Whenever the likes of Napster are called upon to justify their particular brand of piracy, they always hint at MP3 empowering rather than preying on musicians. MP3, it is argued, gives unknown bands a chance to reach new audiences, to create, compress and publish studio quality music at the click of the mouse.
No more waiting around for some A&R man to discover you while hoards of talentless yobs with great haircuts prance around on TOTP. The theory goes that if you want to be heard you can be. So, equipped with my own three-minute dance sensation entitled Love on Radio, I set off to find fame and fortune.
The first shock was a major one. Heading off to www.acidplanet.com, I got my first glimpse of the competition, namely hundreds of wannabe stars who had used the same music-making package (the excellent Acid 2 Pro) to far greater effect.
Imaginatively arranged and perfectly mixed, most of them could be played down your local club with pride, whereas mine sounded like it had been knocked up in two hours on a PC (which it had). Not one to be discouraged, I posted my track anyway, returning a few days later to discover that only 12 people had bothered to download it. The most charitable response from one listener was: "Nice chorus, shame about the rapper."
While MP3 has democratised music, it has also transferred a truckload of new responsibilities to the artist. With the conventional music model, you could rely on a record company to pay for sound engineers, producers and marketers to make your track worthy of attention. Now it's all up to you, and if you don't start with professional songwriting tools (a decent sequencer, soundcard and plug-in digital effects are a must) and a modicum of production skill, no one is going to care how good the basic idea is.
A certain degree of support is offered by artists' collectives such as www.songwriter.com, but selling direct to the consumer is a lot harder than it sounds.
A trip to the newly relaunched www.MP3.com revealed further weaknesses in my strategy. Even if my track had been professional enough, all you achieve by simply posting music is to give some brain-dead Californian student a free fix of your work. The internet does not provide a showcase for artists looking to be snapped up by a record label; it is a true alternative to conventional music retailing, and thinking like a record company is essential to getting anywhere. For a start, you will need an album, or at least a collection of five to 10 tracks you can mail to your fans should you get any.
You will also need to decide how best to market your newfound talent. For example, though posting an MP3 file to your website is easy, no one but a small circle of friends will know it's there. This is one reason for the rise of true online publishers such as www.peoplesound.com, who provide you with a web page, a streaming audio demo of your track, and even make and sell your CDs in exchange for a 50% royalty. Naturally, you first have to prove yourself worthy (by registering and sending in some tracks) but even if you are chosen for the playlist, you run the risk of being lost among the hundreds of artists doing the same thing and you can count your time in the "charts" in days rather than weeks.
The internet is a far more "vertical" record shop than anything you find in the High Street. Users browse specifically for the type of music they like, and unless your style falls into the electro, techno, or trance category (and the harder the better) there is a good chance no one will ever hear it. One possible answer to this is the growing number of MP3 radio stations such as http://radio.mp3.com, which play continuous loops of tracks where a single click will take you to the download page.
The downside is that getting on the playlist is still time-consuming, and whereas a local radio station guarantees you several thousand listeners at a time, few MP3 stations are heard by more than a few hundred at once. The more you look at the online model for music distribution, the more sense the conventional one makes.
The final truth, however, is the most alarming. Heading to the infamous www.napster.com it does not take a genius to see that the average MP3 punter cares nothing for whether I am talented or not. Of the thousands of tracks freely available, 95% of the downloads are for established stars, with Westlife's What makes a Man still being pirated more than 1,500 times a day while my single track lies totally unnoticed.
Although Napster's new deal with the record labels will ensure that the lads make a few pennies somewhere down the line, it offers very little hope for anyone less famous. So, there you have it. Original MP3 music is alive, remarkably professional and available from dozens of websites. It remains, however, a promotional tool for artists with record company support, or those with a loyal fan base and a CD to flog. Perhaps when MP3 radio takes off, it will offer a genuine chance of breaking new talent. In the meantime, it merely encourages clever producers to plunder the web at will for good ideas to cunningly weave into their own tracks. Needless to say, I am not prepared to take such a risk with my precious material.
Oh, who am I kidding? I sucked and they knew it.
