I keep reading how the music industry killed the CD and now nobody on the Web can sell anything longer than a three-minute download. How odd. I sell music–on some days, I believe, more of a given CD than any single store in the country, including Amazon.com–and I do it from a Web site that never has more than 7,000 visitors a day. Even stranger, I sell music without really trying.
This is not the music you see reviewed in glossy magazines. Nor are the books and DVDs I praise. On HeadButler.com, I’m interested in the eternally great and often overlooked, not the just-launched and excessively hyped: writers like Jean Rhys and Brad Kessler; musicians like Ann Peebles and C.C. Adcock; and films like “L’Atalante” and “In America.” Happily, there’s no sell-by date on the Long Tail of the Internet; a 1930 Jean Rhys novel is as easy to find as C.C. Adcock’s post-millennial swamp rock.
At launch, I put a “to buy from Amazon.com” link at the bottom of each recommendation. But I never expected my site to be a moneymaker, so I ignored my daily Amazon sales reports for months. Then my first royalty check arrived–and I hurried to Amazon to discover that, although I mostly reviewed books, I was selling a steady stream of CDs.
And what I was selling was revealing. My endorsements of most recent rock CDs left readers unmoved. But when I praised a classic–like Van Morrison’s l968 “Astral Weeks”–it became a consistent seller. So did American roots music: Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller. And world music: Cesaria Evora, Radio Tarifa, Andy Palacio. And some jazz, some classical. In short, music in niches.
That’s a lot of great music, but even with promotion, very little of it will sell in large numbers. How do I know? Last fall, NPR asked me, as Head Butler, to be an occasional contributor to the weekend edition of “All Things Considered.” One of the first CDs I praised was “Dimanche à Bamako,” a 2005 release by Amadou & Mariam. Few know them, with good reason. They’re from Mali. They sing mostly in French. They’re blind. And they rarely tour. HeadButler.com readers bought 70 copies of their CD; after I raved about them on radio, 700 listeners bought it.
An Amazon check for my cut of those 770 CDs may be sweet for a little concierge site like mine, but with NPR’s global power in the mix, sales at this level represent more terrible news for the big record companies. Consider: When a Head Butler recommendation on NPR can take Noirin Ni Riain, the cult Irish singer, from No. 48,000 on Amazon.com to No. 14 in a few hours–on just 260 CDs–you know that nothing’s selling in massive quantities.
James Q. Wilson, professor emeritus at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, once remarked that organizations tend to have the same internal structure and characteristics as their primary competitors. When the competition in the music business was between successful giants, that was fine. But now the competition is between a few large corporations on one side and a galaxy of small labels and sole proprietors–unsigned bands with MySpace presence and MBA thinking–on the other.
This David vs. Goliath drama is the most familiar story of the last half-century–it’s the story of asymmetric warfare. It starts with the mighty French being forced out of Vietnam, continues with the French losing their Algerian colony and segues into the American defeat in Vietnam.
As for Iraq, in the summer of 2003, the Defense Department screened “The Battle of Algiers,” the Gillo Pontecorvo film that shows exactly how the National Liberation Front–a small group of revolutionaries divided into “cells” of three–was able to organize a revolt that defied and then paralyzed the French army. The Pentagon audience couldn’t have missed the lessons. Even if you kill a rebel leader, another one immediately takes his place. And, most to the point, an army of occupation can never win.
EMI is not Iraq. But the tide of history is running against the large record companies as surely as history is showing that people everywhere have a problem with empires. Unless there’s a radical upturn in music sales, the big labels won’t be able to live on what they earn–their business model will take them down.
The big labels can’t be bothered with the likes of me. And yet there are labels that can afford to care about a site that rarely sells 30 CDs a day. Compass Records, out of Nashville. Yep Roc, in North Carolina. Cumbancha, in Vermont. And the “giant” of the group: Putumayo. Plus dozens of sole proprietors who do everything from making the music to licking the stamps.
“Little man whip a big man every time if the little man is in the right and keeps on coming”–that’s the motto of the Texas Rangers. We tend to dismiss that as romantic, nostalgic, inoperative. In fact, it could be the summary of recent world history. And of the American music business.
Small can now compete with big–can surpass big–because, more and more, the key to selling music that delivers real and deep pleasure is not to sell it. People don’t want to be sold; they’ve been burned too often by “must have” CDs with only one good song. Instead, they want to be told. They want the story of the CD and a profile of the creator; they want to know why they should buy more than one song. That’s a civilized conversation. That’s old-fashioned “hand selling.”
There’s nothing magical about this. It’s in the American tradition of the knowledgeable enthusiast, more motivated by love than money, carving out a niche in his community. It’s about high standards and low profits. And then it’s about seizing opportunities.
It’s not a total solution, but I submit that the big music labels would do well to break themselves up into many small companies that, like the tiny cells of “The Battle of Algiers,” have absolute responsibility for a handful of musicians. And then those splinters of the former giants should cozy up to boutiques like mine and do the thing that the industry currently resists–sell music to one listener at a time.
