Opinion Piece: Is Indie Music Dead?
This comes from Music Think Tank. It’s a pretty sobering look at what it’s like to be a musician these days. It’s worth the read.
I hear all the time that music sales are dead and nobody pays for it anymore.
Derek Sivers, of CD Baby fame, told me in an e-mail conversation that “the music business might end up kinda like the poetry business is today. That is: there are a few who are able to be full time poets, but nobody would get into poetry for the money.”
It isn’t hard to back this claim up either. Green Day’s latest release, ¡Uno!, garnered only 139,000 purchases. Deadmau5, arguably one of the biggest names in electronic music (the 6th largest DJ in the world), only reached 58,000 purchases of his latest release, >album title goes here<. On facebook, Green Day has about 25,000,000 followers and Deadmau5 has roughly 6,000,000 (Respectively, .55% of Green Day fans bought the album and .87% of Deadmau5 fans).
Obviously, not everybody listening is paying.
Chris Lum, a famous San Francisco based, grammy-award nominated house artist, is struggling to stay afloat in this current state of the music industry.
“No one buys records anymore.” he states, “The idea of the “middle class artist” is vanishing. It seems you’re either a broke artist who can’t make it, or Justin Bieber.”
Behind all of these facts and claims, one is tempted to think that music is dead and that indie artists should stop trying to make it.
If you had to ask me, though, I’d say there’s still hope as indie artists — we’re just not doing it right.
