Bands bypass radio, CDs to create virtual buzz

Some fundamental things have changed recently in the music business.

Two years ago, when a label released an album, it often followed a "traditional" marketing strategy: sending CDs to radio stations, buying advertising in newspapers and magazines. Now labels focus instead on bloggers, podcasters and online buyers.

More and more sales are digital, meaning fans pay to download the album directly to their computer, from which they can play the purchased tracks, burn them to CDs and copy them to personal MP3 players. It marks a fundamental shift in the way bands think about reaching their fans, and vice versa.

"Radio used to be the way you found out about new music and had a chance to hear it," says Cory Brown, owner of Absolutely Kosher Records. "But radio has made itself, I wouldn't say obsolete because that's a bit too aggressive, but if you like music that can't normally find a place on mainstream radio, there are so many places to hear about it now."

And not just hear about it, but sample and buy — with only a few clicks of the mouse.

"The old model for a band," says Eric Berk, bassist of the Hoboken, N.J.-based rock group Full Out Freak, "was to put your music together, then play shows and pray that a record company finds you. The only way you were ever going to make it out there was to capture the ear of somebody at a record company, who would then put you on a bus, send you on tour and help you survive.

"We discovered something called MySpace, and we thought it was the way of the future. You make your music, you put it up on a Web site, you let people discover it and then they'll go on to tell others," Berk says. "The new model is where you go directly to the end listener and bypass the ears of the record company — and the record company now finds out about you from the fans who flock your way."

It is, Berk says, the democratization of the music world.

Online music world swells

Proof of this transformation can be seen daily on MySpace — today a popular hangout for teens, but originally designed as a platform for bands to post music and information. Berk points to Full Out Freak's free MySpace page as one of the band's primary promotional vehicles, leading more than 14,000 visitors to listen to their recently posted track "Loser Anyway."

The success of MySpace has encouraged the expansion of such blogs as Music For Robots (http://music.for-robots.com), and My Old Kentucky Blog (http://myoldkyhome.blogspot.com), where communities of tens of thousands now share their new favorite tunes and bands. It also led to such streaming online radio alternatives as Live365.com, Pandora.com and LAUNCHcast (http://music.launch.com), which allow users to customize their own personal radio station. An endless catalogue of podcasts — today there are around 5,000 music-only podcasts — have, for many listeners, taken the place of radio entirely.

Brown says his eyes were opened to the possibilities last month, when a song by the band Sunset Rubdown was picked for a music mix that was then posted on PitchForkMedia.com and downloaded by 13,000 visitors.

"It's 13,000 people in July alone," he says. "People who download mp3 tracks to listen to, that's a captive audience — and you usually don't get that in the music industry."

What has been created through this emerging network of music fans is an entirely new system of "taste makers" — influential voices that were once found only on radio stations and in entertainment publications — and a new philosophy behind the marketing, promotion and distribution of music.

Podcasts for (almost) all

Late last year, organizations such as the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) and its counterparts offered a solution to the final hurdle hindering podcasts: the legal issues surrounding a song's royalty fees and copyright protections.

By bringing hundreds of independent record labels together, and having them approve their bands' music for free-use purposes, IODA launched a service it calls PROMONET, which distributes thousands of free tracks to approved podcasters every day.

The catch? Podcasters must mention the band's name, and report back on how well the track plays with its audience.

According to Tim Mitchell, IODA's vice president of marketing and business development, and Dave Warner, the creator and host of the weekly podcast Dave's Lounge, services such as PROMONET create a win-win situation. Podcasters get new music. Bands get access to more potential fans, and information about those fans. Audiences get to hear the hot new thing.

Podcasters say these free-use networks have accelerated a new way of thinking — an online infrastructure that allows bands to build their name from the ground up. Between bloggers, live radio streams, MySpace and podcasts, a band now has dozens of avenues — outside of traditional record companies — to develop a global fan base.