(re-titled/re-edited/posted again for [even more]clarity)
Comments by Hannah Pool in the Guardian. Reynolds linked this a few days ago.
The last boom for black British music was when the UK garage scene exploded at the turn of the millennium. But it didn’t make enough money quickly enough, so the A&R men went elsewhere . . . And then, of course, there is the download factor. The same technology that has spawned a thousand mix tapes also means people have stopped buying music in the quantities they used to. In these download-friendly times, indie fans are the best kind to have. They buy records, they show up at grotty pubs and they pay extortionate amounts to wade in mud to see their bands play at festivals.
“Indie kids want to own their music: they go to gigs and festivals,” says Shabs Jobanputra, MD at Relentless Records, which has sold over three million records, including So Solid Crew’s Brit award-winning 21 Seconds and Artful Dodger’s first release, Re-Rewind. “Urban consumers don’t go to festivals; it’s not about living on a housing estate in Clapton and going to Glastonbury. Touring doesn’t have the same value in black music.”
[snip]But indie music’s tradition of festivals, gigging and the loyalty it creates means it hasn’t been hit as hard by downloading and file-sharing. Meanwhile, black music fans’ objection to acts selling out – once an underground track or artist goes mainstream, they lose their credibility and a large part of their fan base – leaves it wide open, with nothing to keep it going in these lean times.
I confess I’d never looked at downloading and P2P in this way before, but obviously the collecting and importance of sleeve art aesthetics and ‘owning’ the music is a resolutely White, middle class and rockist tradition. Rockist insofar as ownership invokes ‘authenticity’ and all those laudable traits of ‘supporting the [credible, and thus starving] artist’.
There seems to be surprisingly little on this in the usual places – on genre differentiation amongst file sharing – although there is one study that does examine the impact of heterogeneity.
