Independent Musicians Research

Here is a post taken from Connor's blog:

During today's lesson, me and Arran went into some research on independent musicians and focused on what 'Indie' music actually is and how they distribute their music to the audience through digital copies and solid copies like Vinyls, CD's etc. 

Through the use of a helpful website called Bandcamp, we were able to discover a wide range of Indie artists and research their music to see how they present themselves to their audience as an independent artist. 

Funny enough, during research on the genre 'indie' me and Arran discovered that the word 'Indie' is actually another word for labeling someone as 'independent' as in someone who does everything themselves for the music which includes album artwork, record labels etc. Through discovering this, I have now come to realize that Indie is used in conjunction with another genre like rock to tell the audience that the audience basically did everything themselves. This can tell you a lot about how different an independent artist is compared to other artists that are partnered with large music companies like the big three.  

Going back onto the Bandcamp website, we discovered many artists from different genres that were all a good example of what an independent artist is. Some of these artists were called Hardwicke Circus, Barstow Bats, Sarah Grace, luciensghost. These all came from very different genres and were all on Band camp presenting their music, through Bandcamp they were able to advertise their albums, merchandise and artwork for anyone to view. Discovering this has shown how important small companies like Bandcamp are with getting independent artists the publicity and views they need from the audience in order to become successful. Having Bandcamp enabling independent artists to sell their merchandise directly online is also counted as a very important benefit in my opinion as having a good income can allow the artist to expand faster and expanding is a very important part when starting a music career.

I think the research that Connor and Arran found here will be very useful as we are promoting an independent band so could also use some of the websites discussed in the post. So overall we can use this information found to help promote our local band as it looks cheap and easy to use yet still enables a large scale target audience.