Why File Sharing is Good for Indie Bands
Six Degrees of Distribution
The following paragraph is from a speech by Professor Eben Moglen. It is so important that we need to quote it in its entirety. Professor Moglen has put his finger on the reasons why file sharing is such a powerful concept for the music industry:
“The famous experiments of Stanley Milgram, now somewhat blown upon, which gave us the amusing sociological result known as "Six Degrees of Separation'' was a demonstration of the inherent speed of social distribution in the network. Let us concede six to be a number predicated on only networks of privileged people with a certain degree of wealth, and so on. As recent research has tended to show, it is still true that the social distribution network is much deeper and much richer than anybody previously understood in human history, and that it is inherently superior to systems of distribution networking constructed by the exclusion of most distributors. The result, as everyone in this room is aware, is that twelve-year-olds do a better job of distributing music than the music companies. The music company continues to take ninety-four percent of the gross for promoting and distributing music, and the twelve-year-olds who take zero off the top do a better job. When bandwidth constraints are removed, the same happens to video; without removal of bandwidth constraints the same happens to publishable text, to poetry, to all forms of useful knowledge and information. The model is: "Here; I think you need this: take it.'' The result is, let us say, that when music under the present system leaves the production studio and passes through six hands, it isn't in the store yet. Whereas, in Stanley Milgram's United States, after six jumps, everybody who wants the music has it. The systems for the proprietary distribution of culture--the systems in which the right to distribute is bought and sold--are the Trabant factories of the twenty-first century. They are hopelessly inefficient, they are the outcome of a social philosophy that is utterly defunct, they fail to respond to the existing presence of a robust and superior competitor: they are through.”
Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the death of proprietary culture, Eben Moglen
The best part about these ideas is, as an independent band, you have the exact same distribution model that any of the major labels have (even through they’d rather not have it!) There are few other areas where this is the case, and it’s something to harness. In fact, as we explain in other sections of The Survival Guide, getting played on the radio and gigging at large venues are all largely closed out for independent bands.
Using services like CDBaby.com’s digital distribution, you can distribute your indie music on the same digital music sites as the major labels, such as such as iTunes, Rhapsody, BuyMusic, Emusic, the new Napster, AOL's MusicNet, MusicMatch, and others. Unlike the past, there is effectively infinite shelf space for music. And the digital services have been open to letting indies "share" that infinite shelf with the major labels. Based on how the majors have reacted to competition in the past, it could have come out quite differently!