The entire industry landscape is changing. If you are interested in the subject I suggest you read The Long Tail. The labels, by nature of their business model, are only interested in hit records. But with the internet at his fingertips, the consumer has been presented with a whole plethora of choices the labels never gave him. And he’s making those choices. People are finding music that appeals to them, but might not appeal to a mass market large enough to interest the major labels. So we see the rise of the independent artist.

I’ll note that both the reasoning and the data on which the Long Tail argument is based have been challenged, but that’s not really my main point here. As a friend of mine pointed out in conversation a couple of days ago, the Long Tail has value to aggregators – the amazon.coms, the iTunes, etc. – but not necessarily to the individual provider. The Long Tail argument says that amazon can make the same amount of money by selling 5 copies each of 50,000 CDs as by selling 250,000 copies of 1 CD, but it doesn’t address the fact that the cost of producing a 5-copy-selling CD isn’t 1/50,000th of the cost of producing a 250,000-copy-selling CD – and in the end, you can’t aggregate what’s not being produced.

I would also note that the wide range of choices presented by the Internet doesn’t necessarily work to the consumer’s benefit. To the knowledgeable consumer’s, perhaps, but the sheer volume of unknown material tends to discourage, rather than encourage exploration. The independent artists who are “rising” are, for the most part, either those who have some marketing angle that, in the end, is based on their appeal not to niche tastes, but to mass ones, or else they’re artists who have succeeded in leveraging “old style,” major label careers. It’s all very well for folks like Janis Ian and Natalie Merchant to tout the virtues of independence, but they didn’t start out as independent artists, and one has to be pretty naive to think that their independent careers aren’t based in large part on fan bases built during their pre-independent years.

And, finally, while concert revenues may be up, where’s the evidence that they’re not concentrated among a relatively small number of big-time artists? Talk to bluegrass artists or promoters, and a lot of them will tell you that things are tougher now than they were a couple of years ago. From a bluegrass perspective, the picture Michael Arrington paints is potentially a very grim one.

On April 3 Rebel will be releasing three albums from their catalog in digital format only (which there is a post on that here on the Bluegrass Blog).

Sorry I couldn’t provide more detail than that, but from a consumer point of view it looks like they are heading in the right direction.

The folks at Smithsonian Folkways are in the midst of an admirable and gargantuan effort to get all of the old Folkways catalog available on CD with special packaging that pays homage to the fabulous old album covers of FW releases. They are doing this, however, having already put all the material up online for digi-download. They have an excellent website and system of getting to this music — folks should check em out if you haven’t yet.

I am not sure what’s holding back other labels from following suit. Maybe it’s the technical infrastructure needing to be designed. It would involve coordination of a number of different areas of the company – finance, royalties, IT/web, audio production, etc… I suppose this is the holdup in many cases.

I don’t know the costs involved with remastering an album entirely, but I would imagine it could be worth their while for labels to release a series aimed squarely at the niche that wants an older, perhaps obscure, album and is willing to get it in digital format.

We see smaller forms of this market on CD with Bear Family and Rhino Handmade and I think it is a market that is waiting to be exploited.

As to your question of how to accomplish putting the music in front of more people, I think one answers lies in the very nature of the Bluegrass genre. With few exceptions, the bulk of Bluegrass artists are independent artists and operate on indie labels. In my mind this puts them in the perfect position for this coming (or arrived) shift in the music industry model because while other genres are scrambling and reeling, we already know how to operate in these waters. The accessibility of Bluegrass artists at shows, the quality of the music and production and the proliferation of small town and regional festivals puts the music in front of many people and because these reasons it will grow.