Music and the New Media..Good or bad?

Rewind to the 90's....There never used to be systems in place in order to allow practicing musicians to easily make their music accessible in the public domain. The only available outlets were radio and television and, unless you chased record label executives around trying to be noticed, these were incredibly tough to access.

Now, we see around us a wealth of new websites and programs onto which musicians can upload their music. Social networking utilities such as Myspace (www.myspace.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com) allow anyone with a recorded "demo" to upload their music in a public domain where there is a potential listener base of millions of people worldwide.

After doing a google search for "South Africa music upload" I found a South African example of these called "Music Industry Online" (http://www.mio.co.za/forums/index.php?showtopic=12348). The fact that I could find a random example within 5 seconds of undertaking the search, is indicative of how popular and numerous these websites are.

I cannot help but worry however. It is very clearly good that musicians have these systems of disseminating their music but what controls are in place? Anyone can upload anything but, at the end of the day, without the assistance of a producer (who would bring out a music group's full potential), who is to say that everything uploaded is "good" (for a given meaning of the word) enough? This, while being a concern of mine, is only the beginning.

My above concern is coumpounded where the internet has become saturated with thousands of these independent bands all seeking to "make it big." So now the issue at hand is that while being difficult to find any one band to support due to sheer numbers, the good bands are also hidden by the wealth of average or substandard ones. How are record executives expected to find the good bands under these circumstances?

The great paradox comes in where, to large extents, artists need to follow the approach of the past and perform live, hand out fliers and put posters up everywhere. Although, of course, in these situations, artists can promote the web addresses which feature the music and tell fans to spread the word.

Are these new systems good or bad? I feel they're good but not as a sole means of marketing artists. Old fashioned band marketing is good but limited, new media representations of artist marketing are efficient but with certain limitations. In my opinion, the "new-school" requires the "old-school" to survive and run efficiently. It is all dependent on the status quo.