Filtering.

"Record companies did have their uses though and that was to work as a filtering system. There's so much new music around it's impossible to keep up with it all."- Roger Glover, Deep Purple, Mixdown magazine, April 2006

Filtering?...Yes, the process by which supposedly only the best artists are delivered to the audiences. Someone has to "filter" the thousands of recordings by thousands of artists. The record companies did this...by listening to demos, or monitoring the "buzz" on artists. Of course, they did this on many different criteria, of which "quality" was only an incidental one. Fat Possum records have had success with artists, many of them in their 70s or older, that no other record company had ever showed any interest in. Now, though, artists are not reliant on record company money to make recordings. The result is a flood of "unfiltered" recordings. This creates new situations.

For instance, for reviewers. They can adopt two tactics. One is to continue to rely on record company filtering by refusing to bother with anything other than record company product. For the mainstream, this probably still works well. If a reviewer decides to look at everything that is sent to them, they face a potential flood of recordings. In all likelihood, reviewers will only be likely to take notice of independent releases when they are already successful. However, in non mainstream areas, particularly ones that are poorly served by record companies, reviewers are likely to be much more open in their attitudes. Sites devoted to particular genres are unlikely to be prejudiced against non-label releases. (This is the situation, for instance, in Progressive Rock).

GarageBand is an attempt to create a filtering situation that is open to all. The filtering is done by reviewers, who are motivated by a number of means. See here for more on Garage Band.

I think I would not be going too far if I said that Filtering is the single biggest issue facing Independent Musicians. Realistically you are in competition with thousands of other musicians, of all styles, jumbled together. You want to separate yourselves from them and get ahead, at least to a certain extent. Success is both a result of and a form of filtering, however you define success.

In a more immediate sense, independent musicians exist principally in the medium of the internet. And filtering is everywhere on the internet. To make sense of the vast number of pages on the net, search engines and so forth filter constantly. Much of what you do on the internet will be an attempt to get through those filters.

So Filtering will determine the future of music more than anything else. Stay tuned...