The line to try Mailbox, the new iPhone app for managing your inbox, is long. Really, really long.
I signed up the day it went live in the App Store, on February 7, and finally made it to the front of the line this morning after two weeks of patient line-waiting.
While I was waiting, I’d occasionally open the app to see my place in the queue, and think — what if the line was real?
Imagine an ever-growing line of weary people fiddling with their phones, sprawling off into the distance. How long would the line be?
If you signed up right now, you’d find yourself at the end of a line with 807,896 people ahead of you.
They’re letting people in at a near-constant rate of 800 per hour, or just over 13 people per minute.
Let’s assume that people standing in line take up an average of two feet of space, from back to back with room for personal space.
The line stretches over 300 miles into the distance. To put it in perspective, that’s further than London to the outskirts of Paris. It’s 30 miles longer than Hollywood to Las Vegas. It spans from the Bronx to Portland, Maine.
But it’s moving! Slowly. At about 0.3 miles per hour. You’re shuffling along at just over five inches per second.
At the current rate, you’ll make it to the front of the line in about 42 days.
After four weeks topping the Billboard Hot 100, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” was replaced this week by Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the song that inspired the Internet meme.
As I wrote last month, Macklemore is only the second unsigned artist in Billboard history to reach the #1 slot, the first in two decades.
And now, with a new #1, another record’s broken: Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” is the first song from a largely unknown artist to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Since 1958, only 21 songs have ever debuted at #1. Of those 21 songs, only four were from artists appearing on the Hot 100 for the first time, all from artists with extensive mainstream media exposure — three American Idol contestants (Clay Aiken, Fantasia and Carrie Underwood) and a popular artist going solo (Lauryn Hill). Source: Billboard.
I’d wager this is another first: “Harlem Shake” is the only song to ever debut at #1 on the Hot 100 without significant radio or TV airplay. This is solely an Internet phenomenon, gone deeply mainstream.
This is in no small part because of major changes incorporating YouTube views into the Billboard Hot 100 formula, introduced this week in response to the viral success of “Gangnam Style.”
Billboard and Nielsen are just acknowledging a long-overdue reality. Radio and cable aren’t the future, and if you’re focused on tracking them, you’re looking at an ever-shrinking window of behavior.
But seriously, who cares what Billboard and Nielsen think anyway? Aren’t the charts irrelevant? For most purposes, probably.
But like winning an award, chart success is a symbol of reputation. Recognition from a reputable source tracking sales or viewership opens doors for artists, especially important if you’re independent.
It’s one thing for Amanda Palmer to raise a million dollars from Kickstarter, but having her album debut in the Billboard top ten shows that there’s demand beyond her most hardcore early supporters. This gives her team the power to negotiate everything from distributors to concert venue contracts.
And when other artists see that indie artists can find legitimate mainstream success on their own, others will follow. This is already happening on a small scale, but it’s only going to get accelerate.
A couple weeks ago, I went to see Ben Folds Five’s reunion tour here in Portland:
Just saw an unsigned indie trio from North Carolina that crowdfunded their new album. These boys are going places! twitter.com/waxpancake/sta…
I joked about it on Twitter, but I’m not sure many knew I was serious. The reformed Ben Folds Five is unsigned.
After releasing their first three albums on Sony, Ben Folds Five decided to fund their album on Pledge Music and release it independently.
They easily could’ve released it through a label — Ben Folds is still signed to Sony/Epic for his solo work and Darren Jesse through Bar/None. Why do it all on their own?
Playfic, my little interactive-fiction platform, turned one year old on Friday. I rounded up some recent news about it just last month, so I’m not going to retread that territory.
But I was starting to feel guilty about ignoring it, so I added some new tools for exploring the archive of 650+ games, sketches, and silly experiments.
This surfaced a whole bunch of interesting games I hadn’t seen, so I freshened up the featured section with some new picks.
Playfic was always intended to be an experiment, yet another tool of creative expression and a quick way for people to experiment with Inform 7. I really wasn’t expecting much out of it, but I’ve been happy to see people slowly discover the community and find new uses for it.
Update: Releasing any platform for creative expression often comes with unintended consequences. For Playfic, one of the biggest surprises was seeing it used by educators, something I never intended.
Most recently, I just discovered this high school teacher using Playfic to teach interactive fiction in the classroom. I was a little stunned to see a room full of high school students playing interactive fiction for the first time on iPads, starting with Cooper’s first game:
Games being created by high-school students and played by high-school students. How awesome is that?
The undiscovered young talent gets their big break and a record deal, and soon realizes they were swindled by corrupt management and a major label.
It’s an old story, and a common theme that pops up in rock songs, often from well-established bands. (Though it seems especially common the ’70s.)
After writing about Macklemore’s “Jimmy Iovine” for my Indiepocalypse post yesterday, I stumbled on several more great angry songs about record labels. They didn’t fit into the post, but I still wanted to share them.
Graham Parker and the Rumour – Mercury Poisoning (1979)
I got a dinosaur for a representative, It’s got a small brain and refuses to learn Their promotion’s so lame,
They could never ever take me to the real ball game Listen, I ain’t a pet, I ain’t a token hipster in your Monopoly set. I’ve got Mercury poisoning. It’s fatal and it don’t get better!
The Clash – Complete Control (1977)
They said we’d be artistically free when we signed that bit of paper They meant let’s make a lotsa money and worry about it later I’ll never understand Complete control, lemme see your other hand I don’t trust you, so why should you trust me?
Nick Lowe – I Love My Label (1977)
Deeply sarcastic, Lowe tossed off this track to get out of his major label deal with United Artists.
Oh I’m so proud of them up here, we’re one big happy family I guess you could say I’m the poor relation of the parent company They always ask for lots of songs, but no more than 2:50 long so I write ’em some They never talk behind my back, and they’re always playing my new tracks when I come along
Lynyrd Skynyrd – Workin’ For MCA (1974)
MCA signed the young band for a seven year deal for $9,000.
Oh, nine thousand dollars just to sow to the wind. Come to smile at the yankee slicker with a big old southern grin. They’re gonna take me out to California, gonna make me a superstar. Just pay me all my money, maybe you won’t get a scar. Want you to sign the contract, want you to sign the date. Gonna give you lots of money Workin’ for MCA.
Sex Pistols – E.M.I. (1977)
In October 1978, EMI signed the Sex Pistols to a two-year contract, but dropped them only three months later. They were quickly picked up by A&M, and dropped less than a week later. Virgin finally released their debut in May 1977, their third label in six months.
Don’t judge a book just by the cover Unless you cover just another And blind acceptance is a sign Of stupid fools who stand in line Like E.M.I.
The Smiths – Paint A Vulgar Picture (1987)
World tour, media whore, please the press in Belgium. This was your life. And when it fails to recoup? Well, maybe you just haven’t earned it yet, baby.
In one sense, this is the ultimate first-world problem — successful musicians complaining about bad business deals. Then again, for decades, signing with a major label was the only game in town if you wanted to find success in the music industry, and the labels exploited that monopoly.
But overall, I tend to agree with Trent Reznor, who said, “I don’t set out to write songs about record labels. Nothing could be more boring—with the possible exception of writing about tour buses.”
For the first time in two decades, an indie artist is topping the Billboard charts. For the last three weeks, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” has remained at the #1 position on the Billboard Hot 100, beating the likes of Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars.
The only other unsigned artist to ever hit #1 was Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” in 1994, when her friend Ethan Hawke gave the track to Ben Stiller to include on the Reality Bites soundtrack. She quickly signed to a major label, releasing her debut album the following year with Geffen Records.
Lisa Loeb switched to a label as soon as she could because, in 1994, it was the only way to finance a full album, nationwide tour, market an album, get radio/TV airplay, and get distribution to record stores.
That prized record deal didn’t work out the way she’d hoped. Four years before Lisa Loeb joined Geffen, the label was acquired by MCA, later renamed to Universal Music Group. She ended up on Interscope/A&M, one of Universal’s many subsidiaries, where she received less-than-stellar treatment.
“They became a really big label and I felt they weren’t focusing a lot on music,” Loeb said in 2003. “They had executives telling you one thing one day and then telling you something different the next. They couldn’t deliver on their promises.” A planned music video was rejected by the label because they disagreed with the concept.
In the end, she had to negotiate to buy the rights to her own master recordings from Interscope.
Lisa Loeb wanted her work to be heard and she wanted to make a living doing what she loved, so she sacrificed her creative and financial control to get there.
For hundreds of years, publishers across every industry — book publishers, record labels, film studios, videogame publishers — solved problems for artists in four major ways:
Funding. The cost of creating a new work, paying the artist’s expenses during the creation process, often with an advance.
Production. Design, manufacturing, and printing of the finished product.
Marketing. Going on tour, making a video, promotion in various media outlets.
Distribution. Getting the product into people’s hands.
And how does this play out now?
Digital distribution subverted the monopolies held by physical distribution, bypassing distribution deals with record stores entirely, allowing artists to sell directly to fans. Social media and online music services changed the way people discover music, making the payola systems of MTV and radio airplay feel quaint. Production costs dropped dramatically as computers became more powerful and audio editing software got dirt cheap, along with new services for printing on demand. And, finally, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms offset the financial risk to artists.
Most importantly, each new platform let artists find, communicate, and sell directly to their fans.
Music is hardly alone here. Videogames, film, comics, books, product design, hardware, software, board games, whatever. Hackers and makers across every form of art are finding their fan bases, interacting with them, and selling to them.
We’re at the beginning of an indiepocalypse — a global shift in how culture is made, from a traditional publisher model to independently produced and distributed works.
Artists that were royally screwed over in the past now have an alternative.
As high-profile artists keep popping up across every industry, other artists will inevitably follow. For every Louis CK or Amanda Palmer, there are 10,000 other artists ready to wake up and try something new. It will be the default state for new artists, and a rising trend among artists with existing fanbases.
Publishers will have to evolve just to stay alive. Labels, studios, and other publishers can provide huge value — they can take care of the bullshit that artists don’t want to do. And they can apply knowledge and existing relationships to help artists, rather than asking artists to learn everything from scratch.
Artists of all kinds want to focus on making art, but not if it means giving up a large financial stake in their work, exclusive rights to their work, or a loss of creative control.
It would take much more work, but Macklemore and Ryan Lewis could do it all themselves. Why sign with a label, if it meant giving up so much?
If you have any doubt over whether Macklemore and Ryan Lewis will sign to a major label any time soon, check out the lyrics to “Jimmy Iovine,” a track off their debut album, named after the head of Interscope, Lisa Loeb’s former label. In the song, he sneaks into Jimmy Iovine’s office to try to get a record deal.
Finally see an office with a mounted sign, heaven sent Big block silver letters, read it out loud: President (nice!) This was my chance to grab that contract and turn and jet Right then felt a cold hand grab on the back of my neck
He said, “We’ve been watching you, so glad you could make it Your music gets so impressive in this whole brand you created You’re one hell of a band, we here think you’re destined for greatness And with that right song we all know that you’re next to be famous Now I’m sorry, I’ve had a long day remind me, now what your name is?That’s right, Macklemore, of course, today has been crazy Anyway, you ready? We’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars After your album comes out we’ll need back that money that you borrowed.”
“So it’s really like a loan?”
“A loan? Come on, no, we’re a team, 360 degrees, we will reach your goals! We’ll get a third of the merch that you sell out on the road Along with a third of the money you make when you’re out doing your shows Manager gets 20%, booking agent gets 10% So shit, after taxes you and Ryan have 7% to split That’s not bad, I’ve seen a lot worse, No one will give you a better offer than us.”
I replied, “I appreciate the offer, thought that this is what I wanted Rather be a starving artist than succeed at getting fucked.”
It took two decades for a second unsigned artist to top the Billboard charts. I’m guessing it won’t be long before we see another.
