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by
Bruce Duff
Quick true story:
In the early Sixties, independent filmmaker Herschel Gordon
Lewis was making money cranking out low-budget softcore 'nudie
cuties'. All was good until the major Hollywood Studios got
into the act making similar films but with bigger budgets
and European actresses, rendering Lewis' films obsolete. On
a mission, he made a list of taboo subjects, and from this
list the word "GORE" jumped off the page at him. His theory
was, in order to compete with Hollywood, he had to come up
with something the major film companies couldn't or wouldn't
do. Lewis proceeded to lens the ugly masterpiece Blood Feast
which jump-started the gore sub-genre and made Lewis both
legendary and wealthy.
The same concept
holds true for indie music and labels. It's both impossible
and stupid to attempt to compete with the corporate giants,
so why bother? By nurturing and releasing music that the big
dogs view as lurking below the bottom line, budget-conscious
indies can survive and thrive. The two best angles are to
concentrate on hometown sounds or to specialize in a genre
or genres. Some examples: SubPop hit the charts by presenting
Seattle hometown punk and grunge. Twin Tone did much the same
in Minneapolis, Go Kart does it in New York City. In the genre
game, Alligator releases pure blues for blues purists, Windham
Hill makes us drowsy with New Age, Epitaph slams us with punk,
punk and more punk, Century Media does nonstop death metal,
and Moonshine raves on with nothing but electronic dance music.
The aggressive and often tireless fans of these styles look
to these labels as reliable brand names they can count on.
If it's on Wax Trax, it'll be the best industrial dance music
currently available.
Indies can't afford
to climb on the corporate payola wagon and send every program
director in the country a VCR. Instead, they find the appropriate
college radio specialty shows and fanzines that hype their
brand of noise. Usually outside of the MTV in-crowd, indies
send their artists out to tour as relentlessly as possible,
taking their music directly to the people. It ain't easy,
the pay is poor, the glamour factor low. So why isn't everyone
doing it?
Most of you wingnuts
probably think you'd rather be signed to the Humungo Corporation
666, but while you're busy getting lost in the shuffle you
could instead be building a long-lasting grass roots following.
Your indie release on the CMJ charts and covered in Flipside
or Alternative Press is going to sprout more A&R vampire fangs
then your self-produced demo and color Xerox photo. Once an
indie label has shown the corporate boneheads (not widely
regarded for their collective creative imaginations, let's
be honest) that yes indeed your music does appeal to John
Q. Bongload, you'll be getting treated to dinner on the Corporate
Amex card in no time. If you look at the artists succeeding
today, a good percentage of them began indie and graduated
to the majors after a few well-received indie releases.
Indie success
may eventually lead you to the cocaine en' silicone party
wagon, but getting their could just kill you. For the indies
to keep the lights on, budgets have to be hacked to the bone.
Where I toil, we make albums for what the megas spend on catering.
Promotions are efficient but not extravagant. Tours are bare
bone affairs with six travelers crammed into a van that seats
five, forget the tour bus. It's hard work, and the profit
margin is minimal. However—and this is an interesting point
that riles those whose life is spent computing market shares—the
percentage of discs that make money versus those that lose
is greater at the indie level, primarily because of this frugal
approach to production and promotion. Why bother being indie,
you ask? I ask myself that often, to be honest. For one thing,
when Christmas rolls around, I don't sweat the man tossing
me out like so much used junk when the annual cut-backs and
layoffs hit. Also, at a major, I could never sign a band on
the basis of just thinking they're great, knowing that their
sales potential may be as low as 3,000 units. Forget about
it. Instead, this Christmas I will happily be producing a
death punk band called Penis Fly Trap. It's something the
majors could not and would not do.
Last, but still
extremely important, KNOW THE ARTISTS! When TAXI gives you
specifics about the style of music the listing is seeking,
make sure you are very familiar with the artists they list
to describe their needs. What is their musical style? What
"person" are their songs usually written in? Would they be
able to hear the potential in your song by the way you've
recorded the demo? Does it "sound" like something they would
do? Are they married? Do they have children? What kinds of
subjects do they like to address?
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