Hmm, it’s been quite some years now and the word ‘indie’ isn’t what it used to be, oh those days from the past… Naah, not really. Music is as alive as we are and this constantly changing. Only problem is, some people don’t notice any change going on. They just keep blaming dropping sales on piracy and other eeeeeeeevil people, you know, the devil, Osama, maybe even Saddam and Putin. Why? Because it can be, and ctually is, hard to blame yourself. To look at the mirror and see the problem. That problem can be described as either big labels/major record companies who ‘need’ the huge profits to give luxurious dinners, to pay for lunches, to big the most expensive clothes they can find, to live the life of a popstar.
In the past they could lead such livestyles, because everyone was, well, buying poprecords and there was almost no competition. That is if you can call people making their own cassettes, with handwritten labels on it making a dollar or so profit for each recorded cassette, competition. Why do they make such little profit? Well, actually they like making music, performing in small clubs, which usually get the band a few drinks, maybe some cash, and a bigger social, and business, network. But due to technology the world has changed. Those small self-producing artists, now use myspace or other sites to promote themselves. They’ve set up ‘independent’ labels, run by themselves, or by a group of bands who want to control the cashflow. Control the cashflow=make sure the money goes to the people who work to get paid, the bands.
Now, back to piracy, is this such an eeeevil thing? Is it stealing? As long as you don’t buy the original record, yes. Is it evil? Could be.. Does it hurt the artist a lot? No, not that much, because most of the profits from record sales will stick on the way down through the hierarchy. It will stick to managers, a musicmanager, a studiomanager, a labelmanager, a managermanager, a computermanager, whatever, there will be almost none left at the bottom, the place the artists reside in this big cash hierarchy. So no, it doesn’t hurt the artist that much. The place they get their money is at a stage, performing
And what was that with ‘indie’ again? Well, indie is being used by major labels as well to try and gain some more attention, to get people to buy those records again. Instead of having value, like it used to, managers are stamping everything with ‘indie’ to try and get a more revolutionary image, to sell more records, even though it’s not ‘indie’ as it used to be. Anyway, to conclude this small post a link to a free, huuge, glossy magazine about, nonpoppy music 
Dummymag
