Roxor Blog

This is the fourth installment of Corporate Rocks Still Sucks buy JTk:

With the strong showing of the emusic service which features indie music and the recent success of indie artists like Los Lonely Boys and Franz Ferdinand we started thinking about the state of Indie music in general.

With the perpetual problem of getting heard marginalized by the �Net ( p2p, Mp3�s on artists sites, Amazon�s hear it before you buy it, alternative online radio stations, GarageBand.com etc. ) indie artists are playing on a much more level field then ever before. Just as importantly indie labels are starting to make real money.

Not major label money, but enough money to invest in bands that are good, interesting, have potential - and not �artists� that simply telegenic.

While the record labels have focused their efforts on selling 10 million units by finding the next media sensation ( which may or may not have anything to do with music ) indie labels are free to focus on producing music for people that like music and not pop stars.

While there are many great artists with major label deals they are not the focus of the labels. Unless you can sell 10 million copies ( Diamond ) then you are just not a priority for the majors.

It is just this focus on music that the big labels don�t get. As simple as it sounds, major music labels aren�t about music. They are about mainstream media, magazine covers for Britney, movies for Eminem, etc.

This also helps explain the conflicting sales numbers from the �music� industry. While there are less �artists� reaching the Diamond level, there are far more bands selling hundreds of thousands units then in the past.

Bands like Wilco, The Black Keys and Mofro have all found audiences that would have been all but impossible a decade ago. So while Cd sales are up, top selling �artists� are not selling multi-million units as often - which is a good thing for real music lovers.

Festivals like Bonnaroo and All Tomorrows Parties underscore the hunger that real music fans have for good music. Manchester, Tennessee is not the most accessible place on earth yet thousands upon thousands of music lovers descend on it to hear bands are diverse as Widespread Panic to Taj Mahal.

All in all the state of independent music is as strong as it has been in quite a while, and this, as much as anything else pisses off the majors. So do your part, head over to Sub-pop, Fat Possum, or head over to the Independent Online Distribution Alliance and help support independent music today.

The US Copyright Office has released their new set of rates for the payment of royalties by Internet Radio, and they gave the record industry exactly what they asked for: royalty rates so high that they will put every independent US webcaster out of business.

Internet Radio Stations like Radio Paradise will be effectively legislated out of business while traditional, terrestrial radio stations will continue to pay nothing or next to nothing. This is an arbitrary decision by the US Copyright Office about which business are alowed to exist and which ones are not.

Yet another reason to boycott the RIAA and all of their artists. Read about this from a webcasters perpective.

Gizmodo is declaring the month of March Boycott the RIAA month:

We’ve been following the RIAA’s increasingly frequent affronts to privacy and free speech lately, and it’s about time we stopped merely bitching and moaning and did something about it. The RIAA has the power to shift public policy and to alter the direction of technology and the Internet for one reason and one reason alone: it’s totally loaded. Without their millions of dollars to throw at lawyers, the RIAA is toothless.

They get their money from us, the consumers, and if we don’t like the way they’re behaving, we can let them know with our wallets.

If you are unsure whether or not an album is put out by an RIAA label, the handy RIAA Radar will clear everything up for you.