The Long Tail of Indy Rock

Apple and Apple made peace again yesterday, clearing the way, everyone hopes, for the Beatles to appear on iTunes.  Now if only Led Zeppelin would sign up for iTunes for those times--every six months or so--when the desire to hear one of their songs suddenly and inexplicably strikes me.

Overshadowed by this deal between a behemoth of the old pop music and a behemoth of the new pop was the announcement of a new consortium of indy rock labels called Merlin, a sort of central bazaar for rockism. Indy labels are also forming collective bargaining units to increase their leverage with the major online music distributors, including Yahoo. How much impact feistier and better organized independent labels will have in the marketplace  remains to be seen.  Labels large and small are getting smacked around in the market: According to Nielsen Soundscan, album sales in all genres declined by nearly 5 percent in 2006, primarily because of increasing popularity of digital downloads. Even rap, which dominates American popular music right now, saw its sales drop by more than 20 percent, the most of any genre.

But the decline of the CD is only part of the general crisis in popular music. The MySpace phenomena, with its four-song bands that appear and disappear with alarming regularity, merely accelerates the ephemeral nature of popular music. The days when bands like the Beatles ruled the charts for a decade are long gone. Rap has always been notorious for its brisk turnover in chart-topping bands. Now the same thing seems to be happening in indy rock: Some Loud Thunder, the second release from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which seemed to have figured out the new music industry order, has been received with lukewarm reviews and general disappointment, apparently consigning them to the long tail of rock music sales. While there's no shortage of great new artists in virtually all categories of music, the business overhead of signing, recording, and promoting these new acts, only to see them flame out after one album, has to take its toll.

I once heard a longtime observer of the indy rock scene remark that what's bad for a music executive is good for a music fan. Indy rock labels have considered themselves immune from such sentiments because they're supposed to be on the side of music fans. Probably that will remain the case, especially after another new development in the online music industry occurs later this month: Other Music, the terrific New York independent music store, will begin selling MP3 downloads.

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