In today's society music, like milk, is farmed, processed and sold. Rather than being a spontaneous transformation of the milk of everyday life into sonic yoghurt by a free cultural process, the music industry treats musicians as cash cows. Their product is pumped out of them by the machinery of the record contract, pastuerized by the censorship of mass-produced pop culture, and compressed by the corporate marketing machine into hard cheese for everyone except for the blue vein of the corporate elite.

Who benefits from this industrial treatment of music? Not the artists, who must sell the rights to their work in order to gain access to the means of distribution which the media corporations monopolize. Not the audiences, who must pay for over-inflated CDs and concert tickets and can access only those forms of music which are considered marketable by profit-motivated gatekeepers of popular culture. The only class who seem to benefit from the dominant form of musical manufacture are the shareholders of the major labels and their pseudo-independent subsidiaries. The commericalization of music, like so many other aspects of modern society, is a tool for the concentration of wealth and the majority of musicians are exploited like any other industrial worker (1).

So what forms of resistance exist to this rampant commodification? Firstly there is the immediatist response - to make music only for the pleasure of the players and never perform it publicly or record it. Then there is the DIY ethos championed by punk bands like Crass, where bands are encouraged to manage themselves, organise their own shows in whatever venue is available - ideally all-age, non-commercial ones - make their own records and run 'distros' to trade them with other bands. DIY practices have been remarkably successful within the various punk subgenres; with warehouse venues, garage rehearsal rooms, home studios and small scale labels and distros springing in and out of existence all over the world. The same DIY ethos can be seen at work within other musical subcultures such as underground hip-hop, the electronic rave party movement or the lo-fi and folk genres. But although DIY has kept an independent musical muse alive it has yet to become a broad-scale alternative to the corporate labels and thousands of young music writers and performers are still trapped into exploitation by the promise of fame, fortune and album sales.

In some cases, DIY distros have evolved into independent labels, headed by cult celebrities like Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys' fame (Alternative Tentacles) and Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion (Epitaph). The major problem with the 'indies' being that they are still businesses, bound by the structural injustices of the state-corporate system. Each indie could potentially become a major of the future, or be bought up one of the majors. In some cases, indies are actually just brand names, created by media corporates to niche market more edgy musical commodities to more skeptical alternative music consumers. If the hands of the corporate ogre are to be removed from the neck of the music world, there needs to be a way for all of the people involved in these anti-corporate organisations to pool their resources and form a transnational co-operation. (2)


I envision a global network of locally-based open content websites that showcase independent music along the lines of the way Indymedia has created online space for activists to report their own news (3). Each site could include:
- features on non-corporate bands, venues, labels etc
- an open-publishing 'music-wire' down the right-hand side of the page which artists could use to announce the release of a single, tour dates or any other news about their activities
- links to music hosting sites like Jamendo.com and GarageBand.com, with info on the artist and how to donate to them or buy their recordings. Artists put their songs and their artist info into these hosting sites for music fans and even radio stations to download for their playlists.
- ideally those archives would also be linked to some of the popular file-sharing networks, especially using open protocols like Bittorrent, in which downloaders automatically help share the file with each other, reducing the drain on the hosting server (4).
- advice of encoding and playing media using .ogg formats developed by Xiph.org (5).

Another part of the concept is for each local site to be affiliated to a non-profit community recording facility - an Independent Sound Centre - where the music can be produced, converted to .ogg and audio CDs made, recycled cardboard cases and slicks made etc. This facility could also involve video artists making music videos, uploading to hosts like OurMedia.org and Revver.com and burning them to DVD. The Independent Sound Centres could fund themselves by burning and selling compilations and albums of each other's local artists. The freedom to copy and sell songs could be communicated in a 'copyleft' license that would mirror the way open source software licenses guarantee the freedom of anyone to distribute the content gratis (free of charge), or for a fee negotiated with the buyer (6).

A network built around the websites and Sound Centres could also help bands tour, providing accomodation and help with finding venues, support bands etc. If the costs and stress of touring can be reduced to the point that playing live becomes a viable and enjoyable living for artists, the pressure to get signed and shift units would be removed. Then artists can celebrate the fact that fans anywhere in the world can download their music free or buy it cheap from their local Sound Centre, rather than cursing file-sharing and home burning.

If the level of freedom in a suposedly democratic society can be guaged by looking at the independence of its artists, journalists and historians, from institutions of economic and political power, then we have a lot of work to do before we can presume to call ourselves a free people.

References:
(1) See Steve Albini's classic essay on how corporate labels screw artists:
www.negativland.com/albini.html
(2) The Electronic Frontiers Foundation have responded to the RIAA's tactic of suing people for peer-to-peer file-sharing, with proposals for compensation of artists and decriminalisation of sharing: see www.eff.org/share/compensation.php and
www.eff.org/share/legal.php
(3) See www.indymedia.org/ and www.indymedia.org.nz/
(4) See www.bittorrent.org/protocol.html
(5) These patent-free file formats include:
- Ogg Vorbis (lossy compression equivalent to .mp3) - www.vorbis.com/
- Ogg FLAC (CD quality compression) - flac.sourceforge.net/
- Ogg Theora (for video) - theora.org/
(6) The CreativeCommons licenses are already being used by musicians who want their music to be digitally shared - see www.creativecommons.org/audio