Major Label vs. Indie Label

The music industry has undergone a veritable revolution in the past couple of decades.

No longer is the power to reach a global audience in the hands of a few rich CEOs.   No longer is the technology to record your music to a professional level out of the reach of your common household musician.

Things have become a lot easier in many ways to make your music and get it out there.   This article will compare major labels to indie labels - Professional versus DIY - and see how things match up with the technology available today.


Promotion

Take a moment to think - how many bands or artists have you discovered since the internet was born?   I'll bet it's considerably more than before (if you can remember that far back!) - This just goes to show how technology has brought people closer to what they want to hear.

Whereas before a Major Label would choose which music to saturate the world with, now people can be much more specific with their tastes and still enjoy a variety - all they need is to log on to a forum, sign up to a website like Last.fm or Pandora's Box, browse through YouTube or just jump on MySpace and wait for the artists to promote themselves to them.

With people being able to be more specific about their music tastes, the mainstream is not the only path any more.   Increasingly you hear about independent artists jumping into the charts and selling out massive venues - Electronica/Rock band "Enter Shikari" are a prime example, gigging every other day for 3 years straight built them a massive underground fan base with which they launched their debut album to the number 4 spot in the charts and straight into the mainstream limelight.

So combining live shows with heavy internet promotion can result in a solid fan base.   When you have that, it's then up to you if you want to make the move to a major label or keep going it alone and reaping what you sow.


Recording

There are so many bits of kit on the market now for making music from home that it's difficult to keep track.

And now that major labels no longer hold the key to professional sound quality, there's no reason to join one for that - an artist can invest in their own studio and churn out track after track onto the internet until people start to take notice.

If a home producer can grab themselves a computer-based studio they can be making their tunes sound professional with amazing pieces software such as Reason, Pro Tools, Logic and Sonar, and polishing it with similarly amazing plug-ins.   Professional studios just can't compete with this kind of value for money.

The only thing professional studios have up on home producers is experience - and with a wealth of knowledge available online for free in the form of video and text tutorials, interactive communities and dodgy wikipedia articles, so long as the artist has the motivation to learn, the internet will teach.


Conclusion

So what does a Major Label have up on making your own Indie Label?   A massive budget, connections and experience.   But with technology meaning the budget isn't so much of an issue in many ways, the internet providing the opportunity to contact anyone, and offering the experience of everyone connected to it, how long will it be before there's no need for Major labels at all?

Though Majors still have the power to get a band onto every radio show and every TV channel, they can't instil a sense respect for the artists into the general public that they'll get if people know they've achieved their success themselves.   Everyone loves the underdog and everyone loves to see success sprouting from the most unlikely places.

Plus, there's the immortal advantage that if you set up an indie label yourself, it's considerably more likely to accept you than a major label (unless you're unhealthily masochistic.)

In today's musical climate, if you want to succeed you're going to have to take all aspects of your music into your own hands - promotion, recording and performing.   Then when the major labels come a-biting, you'll have the experience to ask the question - "is it worth it?"