Self-marketing, self-releasing DIY heroes Enter Shikari - but aren't they just doing the music bigwigs' jobs for them?
It's the digital revolution, man. For bands, the DIY ethic reigns: share your tunes on the web, let others read your blog, sell downloads, T-shirts, mugs. All direct from the artist. Well hooray, let's drink to that one.
But perhaps you don't have time for a swift ale because you're too busy trying to add virtual friends to your Myspace page and tell them about the gig you've got coming up at the Stratford Armpits Club. Oh, and perhaps they want to purchase your new download, but not before you've done the accounts and been on Amazon to buy some more USB pen drives.
Gone are the days of kicking a can around the street with your mates, writing a tune, getting a deal and letting the bigwigs do the promotion (a word which used to disgust The Kids). This "DIY" approach means you market yourself. You manufacture and sell your product. You might as well pop that suit and tie on, eh, while you're at it.
If the ramifications of the net mean, as Alan McGee thinks, we will soon enough do away with record companies, what then? Alex from the Arctic Monkeys taking time off to create some edgy viral marketing campaign with Saatchi and Saatchi? Beth Ditto on Dragon's Den?
"Entrepreneur" was not a word you used to associate with rock music, but the Modern Indie Capitalists of today start a myspace page before they write a tune. This digital self-promotion is ungainly. It is completely against the art principles of which "alternative" music is supposed to be born. How are you challenging the dominant culture, pipsqueaks? You might as well be flogging old trainers... oh - pardon me, Lily Allen has a deal with New Look. Nice little earner, but not exactly the music equivalent of painting Guernica, is it? Or even taking a lobster for a walk, a la French poet Nerval.
So where is art? It seems such an old-fashioned thing to be interested in. But are bands today so hell bent on making money and selling units? Or, because we are so in thrall to the technology, have we become immune to its exact nature, which is about promotion and sales?
The pressure to survive in a commercial industry is, obviously, immense. But should not be for the artists to worry about (unless you're American and, as a national trait, take your business models very seriously). This is what record companies are good at - the commerce bit. The industry will wither and die without major label input. Leave it to the bands and it will be six feet under by next Thursday.
It's just wrong for musicians, "artists", to play the game this way. Online music stores don't help either. The - mmm, authentic - indie blurb on the eMusic.com site makes me want to vomit:
"The rest of the eMusic staff includes more than ten actively recording and gigging musicians, as well as industry veterans who've worked closely with Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Slash, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Paula Cole, Bobby McFerrin, Ben Folds."
What nobs.
Bands! Go out (yes, yer actual outside - the place with pavements and no computers) and get drunk. Listen to some Throbbing Gristle (if you actually can). Stop selling yourselves; you are not a piece of meat. When pint-sized ex-Steps singer Lisa Scott Lee claims in the press that she puts her "heart and soul" into her music (New of the World Sunday magazine, 25 March 07), you need to be worried. That's too much of a revolution.
