THis is a great article. Please read it, then my comments below!

- Brian

Thank you so much for all the above points. Thanks also to Dean Kay for highlighting this blog post, because nothing is more frustrating than the conventional perspective that all’s well and good, now that we have the internet and don’t NEED industry anymore. I think that would be true if we as a society appreciated musicians enough that we’d subsidize their livings, but that’s not going to happen, particularly in America.

What my own non-profit organization, Weathervane Music (http://weathervanemusic.org), is trying to do, is place some of the risk that for-profit companies are less and less likely to take on (ie. artist selection, funding for recordings and to some degree, promotion) into the hands of a non-profit organized community of supporters. The model is similar to the way in which member supported public broadcasting works, with maybe a little bit of the Small Business Incubator model mixed in as well.

We produce a curated series of high quality audio and video recordings featuring select independent artists (the Project Series, already in its first year). The project is supported by charitable contributions and sponsorship, and any potential revenue from the audio recordings ends up going mostly to the artist (we retain a small portion for our expenses, there is no “recoup”).

If we are successful, we’ll be handing off great independent artists to the for-profit industry. Of course that success will depend on our ability to assemble a strong, ready and willing community of supporters, as well as effective marketing and promotion of Weathervane.

Either way, I think the industry would do well to look at supporting a non-profit endeavor such as this, as it will ultimately relieve some of the risk they face, and we hardly ignore the true need for physical markers for success. If we do our job right, artists will be well prepared for easy licensing with the industry, they will have a completed recording (we hope with better and better known producers and engineers as we go), and whatever exposure comes with being a part of the Project Series.

Most Modern Marketing conversations these days seem to be focused so directly to the consumer who sits on the other side of a computer monitor, that there is little community built around “the physical event” of music. Sure bands have their own fans, but I am talking about communities with broader interests built around the group shared experience of music. We think this, and a certain amount of ACTIVISM on behalf of an artist’s ability to make money from their music, is an essential missing ingredient before a capsized industry can right itself.