Napster is often credited for being the catalyst of the internet boom. Once people found out they could get music for free they became interested in the internet. Once they realized that changing the file extension from .avi to .mp3 they could use Napster to trade porn, the internet became a must have. With larger file sizes being traded came a demand for broadband internet speeds, and the world will never be the same.
The internet world as it is didn’t pop up overnight. There was an approximate 10 year evolution that started around the end of 1999 with the release of Napster. For the longest time, during this evolution, major labels fought to keep people buying physical copies in stores. It was during this time that independent artists ruled the information super highway. With little concern about piracy and a great deal of interest in promotion, unsigned artists pushed their music online like a dealer in a school yard.
Sites dedicated to promoting independent artists began to multiply like rabbits: Garage Band (the web page not the Apple program), MP3.COM, iLike, Reverbnation, etc. A friend of mine once referred to these sites as circle jerks. There aren’t really any fans on these sites, just bands telling each other how great they are even though they aren’t actually listening to each other’s music.
During the height of its popularity the social networking site Myspace decided to make self promotion an option for their users that were musicians. For a brief couple of years this changed everything. Sense Myspace was already being used predominately by people that weren’t musicians, but were music fans, the ability for us to put our music on our profile meant that music fans might actually hear it. Better than playing in a bar to drunk people that would rather watch the game on TV, Myspace was like radio in the 1960’s. People would set down and focus all their attention on just what they were hearing, and probably some photos of some slutty girls (Myspace had lots of those too). People would hear you. They may decide they don’t like it, but they made a decision to click on your player and give your music a chance. It worked. Big bands like OneRepublic owe their early success to Myspace, and little bands like Magnolia Electric Company were stars for a week due to the same.
During this time, in 2006, we released two songs on Myspace. They were Magical Purple Hair and The End Seems Strange (trailer park demos). We received some positive attention from these releases.
I want to take a moment to mention something. If you are a local band, it doesn’t matter how great you become, you are still just a local band. If you are from New York trying to get a gig in New York, you are a local band. But for some reason just being from somewhere else makes you exotic.
In Oklahoma it is hard to get respect as a band from Oklahoma. It doesn’t matter if you are The All American Rejects, The Flaming Lips, Blake Shelton, or half of OneRepublic, you are just a band from Oklahoma.
So our songs on Myspace got us some attention from outside the state including an indie label from New York that invited us to participate in a compilation album they intended to promote. Our first single was Magical Purple Hair.
Somewhere in this general time frame, around 2008, major labels were begrudgingly realizing that this internet music trend was not going to end. For the first time Billboard started counting online sales, though at first they only counted the sales from certain sites like iTunes.
A lot of the sites that had been based around the idea of promoting independent artists began offering the ability to sell your music on their site. I remember that the whole thing was very sloppy initially. Uploading was not convenient, the player didn’t always work, and the hosts gave little effort to accurately tracking sales. This type of service was new to everybody and most people didn’t see it as a lasting thing so there was no big push to streamline it.
Hindsight is 20/20. When these events were happening I was only barely aware of what was going on. It is often easier to see what happened, than it is to see what is going to happen. To their credit the indie label that released our song on a compilation saw internet music for what it would become. They were on the cusp of every change and every new service that related to music promotion. They were also very good at promoting their albums.
Our first single did very well and we saw a huge jump in our fan base and our online sales. We followed that up by releasing two more singles with the same label, and nothing happened.
A lot of that blame falls on me. Admittedly the songs were intentionally abrasive. We were asked to do a “green friendly” song for a hippie album they were doing to raise money for a nonprofit organization. We sent them the song Lovelock with lyrics like “desert storms in Phoenix fill the sky / The Colorado River is damn near dry / You think recycled paper will set things right / Tell yourself another lie.” We expected them to reject it. The fact that they put it on the album surprised us. Looking back, I now know they didn’t listen to any of the songs, they just threw the album together haphazardly.
Hindsight is 20/20. I now know that during the release of that album the label was falling apart. They had made a bad business venture and it led them to bankruptcy. The bankruptcy was filed during the release of the second single, and was finalized before the release of the third.
By 2010 our rollercoaster ride had temporarily come to a stop. We had experienced (what was to us) a great success, and then two great failures. We received kudos and applaud, and then sunk back into obscurity. We had already begun working on a full length album, but no longer had a vehicle with which to promote it. In 2010, our options were limitless.
