I ran across a business theory in an audiobook recently. I've been listening to The Omnivore's Dilemma, and at one point the author compares industrial and artisanal business models (in this case, with food production). The general point is that industrial systems create standardized commodities sold at high volume and low margin, while artisanal systems involve individualized products, high margins and lower volumes.

So, of course, I started to think about how this applies to the music business. The comparisons just jump out. The industrial model is the record companies, of course, and the artisanal is the independent musician. Record companies (and the musicians who work with them) try to sell many CDs at low margins; lower for the musician than for the company, of course. Independent musicians keep a lot more of the sale price of the CD, and many act as their own retailer as well, which also helps.

Another quality of industrial models is that they involve specialization. Marketing, promotion, management (booking gigs), and other tasks are all assigned to specialists. Independent musicians often perform many of these tasks on their own, which leads to much lower expenses (and therefore higher margins).

The biggest thing that seems counter-intuitive, however, is commodification. Any industrial process involves taking individual products and making them indistinguishable; it doesn't matter which Ford Focus I drive because they're all identical. This is where any intellectual property will always differ from a manufactured one. I'd argue, however, that the slavish devotion of record companies to a genre system that pigeonholes artists is a pretty close approximation. Whether it's pop, techno, industrial, oldies, new wave, or emo, such labels serve to make music easily digested to an industrial consumer. Bands that aren't easily categorized have a notoriously hard time getting signed to labels, and established bands have heard the devastating phrase "I don't hear a single" and been forced to modify their work.

The point of the original business article that brought all this up is that industrial processes are effective, and artisinal processes are effective, but that when you try and mix the two together you end up with all the inefficiencies of an artisinal process with all the problems associated with an industrial process. So the question is how I, as an independent musician, can maximize my artisinal advantages without succumbing to the difficulties of industrialization.

I'm still working on that part, but it's an interesting question to ponder.