by Mark Rushton
I had been making instrumental music in my home recording studio for a few years when I decided I had enough good material in order to put out an album in early 2004. The album, titled The Driver's Companion, was going to be released on CD.
At the time I was getting the album ready, CafePress started offering made-to-order CDs for sale. You could design the entire CD booklet yourself. For less than $9 it was satisfying to see a one-off of my music looking like a real store-bought CD. Practically no CD manufacturers at the time would offer made-to-order CDs, and very few would do short orders of less than 250, so I thought what CafePress was doing at the time was rather revolutionary. They even offered a discount on bulk orders of at least 15 CDs. It beat wasting a lot of money to do a typical order of 1000 CDs. Besides, I was an unknown and not signed to a record label.
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
— Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
Not long after, I learned of CDBaby, which is a company out of Portland, Oregon. CDBaby acted as an online CD distributor for independent musicians. They still do, but nowadays they are basically a gateway for musicians to get on the major digital download services like iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, and others. In the summer of 2004 I had my album, The Driver's Companion, signed up for digital distribution through CDBaby for a small fee. The first year it was available in digital form I thought it was a mistake to spend any money on digital distribution. I had literally a handful of digital sales, mostly single tracks from iTunes.
In very late 2004, I started podcasting my music as a way of finding a wider audience. When I first read about podcasting, around September of 2004, it seemed like a good idea, but this was a time when very few people were looking for podcasts to download. Although this was just a few years ago, it seems like a different era! There were technical obstacles, like learning how to make an XML file and figuring out how RSS feeds worked. Then I had to submit a link to the XML file to all the podcast search engines. I could see how daunting these challenges might be to musicians who are not technically inclined.
By the second half of 2006, the digital sales started taking off thanks to increased popularity of the iPod and MP3 players. I added another album, Hum And Drift, to the digital stable, and that helped increase sales, as did getting on iTunes for podcasts as a promotional vehicle. In the course of two years I had gone from tens of new and random listeners every month to hundreds just after the launch of iTunes podcast support. Today, I have many thousands of regular listeners to my podcast.
Another thing I noticed in 2007 was the significant increase in the number of people downloading my music via subscription-based services like Napster, eMusic, and Rhapsody. For a certain price every month on those services you can basically rent music and even put it on specific portable devices. The royalty payment I get isn't near what it is for a digital sale, but with more people subscribing every month the audience is expanding rapidly. I suspect that digital subscription plans may be a version of the wave of the future.
The digital revolution is becoming widespread across all ages. Recently, my father-in-law visited for his birthday. He turned 74 years old. One of his sons had bought him a new MP3 player to take along on a trip, but my father-in-law was unsure how to get some of his CDs onto the MP3 player. Before dinner I set up a program on his laptop to automatically rip the CD when inserted, and then I showed him how to "sync" the MP3 files to the player. Within minutes the music was on his MP3 player. It sounded really good and he was thrilled. I'm sure that the next time he wants music, he probably won't buy the CD and rip it. He'll just buy the download.
What does this mean for the independent musician? Being on digital download services is vital to your future. Podcasting, or at least connecting with potential new fans by offering free music through digital networks like iTunes is necessary to ensure growth. As independent musicians we need to embrace the future in order to keep up with the evolving digital markets of music. Mark Rushton is an independent ambient and electronica musician. His music podcast is heard by thousands worldwide on a regular basis, mostly via iTunes, and he has sold albums in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia thanks to digital distribution services. His web site is http://markrushton.com