the dotmatrix project

Following in the “label darlings gone independent” heals of Radiohead, Trent Reznor is releasing his latest project — the production of Saul Williams’ album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, straight to the internet tonight, sans the middlemen label people clogging up the mix and taking their cut.

To that particular end, here’s Saul Williams message to the people:

My Dearest Friends and Fans,

It is my greatest honor to present to you The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, my new album produced by Trent Reznor and mixed by Alan Moulder.

The wall of sound that we’ve created is tagged with such graffiti that a passerby would seek out doors and ways to ENTER. Once inside a world defined by dreams come true they’d find aligned with the simplest act of sharing what we treasure. Most people aren’t aware of the world of art and commerce where exploitation strips each artist down to nigger. Each label, like apartheid, multiplies us by our divide and whips us ’til we conform to lesser figures. What falls between the cracks is a pile of records stacked to the heights of talents hidden from the sun. Yet the energy they put into popularizing smut makes a star of a shiny polished gun. The ballot or the bullet for Mohawk or the mullet is a choice between new times and dying days. And the only way to choose is to jump ship from old truths and trust dolphins as we swim through changing ways.

The ways of middlemen proves to be just a passing trend. We need no priests to talk to God. No phone to call her. And when you click the link below, i think it fair that you should know that your purchase will make middlemen much poorer…

NiggyTardust!

love,
Saul

No doubt a creative and eloquent way to pitch the download of an album while riding the wave of the anti-label froth that has developed in the mouths of music lovers everywhere. The last line is a bit overstated at this point in time — middlemen will continue to find their nut to squirrel away — but the optimism is fresh and well taken.

Here’s the jist of the release approach:

• Download the album for free and receive it in 192Kbps MP3 format
• Download the album for a $5 donation and receive it in one of multiple formats — 192Kbps MP3, 320Kbps MP3, FLAC lossless audio
• All versions include a PDF with artwork and lyrics
• All files are 100% DRM free, and can be played on any device. MP3s are encoded with LAME v3.97

I heard Saul Williams first drop his style in a track called Ohm on Lyricist Lounge, Vol. 1 in 1998 and his Buddhist / kung-fu inspired cut stuck with me for years. I rediscovered him in my iTunes catalog this past week, so I was already planning on supporting this release before Reznor “leaked” three tracks from the NiggyTardust album.

Check them out for yourself:

Ohm (Lyricist Lounge Vol 1)

Tr(n)igger (NiggyTardust)

Break (NiggyTardust)

Banged And Blown Through (NiggyTardust)

While I’m psyched to see artists use the guts of the internet to promote and distribute their craft, this model isn’t necessarily the savior for indie artists everywhere. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt for any artist to develop a site like the NiggyTardust site — chock full of free and donation driven download options, embedded widgets for viral promotion, etc. — but Trent Reznor is already Trent Reznor.

Would this work for him (and Saul Williams) if Reznor hadn’t gone the label route first?

As I see it, the future of independent music isn’t relying on massive shifts in the online distribution model. If Amazon.com and iTunes were as lax as Amie Street regarding entry into their catalog, distribution success would then be simply a question of the right price point — and that’ll work itself out through competition over time as the average kid’s perception of a music track moves farther and farther away from something one pays money to own.

The RIAA is doing their best to fight that losing battle.

So the question that’s popping off in my noggin’ is: What exactly is the draw for an artist or band to sign their lives away with a traditional label?

• Their hold on distribution has slipped away
• Online promotion is open to all with a clue
• Radio is no longer a huge draw to potential fans
• Music videos are probably watched more on YouTube than the reality show driven MTV

What’s the “sell your soul” pitch from a big label in 2007? Seriously, what angles of distribution and promotion do they still have a death grasp on? Big media connections?

How are successful smaller labels working with artists and differentiating themselves from the machine?

What are successful independent bands doing (aside from making great music) that can be replicated by other independents?

Will services like Facebook Music be the answer? Or can a walled garden truly provide that degree of change?

Anyone?

(originally uploaded by Living Juicy)

The DNA of our internet is fascinating — specified as a flat, open and relational network, so that only the limits of our imagination could obstruct its evolution (except for the omnipresent power brokers of industry who try to control anything disruptive, I suppose).

What’s becoming obvious is that as more domains decide to make their APIs available in the public arena — to both independent developers and to the very same domains they compete with — our internet rapidly progresses from a linearly connective space to a multi-layered, inter-connected environment — more akin to a network — ripe with exposed hooks to latch onto and build upon.

The most powerful part of this equation? How about the fact that a great number of internet services — across numerous industries — have evolved to a point where Joe Layman can now leverage our internet’s many to many power of connectivity and discovery, yet never have to bust out one line of code in the process of doing so.

Consider Me Joe Layman

I’ve a few close friends who are talented musicians; all of whom are trying to catch their big break during the off hours of their daily grind. Being the curious guy that I am, I told both Universal Mathematics and Molly McGinn that I’d dive into the online music and event promotion space to see if I could craft an approach for promoting their gigs and sound.

I figured that with all of the free services online — from social networks to event services to video communities — I’d be able to figure out an optimized approach to:

• promote their recently booked gigs
• expose the various media artifacts of their events
• increase their online findability when people run contextual searches
• both give away and sell their music online

After about a month of reviewing practically every service under the sun (feel free to suggest ones I’ve missed in the comments), I’ve come up with a particular approach for:

1. enhancing the community currently building around Molly and Clement’s personalities and music
2. tapping into the guts of the internet to expose their talents to potential fans

Like I said, it’s only one approach of what I’m sure could be many. That being said, let’s break down the thinking behind it.

If You Don’t Promote The Event, Who Will?

If an act has a gig, but doesn’t promote the event online, will the audience make a sound?

Of course they will.

We’ve not quite evolved as a species to all internet beings (well, those of us outside of Silicon Valley at least), but to disregard the power of the internet in building community and enhancing reputation is a mistake, as the only cost to harnessing the web is time.

The key to this approach is recognizing that it needs to augment an off-line promotion plan. Without fliers, listings in weeklies, real world word of mouth, real friends and family support, etc., the online plan can’t guarantee results.

So, understanding that time is money and precious — particularly for independent musicians — I came up with a simple plan for online event promotion, utilizing four web services to get the word out: Eventful, Last.fm, Facebook and MySpace.

Most indie artists already maintain a Facebook and MySpace profile, which in turn has prepped musicians to become accustom to interacting with their communities on a somewhat daily basis; adding a couple additional event spots to their periphery shouldn’t be too much for them to manage.

The benefits of these two particular spots?

• Last.fm has a global audience and event info can be found contextually throughout the site
• Last.fm allows artists to list not only their bios, but upload their music and videos for the community to check out
• Eventful has a nice footprint in Google and Yahoo! search results
• Eventful allows you to create a rich event listing, with links back to the artist’s sites and any number of videos, songs or photographs
• Eventful broadcasts the event listing to multiple event services, greatly impacting the chance of discovery

All of this is free.

What I’ve stressed to my artist buds is that as soon as they book a gig, they need to update these four services with richly crafted and tagged event submissions. Once they do so, their Facebook friends will automatically catch the new event in their stream of friend updates. With MySpace, artists can send out a single bulletin to their people and make them aware of the gig. And while Last.fm and Eventful have their own degree of community built-in, the purpose of including them in this approach is to work the information retrieval mechanisms of the web itself, not to add layers of complexity and management for the artists.

Curate your communities and provide findable metadata for the rest of the world to discover you.

Not too crazy of a concept, eh?

All Recording Devices Are Welcome At Our Gigs!

Jerry Garcia was quite possibly the most brilliant marketer the music industry has ever known.

Way before the internet came into play, Garcia was giving his fans the pass to record and distribute his music between themselves, which obviously spilled out to potential fans at parties, cookouts, late night bake sessions, etc. While the RIAA would argue today that such an approach would be taking money out of the artist’s pocket, go ahead name me one artist who wouldn’t kill for the degree of popularity and recognition such a decision helped foster.

Of course, in order to have Universal “Heads” or Molly “Heads” as a fanatical, viral, media creation fan base, the artist has to bring it to each performance, just like Jerry and the boys did. But it’s not like that has to be explained to an artist; that motivation to excel live is already built into the deal.

So with an open media policy — actually promoting the concept of audiences recording live performances, whether it be photography, video or audio — an artist can tap into the myriad of free media communities and services found online and stack the deck for discovery and the potential for viral exposure.

In my above approach, I outlined the services that an artist could leverage with a mixture of planned performance coverage and audience participation. Again, any number of services could be used, but I wanted to keep the list somewhat manageable. Here’s my rationale for including the diagramed services:

• flickr has an extremely rich online community, with tons of topical photography groups that have strong followings
• flickr images are well represented in Yahoo! image search results (not as much with Google)
• Blip.tv allows an artist to create a customized channel and offers advertising plans to monetize media
• Blip.tv also cross-posts elements of the video submission to multiple sources — iTunes, del.icio.us, The Wayback Machine and flickr
• Veoh allows high-quality video posts and cross-posts to a handful of popular video communities — YouTube, Google Video and MySpace
• Last.fm empowers the artist to upload videos, new music (albums or live tracks) and photographs

As long as media is uploaded with a rich description and tagged well enough (names, places, genre, etc.), it really doesn’t matter if it comes from a representative of the band or an enthusiastic fan — in either case, search engines will index the additions and place the media within search results.

The benefit of artist’s hiring a media generator is that they have the extra incentive to spend the time and effort in cross-posting within each community. For example, a concert photo uploaded to flickr with a decent description and tag set is valuable, but one assigned to eight related groups as well will greatly increase the chance of community interaction.

The more that people talk about a great shot of a band or a great video clip, the greater the chance that the band name sticks in their head.

Well, at least that’s the idea.

Sell, Sell, Sell! And Give Away!

The last part of the online equation is music distribution, where most businesses ratchet down their open policies a notch or two, falling in lock step behind the traditional distribution behavior of the music industry.

It’s a lot harder to get a spot on Amazon or iTunes for an independent artist than it is for a label-backed act. That being the case, I decided to focus on two music communities with rather liberal policies for uploading original music: Last.fm and AmieStreet.

I’m going to save the insight I’ve gained from using those services for my next post, but I’ll leave you with a hint of what I’ve discovered…

AmieStreet rocks!