Releasing music has never been easier. What is now completed with basically the click of a button via an online distribution service like DistroKid, CD Baby or TuneCore was once a laborious process of trying to convince local stores to stock your records on their shelves one by one.
“It was a high-risk business,” Molly Neuman, president of CD Baby, explains. In the early 1990s, as a college student, Neuman formed the now-legendary Riot Grrrl outfit Bratmobile with her friends and navigated the difficulties of making music without major label resources. Simply making a record back then was challenging enough with all the studio and manufacturing costs — let alone getting stores on board to carry it nationwide.
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“The idea that you had to order 2,000 copies and spend $20,000 just to have the records sit on a shelf was [also] real,” Neuman continues. “In many cases the records were returned.”
On the latest episode of Billboard On the Record, Neuman joins the show to talk about the evolution of the independent music industry and how the challenges facing artists have shifted since her band got its start in Olympia, Wash., more than three decades ago.
To watch the episode, check out the YouTube video below or click here for more viewing and listening options. An edited and condensed excerpt of the conversation can also be found below.
I want to start at the beginning of your career, when you were starting Bratmobile. What did it mean to be an independent artist in practice in the early 1990s? What did you have to do to get those records out there?
We were interested in playing music as friends, with our friends, and going to shows. The easiest way to go to a show was to play one. It was really more about community, being inspired by our peers and people we admired, and wanting to do what we saw them doing.
Because we were women, we were also motivated by the fact that we didn’t see as many women onstage or putting on shows, even though we knew they were there. We would literally go to record stores, comb through records, look in the back and see which bands had women in them if they weren’t on the cover. That was our path to discovering new artists and being inspired by them, and then realizing that we could also be musicians.
We weren’t necessarily there yet. We hadn’t spent high school sitting in our bedrooms learning “Stairway to Heaven”, which I think was somewhat of a model at the time. We learned as we went along. A lot of the bands that inspired us were accessible and simple, so that was our approach.
It really wasn’t a career- or exposure-oriented motivation. It was more about creation, the scene and the act of making music — just being present in that way. When it became, “We want to make a record,” it was more of a document than an attempt to sell a lot of records, if that makes sense.
Back in the days of physical music, they had to manufacture a bunch of records without knowing whether anyone would buy them.
It was a high-risk business. The volatility of the 1990s, followed by file sharing disrupting physical music, made it extremely risky. I’ve thought and talked about the ways we’ve de-risked the business in many ways. Now we have different — and, in many cases, more complicated — issues.
But the idea that you had to order 2,000 copies and spend $20,000 just to have the records sit on a shelf was real. In many cases, the records were returned…
If we had a big release, we would order enough records to be in inventory at its regional distribution centers. They would sit there. Maybe a chain [store] would bring them into a local distribution center, where they would sit again. If demand was sufficient, the records would go into stores. If demand wasn’t sufficient, they would sit on a shelf and then come back to us with a charge.
When you look at contracts from that era…there were return charges and other costs that often flowed down to the artist. There was no other way. There was no leverage.
When Napster, piracy and file sharing started to take off, people didn’t realize how significant they would become. Do you remember the turning point?
In the 2000s, the artists we were releasing were compelling and wonderful… At the same time, access to every album in the world was sparking discovery. Looking back, we were unprepared for the technology…
At an independent label, we weren’t MBAs, lawyers or finance people. We were punks who happened to work at the label and kept it going for a long time. Without that management instinct, it was difficult to navigate the changes.
Labels such as Dischord and Sub Pop weathered many changes. They may have had other elements in the way they operated, or infrastructure they could access. Like, Sub Pop had a joint venture and at one point had ADA as a distributor and had different ways to collaborate.
Nirvana released their first album Bleach on Seattle indie label Sub Pop, then they moved to Geffen, a more commercial label that could offer them [services] for their growing fan base. In your opinion, would it have been possible to reach the heights Nirvana reached with Nevermind and its later releases if the band had stayed on a smaller, more local label?
We’ll never know exactly. The same pattern happened with Rancid, which signed to Reprise, and The Offspring, whose album had a huge hit while it was on Epitaph before the band signed to one of the Sony labels.
At some point, artists or their teams may have decided that they had reached a threshold and needed to tap into something much bigger to reach their full potential. Or perhaps the checks were the right size. We don’t know for sure.
Coming from a scene where the corporate world was treated as “the man,” the message was often, “Never do that.” But there were compromises in every direction….
Ultimately, artists should make decisions for themselves based on their needs and priorities, and those decisions should be respected. That’s relevant today because there are so many choices and so many things that are less restrictive when you tap into larger infrastructure.
With the rise of DIY distribution has come a lot of confusing noise. On a recent episode, Rob Jonas from Luminate said that 150,000 songs are now released each day. Because of this, market share has shifted in favor of independent artists more than ever before. How have you seen that change the music industry and shift market share toward independent artists?
The relationship between the volume of music and who’s listening to it — and all the connection points between those dynamics — is fascinating and difficult to understand.
We know how many tracks we’re delivering each day. We know we’re not the volume player. We also know that a lot of music is being heard in different ways. There are questions about what is happening when you consider the size of the human population, who has access to digital services and who subscribes to them.
As an industry, we’re trying to understand that complicated question while supporting the fact that people want to make music. They want to make it in their bedroom, they want people to hear it and there are audiences for it. People also want to discover new things.
How do we make discovery work better amid all the volume and access? Rob also shared how little of those 150,000 tracks are actually listened to.
I often hear artists complain about streaming rates. At the same time, more people can release music than ever before. There are pros and cons to the streaming era for independent artists. Do you think this is the best time that has existed for independent artists?
I think it’s the best time because there are so many options, and we’re learning from the challenges of the past in a completely different way.
CD Baby was recently part of the Downtown acquisition and is now under Virgin, which is under UMG. Does that mean anything different for CD Baby?
So far, it really hasn’t. I’ve been in my job for about two and a half years, and we’ve spent a lot of time looking at what has worked well at the company and at the loyalty of the artists who trust us to distribute their music. We absolutely don’t take that for granted.
We also had to look at what we were doing that artists didn’t necessarily feel. Even before entering this new Virgin structure, we were using the same technical supply chain as other sister companies that had previously been part of Downtown. That gave us an opportunity to become more efficient in areas artists don’t see day to day, and then to be more supportive in the areas they do see.
Many artists in our part of the industry are frustrated and overwhelmed. They don’t know why things are happening, or why a song was flagged. They want someone to explain it. We’ve focused on improving those fundamental experiences so artists have less frustration and can respond more effectively.
We’re thinking about how we can be a partner to artists as they grow. Our terms are flexible. If you want something taken down, we’ll take it down. If you want to move, you can move. We hope to be a place where artists stay with us, and if new opportunities arise, they can make decisions on their own terms.