I’m Doing It For The Scene Maaan

I’ve been making music in various underground music scenes for the past ten years now. I’ve enjoyed it a lot. Generally you find great people in underground music scenes, people with a lot of passion and dedication who truly love music. When people are able to strike a balance between their underground aesthetic and being organized, special stuff can happen. But there are many times when people can’t strike that balance. One of the ideas that I’ve run into again and again in this world is the idea of ‘doing it for the scene’. On one level this is a very respectable idea: doing something not out of self interest, but to benefit the larger musical community. The problem I’ve encountered with this is that taken too far this can seriously undermine one’s ability to continue to function.

For example, let’s say hypothetically you are a small record distributor. You do it because you believe in the music, you want to support emerging artists and labels and you don’t care about money. You set up shop, take product on consignment from any unknown player with a willingness to press their material and start doing business. Consignment is when you take product before paying for it, warehouse it and pay when it sells. You continue to operate on this basis but because you have so many unheard of records released by labels with no business model or capability to promote them, sales are slow. Eventually, basic costs start to add up. The rent on your office is due every month. The bill for your shipping provider is rising. Eventually there comes a time when you have backed yourself into a corner. Nothing is selling and while you were hoping for an improvement you passed the point of no return. The shipping company has cut off your access to shipping because your owed bill is so high. Your landlord is initiating eviction proceedings against your office where you warehouse your product.

You’ve heard of when keeping it real goes wrong? This is when doing it for the scene goes wrong. Now as a distributor you can no longer ship product, you’re finished. You can’t even ship your paid orders. Relationships are damaged, credibility is eroded, your company implodes. You do not have money to pay for the records you didn’t sell on consignment nor do you have the ability to ship them back to the people who gave them to you. The ripple effect begins. If these small labels are not funded by trust-funds they are counting on your timely payment to reinvest in the business and press their second release. Without their money or product returned, they are stuck. Unless they can find their initial capital again to make a new record, they are finished. Without the ability to release, the artists on that label’s music withers on the vine and their careers don’t develop. A grim picture. Feel free to change the variables and apply this to a party promoter who loses money and can’t pay his artists. What’s the point?

The point is that this disaster could be averted by focusing on profitability early on. The message is sustainability, self sufficiency and self reliance. By making sure that the activities that you are doing are profitable in a small (or large) way or at the very least break even and don’t lose money, your institution can continue to exist. Doing it for the scene does not help the scene when you cannot sustain your activity. I am a musician and have experienced this in music so am using this example but clearly there are other examples to be found, like for example the charity funded hospital in a developing country that replaces the normal hospital and then ceases to exist when the endowment for that charity is destroyed by a stock market crash. Everyone is safer when basic economic or resource sustainability is factored in. This does not just apply to money but time as well. I’ve seen many people burn out by thinking that their labor is free and working themselves to exhaustion without seeing a return. Your own labor is not free, in fact it is the most valuable resource you have. Don’t exploit yourself. If you can create an institution that helps people in a small way and provides for itself thereby allowing itself to continue to exist that is much more helpful than an institution that helps people a great deal but is un-sustainable and disappears suddenly because it couldn’t support itself.

Unfortunately, the business of selling recordings being what it is we’ve seen many more of the unhappy stories in recent years than the happy ones. The cushion of when you can press almost anything and a certain number of compulsive collectors would just buy it is over. Now margins are razor thin, or non-existent and so we all have to think very carefully about the ways we’re doing business. Do you have an experience like this or a lesson we can take from this? I’d love to hear people’s stories of dealing with this problem, even if you disagree I think a discussion about ways of dealing with these questions would be helpful for everyone. What do you think?