1. Old rules have gone online

As those outside the mainstream music industry, we independents have been prone to view the internet and digital production as a solution to our marketing problems. We can now produce music at home, and sell it online. We can manage our own content, do our own research, and create our own distribution channel.

New skills have come into the fray in the age of computers: first it was desktop design, then self production and manufacture, link awareness and search algorithms with the ascendancy of Google and search, online shop fronts like iTunes, and cottage rights management with the likes of Weed.

After acting on this new reality for some years now, I have come to the conclusion that I will not break beyond my circle of association without the time-honored skills that make up marketing and promotion.

I have seen several attempts to automate this function, in which your site and some associated marketing data is submitted to popular sites via a broker who is paid to do this. However, even were these links to be accepted at a popular site, if there is not an external buzz about your act or album, no one will find you amongst the thousands of others doing the same.

To be noticed online or anywhere else requires a massive and well co-ordinated effort, so that printed press, radio and television, and live performance creates a “bookmark” for you in the minds of potential fans.

Now here's a key phenomoen : the LAB list. LAB means "Listeners also bought"; to be strictly Amazonian about it it should read “Customers who bought this item also bought“, the acronym of which is Cwbtiab, and whatever currency this may have in Welsh, it still sounds a bit too awkward even to my bent ear. Anyway, to get onto the LAB list you will need to be generating sales already, I do not see an easy way for independent newcomers to get onto one, outside of a growing grassroots interest.

One organization worth mentioning here are CDBaby whose service includes stocking your CD and submitting you to new digital Shopfronts. However this submission is still dependant on the criteria of the Shop in question. I have been submitted to 25 DD companies and as far as I can see its only iTunes who have actually gone through with giving me any “space”.

As the owners of profitable websites have become increasingly powerful, so “simple democratic” rules have increasingly relapsed into “simple market rules”, so that the more a product is selling the more likely it is to be given a chance to sell. This means that what is needed to succeed is good old fashioned knowing the right people, and in this respect one cannot compete with the mainstream industry.

2. Nic is the name; Niche is the game

A major process that a new act needs to go through is to identify, find or create hooks from which threads of interest can hang. This includes identifying similar artists on the sonic map, as well as a genre which distinguishes without alienating the potential audience.

In my case I have tried to capture my interest in song-form, acoustic music and electronica in the term Digifolk. It also hopefully speaks of something novel and contemporary, but with a rootedness in various traditions.

One of the new buzz words defining the new musical economic is the “long tail” whereby a previously thinly dispersed audience for a niche genre can now become profitable due to the “liberation of shelf space” with the new and practically unlimited online means of storage. The Long Tail represents items which by traditional measures are non-profitable therefore not stocked, and is accessed by people starting to be led via mechanisms like LAB lists (see above) and indeed Hypertext itself, along a path of discovery. “As they wander further down the beaten path they discover that their taste is not as mainstream as they thought", says Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of the influential Digital Culture magazine Wired.

Digifolk (a term used to describe my album) is busy finding its legs as a concept. The word itself was dismissed in Wikipedia as a “neologism” (and has now infact been deleted), and sure, it may not endure, but initial indications are that it has something unique and intriguing. What is of utmost significance is that whatever the size of the potential market, this niche genre needs to be nurtured and then when it finds its voice, branded.

Concentrate on what it is, not what it is not. Don’t try to bend it beyond its own ability to endure, towards a “more successful” model or sound. John Hassel says "I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it."

3. Acoustic music, songs and electronica can live happily together

I was brought up to think in terms of electric vs. acoustic, rock vs. jazz, serious music vs. pop, and synth music vs. real playing.

But eventually I learned that it’s not an either-or situation. This is all part of maturing I guess, and we all come to appreciate a bigger picture at some point or other. One of the great antitheses from my musical upbringing pitted electronic against acoustic, and a recent skirmish in this particular rivalry has been the dominance of dance and techno over the last decade. In the last 2 years or so I have become increasingly aware of a new urge amongst liteners to hear song-form and acoustic instruments.

Well I love both of these sonic families and have been enjoying finding a way for them to live together. I am a poet at heart, obsessively involved with words, images and imagination. Songs are how poetry is expressed in music.

Electronic sound can be a vast palette of sonic colour and I often feel its lack in the guitar – bass – drum rock tradition. The ambient washes of granular synthesis, digitally distressed riffs using dynamic filtering, and arrangement synthesizers like Absynth have not only changed the way music sounds, but the very way it is created too.

I used to worry that computers would take the music making function out of our hands. What I feel now is that side by side with our innate musicality they have become instruments and tools that are allowing us to say things we have not said before.

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Reprinted from Nic Paton's Website
www.nicpaton.com

3 Things I Have Learned In 3 Years ©2004 Nic Paton & The Virtually Acoustic Club
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