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Yes, I have tons of evidence for this, and for why all of your claims have no foundation. Allow me to provide one example of the hundreds that I personally know

• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > Financial support has always been a very well-understood con by the record labels, as it allows them to assume ownership over music rights under the guise of "necessary promotional activities." This. Just look at TLC, one of the biggest R&B groups of their time, and yet they were personally broke.
• b20000 5y ago
  marketing is not free and “it just went viral” is bullshit. yes, the internet is available to anyone. buying visibility is not though. that is the main problem for anyone who creates anything, and not something you can solve by working hard.
• KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  Same with software, books and manga and video games I think. The only digitalized industry where indies still don't really have a place is tv/movies
  • mikepurvis 5y ago
    There are loads of people making indie movies/docs out there, I think, it's more a question of exposure— there's a long tail of them that get uploaded to Vimeo or YouTube and then just die there. There's some limited curation going on with aggregator channels (eg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7sDT8jZ76VLV1u__krUutA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7sDT8jZ76VLV1u__krUutA), but it's not mass-market in the way that a Netflix series is. Which definitely does seem like a missed opportunity for the streaming platforms. Maybe one of them needs to step up with the equivalent of Stream's Greenlight programme— an opportunity to temporarily have your stuff listed alongside the AAA content, and if it hits whatever the numbers are, they'll buy it from you?
  • finiteseries 5y ago
    Outside narrative driven / sports / blue planet level stuff, isn’t a huge part of TV just YouTube/Podcasts/etc now? Curation and everything built in. I was led to a oddly human travel show and watched it go from a few thousand to millions of subscribers over the past couple years, they were recently on the Ukrainian / Russian border the day before the invasion talking to locals and ended up leaving on a refugee train in 1080p60, 3+ million views. Questionable character I don’t want to promote and some of the episodes I don’t want to be associated with, but that’s tvesque isn’t it? Repeat for true crime, history, cooking, children, educational, political commentary, informercials…
    • KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
      Sure kinda, but I'd say that's a new industry rather than an opening of the old one. It's kinda like saying tiktok replaced concerts and singles for musicians, kinda true but not what the parent guy is saying. Tiktok enhances the path to getting success on the traditional platforms rather than simply replacing it. That's not generally been the case for youtubers, though a strong argument could be made for podcast i think.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • majani 5y ago
• lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Is it possible this method was doable for them without the backing of bigger money because it's sort of novel? If everyone starts live streaming reddit and tiktok, what will make certain groups stand out versus others? I would guess there would be an opportunity for paid promotion, maybe by Reddit or TikTok themselves.
  • bryans 5y ago
    That's an argument which could be made for any market or industry. There are obviously a finite amount of people in the world, and those people have a finite amount of time to find and listen to music, so there is always competition and certain artists are going to stand out among others -- that's the nature of human preference. But that doesn't automatically mean a few are successful and everyone else fails. It's a spectrum of success which, as it turns out, is directly proportional to the effort invested toward getting better and producing more attractive content.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I think it has more of an effect on markets where the marginal cost of an additional sale (or attention) is effectively zero, which results in very bimodal winner (or top few winners) take all type situations. Not that there is anything wrong with considering success to be whatever you achieve without outside funds trying to promote you, it all simply depends on personal goals and what you are willing to give up to gain an edge.
    • skinnymuch 5y ago
      If things in life were directly proportional to effort and similar things. We’d be living in a meritocracy. Society doesn’t work that way. There are most certainly people who failed while putting in more and better effort than others who succeeded.
      • bryans 5y ago
        No, there are people who put more effort toward the wrong things, and that's why they didn't find the same success. The best songwriter in the world could be incredibly unsuccessful if they don't have any concept of how to market themselves properly, so sitting in their studio practicing guitar all day is technically effort, but it isn't doing anything to progress their career. That's exactly why most musicians fail. They don't bother googling "how to be a band" or learning any of the necessary skills to be successful independently, and instead spend all of their time hoping that someone will "discover" them. I've quite literally never once seen a musician expend effort toward learning marketing and business without finding success.
• basisword 5y ago
  How long does that work for though and for how many artists? If you get on a new platform early you can find success, but once the platform becomes swamped with content it's impossible to stand out without creativity, luck...and funding. Unless you're lucky enough to find the next platform. Additionally - 15k monthly listeners on Spotify is a pretty great starting point. Most indie artists, regardless of quality, will struggle ever even reach that without a lot of outside help (or luck).
  • bryans 5y ago
    I think you're maybe putting too much emphasis on the platforms, particularly on them being a single opportunity that goes away at some point. Every platform, regardless of whether it's a specific function like Spotify or a content hub like YouTube, is a separate venue representing a series of opportunities, not a singular event. If you need evidence of that, you can find countless new YouTube channels finding success in the same markets which have been "saturated" for years -- some since the beginning of the platform. And specifically to your emphasis on needing funding, that's just not the case anymore. Everything is cheap. You can live stream from your phone in 480p with a $20 ring light, and fans of the content will still throw money at you. It happens all day long on Twitch. > Additionally - 15k monthly listeners on Spotify is a pretty great starting point. Most indie artists, regardless of quality, will struggle ever even reach that without a lot of outside help (or luck). Again though, that was after almost a decade of gigs and touring and marketing. All it took was opening their eyes to those series of opportunities that platforms provide, and then applying all of their effort toward those instead of pursuing the traditionally prescribed music industry path.
    • skinnymuch 5y ago
      > countless new YouTube channels finding success in the same markets This is seeing the survivors. Even if there are 100 new big YouTube channels per year for some saturated niche. That number might practically speaking basically mean zero if 10 million people every year earnestly try to succeed in that niche. The hit rate on this example is 1 in 100K.
• deleted 5y ago
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• mtalantikite 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, did they book their own tour? What sort of rooms are they playing? And who is dealing with their music publishing? All of my close musician friends generally have teams that deal with those sorts of things, but not necessarily from their label (although the more famous ones playing large rooms/stadiums definitely go through their labels).
  • bryans 5y ago
    They handle everything themselves. The recent tour was 200-300 cap rooms, with a couple of large clubs in the mix. Booking can definitely be a grind, but at the end of the day, the booking agencies are saving you about 5 hours of work in exchange for ~15% of gross, which they hope translates to at least $150 to make their own 2 hours of work worth it. But if you're grossing $1,000 from each gig, that's $30/hr that could be going to a band member instead of some third party, presuming somebody has the motivation to do it and they're not already making more at a day job.
    • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > if you're grossing $1,000 from each gig, that's $30/hr that could be going to a band member instead of some third party These are massively different economies of scale than the labels deal with. Unless we see technological breakthroughs that make scaling easy for a DIY musician, the labels look well protected for the next generation.
      • bryans 5y ago
        > These are massively different economies of scale than the labels deal with. You're mistaken and only thinking in terms of major labels and Beyonce. There are thousands of indie labels working at that small scale, along with countless major label "baby bands" (as they call them). > Unless we see technological breakthroughs that make scaling easy for a DIY musician, the labels look well protected for the next generation. The entire premise of my original comment was about how technology has made scaling easy for independent musicians. It's already happening. That's the whole conversation we're having here.
• majani 5y ago
  The way I see it, there is a small window of opportunity for organic growth on TikTok right now, but very soon it will become pay to play. That's the playbook for every social site out there: leave everything free during the growth days, after growth starts peaking, start charging for every valuable thing on the site.
  • bryans 5y ago
    I was mistakenly telling people the "small window" for TikTok was closing over a year ago, but it's still open wide enough to fit a 747 through it. TikTok's algorithm, in particular, is actually extremely friendly toward user content, and that means there will always be room for organic growth on the platform, as is still true for every platform (even the dead ones like Facebook).
    • majani 5y ago
      TikTok is able to stretch the organic period because of the absurd funding environment right now. It's parent company has raised $8 billion and is valued at $400 billion while still private! When the music stops they will surely charge for virality somehow
• hef19898 5y ago
  Curious question, if streaming services reach the point where they enable indy artists to actually become super stars (using TikTok for marketing), doesn't that move the role, and power, from label to those streaming services and social media (for marketing)?
  • bryans 5y ago
    No, because the label never had that power to begin with. They were always at the whim of social media and other factors. The trick is to not dedicate yourself to one platform, because they should all be treated as separate venues with different types of audiences (because they are). Social media sites are tools, not goals.
    • hef19898 5y ago
      Thanks for the answer!
• siquick 5y ago
  150k streams p/month is absolutely nothing compared to the artists that the major labels are interested in. Record labels that the likes of “Sub-Radio” are suited to have always be and will continue to act as taste makers and curators, and not large money making organisations (and for the better). Even the large indies like Sub Pop, Stones Throw, and K7 operate in completely different seperate financial and reach realms than Universal, Warner and the like. If someone becomes “Tik Tok famous” overnight then they’re likely to seek management and guess who that manager is most likely to be aligned to? Major labels aren’t going anywhere.
  • dna_polymerase 5y ago
    > If someone becomes “Tik Tok famous” overnight then they’re likely to seek management and guess who that manager is most likely to be aligned to? Major labels aren’t going anywhere. This is the important thing for labels to focus on in the future. The actual logistics around the physical world is something you cannot handle if you are also seeking time to record new music and practice. On the web however things are getting easier for everyone and the value proposition of record labels vanishes.
  • bryans 5y ago
    > 150k streams p/month is absolutely nothing compared to the artists that the major labels are interested in. I said 150k unique listeners, not streams. Also, you're entirely wrong about this. The 100k-250k range is a very distinct tier of band, and those bands are ubiquitously on record labels. So, your insistence that labels aren't even interested in them is the exact opposite of reality. > Record labels that the likes of “Sub-Radio” are suited to have always be and will continue to act as taste makers and curators, and not large money making organisations (and for the better). Even the large indies like Sub Pop, Stones Throw, and K7 operate in completely different seperate financial and reach realms than Universal, Warner and the like. They operate at different scales because of the overall size of the rosters and the major label's ability to literally throw away cash at every turn just to maintain superiority. That doesn't mean major labels don't manage projects that are operating at smaller scales, because they absolutely do. They're called "subsidiaries" and they fit directly in the category that you're pretending doesn't exist. > Major labels aren’t going anywhere. Nobody said they were, so your entire argument was made with a false premise. The point was that they aren't necessary anymore.