stewart anderson on why his label is dying

by jove this is pish

Darla are one of the few distros we deal with that pay us regularly and sell
a decent amount of stuff. They have stood by my label and helped me grow
over the years. My sales in Europe are currently down 75 per cent from this
time last year, (UK in particular), so much so I am considering stopping
alot of my distro in Europe as I simply cant afford the postage anymore.
I would indeed by saddened if Darla disappears, as I would imagine my label
would fold and many others too. I could list you 5 or 6 distros that wont
tell me what they have or havent sold, or simply dont pay me. It took 4
years (!) to get 200 quid from one guy. There are others who have never paid
me and I am assuming never will. I have lost probably a couple of thousand
dollars from various flaky distros over the years. It happens sadly. And
thats why you stick by the good ones.
I have never had any problems with Darla. They are one of the good ones...

I've worked in college radio for 4 years, and in this time i've definitely noticed changes in the attitudes of our student deejays towards piracy. These days, I see kids come in to deejay their show, and literally every CD in their 200-disc binder is an illegal copy. You should see the shocked and outraged expressions when i tell him, "No, you can't rip MP3s of all the new CDs in rotation onto your laptop."

Part of the problem is that these kids grow up watching MTV's "Cribs" and assuming that musicians are all wealthy. Naturally they see through the bullshit when Puff Daddy or Britney lectures them about it on MTV. And these idiotic lawsuits are alienating people who can't draw distinctions between the RIAA and the hard-working, non-litigious small labels.

It's good to hear quite a bit of praise for them but I have heard -- directly, from bands and label folks -- any number of horror stories as well, involving money never paid and the like. This includes this year as well, so I do wonder sometimes; I will say my experiences ordering directly from them have all been fine. Of course, on a separate but hilarious note, there was the one time Mr. Darla REALLY REALLY wanted S***c Y***h to contribute to the Bliss Out series -- when said band refused, Mr Darla complained mightily on the Net, only to have one T. Moore respond...

it was more a comment on the outstanding quality of these CDs. my life would be lesser without them.

My prediction is that music making will get more and more 'gift economy' - people making the music will have the same attitude a lot of web content creators have, it's something to do because you want to do it, but you know you're going to lose every penny you put into it because it's free at point of consumption.

Second, the distribution environment for the kind of stuff he and I like has been sucking since well before file-sharing got popular--it's just that distros didn't realize it yet, so they'd order 250 copies of something and then it'd sit on the shelf for years and get sent back. The labels that had gotten big enough to affiliate themselves with, say, Touch & Go or Southern have done okay; the rest have a very hard time getting stuff into hugely overcrowded mom 'n' pop store shelves.

Third, these releases that sell 25 copies apiece--do these bands tour the way Boyracer does? Do they tour at all, to speak of? Is there any reason anybody should think they're worth dropping $10 on sound unheard, other than that they're on Stewart's label? I notice in his catalogue that the two releases before the four most recent ones are in "limited supply"--they can't be doing THAT badly. I bought a stack of 555 releases last time I saw Boyracer play--it seems like a pretty solid distribution vector.

Fourth, there is the issue of college radio, which is how a lot of Stewart's and my label's stuff used to get exposure. Ten years ago, it was a very open field: an indie band that toured a little bit and sent its CD to the 60 or so top stations would get significant amounts of radio play, and chart in CMJ. Now, if you don't hire one of the big promotion firms to actively work it, your record will not get played at all but a very few of those stations; in most cases, music directors won't even bother to listen to it.

I mean, I feel Stewart's pain. I miss the days when I could put out a single by an unknown band, get a two-sentence review in MRR, and immediately get a 200-copy COD order from Japan, too. I haven't put out a full-length CD on Dark Beloved Cloud in over a year. But I've been doing the singles club to keep the P.O. box busy and get some music I love out into the world--it's not exactly "something for nothing," but it's a way of getting people to do something to get music. And it keeps a steady trickle of mail-orders coming in too. I do admire Stewart for his plan to do lathe-cut records next year--I want to hear them!

I don't know much about the 555 records thing, but it strikes me that maybe indiepop has a declining constituency anyway, and blaming it on filesharing may be misguided.

Anderson, I think, makes a very important realization regarding labels, when he says that for the youngest generation getting into music and filesharing, record labels will have greatly diminished importance. I fully expect we won't really see the fallout from filesharing for another 10 years.

As far as college radio goes, I know back when I was MD I eagerly anticipated getting mailings from 555/Red Square, but I can see how they might get ignored or lost in the volume of mail at other stations (especially since the discs came in plain paper sleeves, ostensibly to save money, and lacked even the standard "one-sheets".) MDs are under a lot of pressure: a promoter at Interscope offered my friend [name removed] a microwave if he would agree to chart Weezer as #1, and the little guys simply don't have the muscle behind them.

Granting that perhaps 555 aren't/weren't particulary efficient at self-promotion, I still think it's fair to say that piracy contributes to the difficult climate for small labels.

i agree with a lot of what douglas said as contributing factors -- Steward hasn't necessarily gotten the word out as well as he could -- one wonders if it would have better for him to put out a few less records and spend the money on marketing more in the form of a website, advertising, etc. more press would also be crucial to the austrailian bands, who cool as they are, really dont have as much of a presence here for Joe Blow Indie Guy or Gal.

...but...but...this would be an utter disaster for those of us who love Great Big Pop Music like, say, the Backstreet Boys!

- The proliferation of cheap home recording equipment allows pretty much anybody to record their own CD and put it out in some shape or form whether on CDR or MP3. Just in the last few years there seems to be an immense amount of new material out there for listeners to sort through.

- What percentage of filesharing users are downloading "indie" music? Is the average kid in the burbs going to be downloading Acid Mothers Temple or the new Linkin Park album? I wonder about this one. For labels with small margins any level of piracy is going to hurt, but I'm curious about the scale.

Just my $0.02... sorry to hear of Stewart's ongoing problems.

I set one of them up on Vitaminic a couple of years ago, there were plenty free downloads of the lead track, but no sales. I did not expect any, not because the CD was bad, but why would anyone? As someone just said, there is too much music around anyway.

I did buy two copies (for legit reasons), and hey, it went to number one in the indie lo-fi chart! Rock and roll!!!

Is it a bad thing for fans of Enormo-Pop? Yeah, potentially BUT I think file-sharing will reach a peak, if not now then perhaps soon, because it is seen as difficult and a bit risky and the industry will keep on doing its best to make it *more* difficult. (Kazaa usership in the states is down by about 35% in the last 5 months thanks mostly to the prosecutions tactic I'd guess).

My guess is a two-tier music industry - big pop, big names and guaranteed bankers for the non-downloaders (though less profits than of old); smaller networks (local scenes, net fanbases), gift economy work and other revenue streams for the specialist/indie industry. Small label bosses are indeed fucked - the 'friend with a record collection' in future might well be a tightly-edited portal pointing to new downloads or offering some, epitonic style. There's an issue as to whether these tiers link up, but I get the impression the big music business has been investigating for years less 'organic' ways of finding new talent.