Music has always relied heavily on its local aspects. Scenes and the communities of enthusiasts that surround and support them have always been the most crucial element in building a platform that can support a movement. Pick any number of progressions in music over the last 50 years, and you’ll find that they started as a gathering of enthusiasts that helped build the community to support artists. Many stayed quite in the underground; others, like grunge, became international phenomena. These movements have traditionally been nurtured by small groups of dedicated fans, promoters, and clubs. In the wake of such scenes, throngs of young creative types have been enticed to move to cities like Seattle, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, helping to turn these movements into eras reminisced about as if they were magical, distant utopias.

This is where the role of a new type of label begins to make sense. I imagine the big labels evolving into, mainly, distributors, with rosters that receive a (hopefully) refined version of their current services as a label. There will be the traditional independent labels, who with their adequate physical (and more innovative online) distribution continue to fill their niche. Then there’ll be the space left open for a new kind of label to fill in the emerging gaps. I envision lots of small labels devoted to building up young local acts and helping to build community around the music in their respective towns.

Such a label would function as a manager of sorts for the band at first, guiding their career choices and helping them gain exposure. They would also function as a booking agent, working with local clubs to get their bands on the stages and booking showcases around town to create local music community, while also hopefully getting their artist on tour with a larger up-and-coming band. The labels would also act as the PR rep. In effect, this label would function as an AA farm club of sorts, but also help fill the void of dwindling A&R budgets by giving an artist the support to get noticed when there are less people out there looking for them.

Such a label would need an interesting business model. The royalty rates should resemble those of any established independent label with regard to sales and publishing. Such a label could also be contractually entitled to receive 15-20 percent of the revenue the band generates from ticket sales and merchandise in exchange for their services. Their distribution would be largely online through companies, such as the Ioda Alliance, with minimum physical distribution. As the artist matures and begins to grow, the label could renegotiate the terms of the deal (likely on an album-to-album basis) to allow the band to bring on separate management or booking as their career necessitates. The end game would be for such a label to help cultivate an artist’s career and ensure they are noticed and eventually picked up by a larger indie or major label, with the original label maintaining the back catalog of releases published while with them, using that revenue to find and foster other new artists.

Perhaps this is all too idealistic. After all, labels and managers often don’t agree. But with the ability to spend little on marketing while allowing the blogosphere to generate exposure, it opens up the opportunity for artists to be exposed to bigger labels that seem increasingly less able to find solid acts because of shrinking budgets. Let’s face it though, all else aside, with the internet making everything so global, we could all use a few more passionate individuals out there, bringing the focus back home.

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