I've been thinking alot these days about the music industry and have come up with this scenario.
Something to think about, don't drop the hammer down on me yet. The Muggs have 79,000+ fans on Myspace now and have alot of faithful fans locally and in Europe and Australia as well.
Many times a week it seems, I'll get emails saying, "Wow! Great stuff guys. You should come to Colorado, or L.A. or Austin or even Spain." Why aren't you touring?
Let me tell you why it is we cannot: It has become common practice that everybody rips, burns, dare I say 'steals' music from everywhere they can get it. I'm an offender as well.
But what it has done is pulled money away from labels. So what right? I thought so too until I thought of the ramifications to our band.
Because everyone 'shares' music now, there is no money for a band like the Muggs to get signed because labels have no money either nowadays, thus there is no tour support anymore.
A band like the Muggs, cannot tour for 6 weeks which was protocol 10 years ago without tour support from a label. Without tour support, most bands come back even or in the hole. Sure, they made some new fans but so what, when those new fans are gonna rip the LP for free.
The only solution I see is we as a music culture have to start paying for music again, supporting local bands, who by the way are mostly independent bands nowadays. Scraping money up to create LP's themselves.
If every Muggs fan bought one cd, we wouldn't need a label, we could survive mightily touring 8 months each year and giving Muggs fans quality LP after LP with our own money.
You could argue that a band like Metallica is rich and you then justify yer actions. So did I but the bottom line is it hurts bands like us more because of the trickle-down-effect.
Because labels cannot make money off cd sales anymore, they've stopped signing bands altogether or bands get roped in to what's called 360 deals, where the label gets a % of cd sales, touring and merch. This is horrible for bands. Because everyone shares music across the board, it has become impossible for smaller, popular bands to break out of their city even though there is a demand for it.
So the bands that suffer the most are budding local bands that can't afford to break out or they try and are successful but have no money at the end of the day to show for it. And that leads me to believe that this is why so many people are bored to death with the radio.
There hasn't been a creative musical movement since Grunge in the early to mid 90's. Nowadays it's 90% tripe and 10% good acts on the radio. I hear people complain about it everyday. No one listens to contemporary radio because their fed up with mediocrity and formulic b.s. I am speaking in generalities of course. Stations like WRIF, WCSX, 89X and the River do what they can to help out local bands. It's not even their fault really. Those stations are owned by Clear Channel.
But it all comes back to us people. I believe we have shot ourselves in the foot with this one. Bottom line, start paying for cd's, downloads and vinyl. It will make local record stores vital again and bring more talent to the world overall.
Anyways, feel free to chime in, wail away, but that's how this Mugg, a pragmatist at heart, sees it.
Best, tonymuggs