and an inspiration. It’s great to see a band paving new territory and building such a massive following independently. They’ve worked hard to get where they are and I hope they inspire many more bands to break out of the mould in the future. Not to mention they are such lovely guys (when my bands amp broke at 11pm the night of a gig in Brighton, they lent us one at the last minute even though it was probably so inconvenient to them as they were planning on leaving that night).