The Voxtrot Kid: Apology and the New Music Business

The Voxtrot Kid has an "Apology" for a previous post about the impact on the internet and leaked music and snapshot criticism.

The previous post, which was really long, included this:

The internet is fickle. Everything is disposable. Everything is fleeting. The internet is a very dark place to be. Everybody's a fucking authority and everybody knows better than everybody else. You (I am now going to use "you" in a general sense, though I realize that it does not necessarily apply to the reader) may think that you deserve to be able to download an album at no cost, store it in your iPod, pass your particular judgement, and then immediately dispose of it or hype it at will, but you actually don't deserve that. Sorry if I sound a bit critical, but I guess that, at this point, I'm not talking so much about Voxtrot specifically as I am about the relationship that every band is forced to maintain with the internet.

Honestly, this is something about which we all worry.

I was in a meeting tonight where we openly acknowledged that the album we are all so concerned about is just a marketing tool, rather than the product itself, in terms of how the band will make money.

The band is striving to make an amazing album, and the work they've done with the producer in pre-production has been wonderful (so I have heard, they are not actually letting me hear the tracks yet, only the acoustic demos).

But, we know that, most likely, the album will be leaked and traded, that people will buy singles rather than the whole disc, and that the album's success will be due in large part to music bloggers who may decide to embrace or disdain, after a few listens, what the band has spent months creating.

I commented a few weeks ago on Idolator that blogs are the new record store -- the place where we go to hear about new music we should buy.

Buying music is part of the social contract. The artists create; we buy.