"Our whole notion was to come into the music business and destroy it".

Chuck D.

In 1998 by releasing a song directly on his website instead of going through his label Def Jam, Chuck D stormed into cyberspace. What shouldn't have been a big deal at the time (finally, it was just one rapper giving out a few songs to a few people), the artist redifined the relationship between a musician and his label, and started changing the whole music industry, maybe for ever.

Until then, labels, and I mean mainly major companies, ruled over the music world for almost a century. The dictated the rules, wrote the contracts, chose the artists, fixed the prices... The only way for an artist to reach a significant audience was to be signed on a label. Internet was going to change that, in many ways.

If Chuck D's attitude did not have a huge consequence at this time, another event would have a much bigger reasonance. On the 1st june 1999, Peter Fanning launched his program Napster. Very soon, millions of people would exchange files (and mainly music files) through the program, and the threat could not be ignored any more by the industry.

If Napster did not last very long in its free version, it stayed long enough to make people realize that music could be consumed in a new way, very different from the one they were used to. Of course, this new way of consuming problem (for free) raised many problems... How could the artists make a living? What would the labels become? What is legal? What is illegal?

One thing was sure, things had to change.

Before exploring the changements that the music industry would have to process to adapt to the new situation, I would like to underline the importance of the labels and the major companies over the bands.

In 1993, Steve Albini, a recognized producer and musician, wrote a very interesting essay called "The problem with music", describing the situation of the music industry at this time, giving some very precise details. He takes the example of a young band signing a supposely interesting contract with a major company.

To underline the details even more, Albini, in his fictionnal story, explains how a band would get in interaction with a company, through an agent who does not really care about the music but thinks about his percentage on the contract.

In the example given, the band would sign for four albums with the label. Of course, every details of the contract are dictated by the company and the band has no word to say. Actually, bands are so afraid not to find a label that they would sign anything.

Steve Albini's imagine that the band would sell 250 000 albums (it's an optimistic scenario), and makes a list of all the costs and incomes produced by the band after the first album and tour. In the end, the label would get 710 000 dollars while each member of the band would make 4031 dollars, with three more albums to release, which will never sell as much.

The whole point of the article is to expose the completely unfair repartition of the money (and of the risk) between an artist and his label.

In my opinion, the biggest improvement with Internet is that the artist can reach his audience without any kind of filter. If the labels, in the 50's and the 60's, were trying to find geniuses to expose their talent to the world, it changed more and more in the 80's when the biggest deal became to find what would sell the most, regardless of the quality.

Of course I am generalizing too much, and independant labels have always existed and have been managed by people who really love music. However, major companies realized very early that it is long and hard to find talented artists while formated bands can sell much more and much faster.

If after the creation of Myspace, many artists did not really realize how they could use Internet in their advantage, some new tools would help them very soon. The most famous one by our days is of course Myspace.

Myspace is a website where everyone (artist or not) can create his own page. An option (Myspace music) allows people to upload some songs so everyone can listen to them. The artist decides if the songs can be downloaded or not. The system here is the same that Chuck D used almost ten years ago, but instead of looking for the website of each band, Myspace centralizes all the pages on the same website and a user just has to find any band on it.

Many artists understood the power of this tool, and used it very well. The most significant one in the late years is probably the Arctic Monkeys.

Originally, this British band had no more arguments than any band of its generation to sell millions of albums. Great Britain right now is famous to have dozens of new bands created every day, a lot of them sound the same and Arctic Monkeys were not espacially better than the other ones.

However, this band understood how to use Internet very well and how to create a huge fan base.

When they started playing around the UK, the band gave away many burnt CD's with a few demos on it, but also their Myspace adress. They built up a big reputation out of themselves without having released anything.

Some journalists reported that thousands of fans were singing the lyrics of all of their songs when they play on a small stage in Reading festival, the next summer. The phenomenon was started. The bands achieved to create hysteria everytime they would put a new song on their Myspace page, but did not officially release many information about a future official release.

When the first single would finally come out, it hit the first place of the charts suddendly.

Then, when the first album came out, it beat the record of selling for a first album in the first week in UK (beating the Beatles / Rolling Stones / Oasis / Spice Girls / Uk version of American Idol).

Arctic Monkeys had proven that Internet could be a strenght and not a threat for the music industry.

Now I would like to say that some other bands decided to use Internet in a different way, not only to sell many albums.

Finally, when we look at it carefully, the Arctic Monkeys are signed on a label, they probably did not manage to use Internet by themselves and they sold millions of albums, which is not so different from the "old" system, Internet only being a new platform for advertising. They only followed a smart promotion plan which worked well.

Other bands followed that direction and came out of Myspace the same way (Clap your hands say yeah was another example).

However, some artists saw in Internet an opportunity to give out some music for free, just because it was the way they saw the music.

In 2003, a band from New York called Liars decided to upload their whole new album on their website, and to allow people to download it for free. At the same time, the album was being released normally through a label. Many people did not understand this behaviour and talked about a "commercial suicide".

The band simply explained that their music is for everyone and that if someone just want to download, listen and discover, he's free to do that. Of course, this must have happened a lot for some "little" bands, but the fact was surprising at the time because Liars were gaining more and more popularity and they did that without asking anything to their label. Bands who did that before simply did not have any labels and for some of them, it was the only way to distribute music.

Another interesting use of Internet that I noticed came from a British band called Six.by.Seven. This band released a few albums through different labels and had a decent recognition through Europe (I don't think they exist anymore). At one point, they wanted to release a single but the label did not support them. The band simply decided to upload the single song, the b-side and the artwork, so people could download everything, as if it was released. The only thing was that they asked to the fan to send them the amount of money that they wanted.

I think that this is a very interesting process.

The picture of the "new music industry" that I just gave is obviously a bit too optimistic, and everyone would argue that if Internet was such an advance, the music industry would not be talking about a crisis.

While redefining the rules of relationships between bands and labels, Internet had a very bad effect on a big part of the music world : record stores.

It would be a lie from myself to deny that record stores are not suffering from Internet. I saw two sad examples of the influence of Internet on record stores very recently in Minneaolis, very close to where I live. In Dinkytown, two record stores were in the same street, on two different blocks, and they both closed in the few last months. One of them, CD Warehouse, had a message on its door to explain its situation. The tone was very sad, telling people that downloading music on Internet affected real people in real life, and that the closing of this store was an example.

The next day, I read a very interesting article in the Minnesota daily, where some students were interviewed about these closings, and what they thought about it. What I read made me very sad : absolutely all the students said that did not even know that some record stores were there and that anyway, they did not buy music anymore.

I found online another article in which someone explains that the record stores are a tradition for many people and that seeing them close made him sad.

Now I would like to talk about a totally different aspect of the music industry that has been completely changed by Internet : the music press.

For years, a few magazines dictated what was worth being listened to and many people kept complaining (especially in France) that critics were often to close to some artists and that they would not discover any bands.

The situation of the music press in France is actually still very alarming. The most famous music magazine : Rock'n'Folk, is often accused of trying to impose bands with which they are closely related. We can make a parallel with the way labels chose their bands lately : not choosing the talent but the interests.

Internet allowed everyone to create his own website and to put some record critics on it. Until now, nothing sounds very extraordinary. However, an American website is currently frightening a whole part of the musical press because of the importance it took. The very interesting article "The Pitchfork effect" narrates the ascension of a small webzine which became one of the most important voice of the independant music.

In a French interview of Liars, I read that the band gave its whole attention to the grade they would get in Pitchfork, and that their whole future would depend on it. When they finally got a very high grade, they knew that their tour would be sold out and that they would sell a lot of records.

This really resumes the importance that a small webzine took online today.

Pitchforkmedia now runs its own festival where bands rarely refuse to play, and which sells out every year in Chicago.

Internet played a very interesting role here. Being bored of being mislead (according to him) by some incompetent journalists, someone decided to publish his own opinion, and he managed to be heard from the whole industry.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Internet had a huge impact on the music industry, and made a revolution into it. This impact can be seen as benefic or catastrophic depending on the point of view. For sure, Internet cannot make everyone happy, and someone has to lost the game.

If  I agree to say that some music lovers has been very hardly touched by the consequences of Internet (I am thinking of the record stores owners), I think that the biggest losers with Internet are people who used to make a lot of money not because of their talent.

On the other side, musicians can now reach a wider audience, even if that does not mean that they will be able to make a living out of it.

Personnally, I think that Internet had a big benefit on the music industry : it reminded to the world that music was not originally a business, but art.