Blog # 5 – Distribution – Wendy Day

This article was really informative, though it didn’t fill me with paradigm shifts and value judgments that inspire great response writings for me. While reading this, I was thinking about how popular some rap is and comparing that to the DIY culture that’s come up in rock music while rap has been dominating the airwaves. Do upcoming hip hop artists and stylistic movements have something to learn from indie rock bands producing their own records and distributing them on the small-scale until an indie label will pick them up? The movements seem pretty analogous, but I wonder if less indie rock bands actually expect success. The “role models” of successful rock bands in the 90s and recent years are few and far between and in a lot ways, indie rock bands seem to be opposed to their style—Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day are as much important stylistic examples for modern rock as they are the elements that indie rock variously try to avoid.

I like the line in the first paragraph—“Especially when you take into consideration that the stores exist MAINLY to supply the Top 40 records in radio rotation, and on M-TV and BET. The stores also sell some back catalog.” I liked this because it probably is a great description of a lot of music stores—but I’m someone who has probably paid 20% more than I needed to for records on several occasions because I bought them at the now-defunct Tower Records rather than Best Buy because of Tower’s extensive back catalogue and variety of distributors they work with. I must have bought hundreds of albums from used CD stores, and I fret at how many hours I must have spent in the past ten years flipping through those stacks of CDs. Sometimes I have no choice but to download an album over the web because it is simply the only way I can find an album I’m looking for. But if you ask me about who has been on the top 40, especially since I’ve been in college, I really have no clue—even when listening to popular artists, I have to ask other fans which tracks the singles are and how popular they were on their tour-de-billboard. Other music snobs care about how new the artist is and how popular they will be after said music snob has ‘discovered them’—me, I care about how unique a sound is, how they are connected to the music world and how much the artist has a really impeccable discography of great albums with amazing songs. In the past year or so, the music world has been buzzing about discovering L’il John or the Game, I’ve been buzzing on discovering Calexico.

“It used to piss me off when I saw the bullshit some distributors chose to release, but then I realized that the average distributor knows NOTHING about rap music or what’s hot on the streets, other than “is it selling or not,” I just wanted to pull this quote because I completely sympathize with it! I guess there’s a market for everything in music and that there are a lot more people who are putting out music than can be produced.