Making The World Stable For Indie Labels: A2IM Turns Five
UNION SQUARE, MANHATTAN:Welcome to the indie city. No, we’re not talking about Chicago, but the big — and often scary — habitat that exists for the independent music community.
A2IM, watchdog for independent music
For the times that this place feels more like a jungle, the national NYC-based organization American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) is on hand to help independent labels and artists of every shape and size. When you add it up, that constituency isn’t small potatoes — indie labels represent 30% of the music industry’s market share in the U.S. (38% of digital sales).
The summer of 2010 marks five years for A2IM as a watchdog for independent music, keeping their members advocated, empowered and informed on a host of crucial components to doing business: fair trade, new technology and distribution, access to media, legislation, international, purchasing, new business development, and branding chief among them.
A2IM Vice President Jim Mahoney has a very first-hand understanding of his members. His nearly 20 years in the independent music sector include seven years as President of hip hop label/distributor Fat Beats, preceded by posts with senior posts with Roadrunner Records and Profile Records. For some major insights on what’s facing indies today, the words below are where to go.
You’ve had a diverse musical career. What attracted you to A2IM?
It was a couple of things. First off, I’ve always been interested in how things work, and I have a general distrust that they are as they appear to be when you’re busy doing your daily routine, that there are typically forces at work driving things that most of us aren’t aware of or don’t have time to spend thinking about.
A2IM Vice President, Jim Mahoney
Then I heard about A2IM, and how it’s all about how indies need fair access to markets and a voice in discussions about how the future of the music business would be defined. That spoke to my core: At indie labels I was always looking upward at the mountain, saying, “My God, how will I push this record to the top?” and concerned that despite appearances that digital outlets would create a level playing field for indies, it could easily turn out not to be that way leaving independents in the same bad shape we were back in the old days of big box retail and the tight playlists of FM radio.
So I was interested in the organization, but I’ve also always been skeptical about a “kumbaya-ism” that was more about platitudes and hot air and less about getting things done. Like a lot of people from an indie label background, I’m about a check list. Get things done, and check them off the list.
Then I met A2IM’s president, Rich Bengloff — if you spend two minutes with Rich you don’t imagine that he’s spent any time in a kumbaya circle. He’s a financial type who’s worked at Relativity, Red, Sony, & Elektra, and has a deep knowledge of the industry and, in particular, the financial challenges that indies have faced for 20 years. Everything we discussed was about hanging up real wins for indies, so they’d have a real say about how things progress. He got me fired up and I joined the A2IM staff in March of 2007.
That’s a good start. Why are the goals of A2IM particularly important now, in 2010?
I think we’re important because our members are important. We have over 250 labels members that are important, and about 120 service or solutions providers that are associate members. Indie music and indie labels are tremendously important to our culture, to our economy, to this industry and to music, but unrepresented they are also most likely the people to be left outside of the conversation or, be treated unfairly by people who rely upon music for their own businesses.
A2IM members include Beggars Group, Chrysalis, Concord, Curb, Domino, Epitaph, Ghostly International, Kill Rock Stars, Lookout, Matador and Sub Pop among many others.
According to SoundScan, at 2009 year-end indie music accounted for over 30% of physical sales, and over 38% of digital sales in the U.S. So taking that into account, indies are as big as Universal, but indies aren’t treated with the same care and respect as Universal by music services and would-be commerce partners.
Often that’s because the largest indies are still comparatively small when held up individually against the market share of the majors and, unfortunately, much is decided in our industry not by the quality of the music you can deliver but rather how many masters you can deliver. So indies need a central voice, and we provide that.
We don’t do collective licensing, and as governed by US antitrust laws we do not negotiate terms on behalf of our members, but we are able to engage services that work with music and promote the value and size of independent music and seek fair treatment for our community. Additionally, A2IM is an effective a communications hub. If a new on-demand streaming service enters the market to much hype and misinformation it is not uncommon for concern and paranoia to spread through the indie music industry. A2IM, operating on their behalf, can be seen as a fairly pure source of information – if a message needs to get out to the indie sector, A2IM becomes a fairly important portal.
For labels, I think we provide a voice to Congress, as well as to the RIAA, our major label cousins. So our members have access to that voice, and to any number of educational resources that help them run their businesses better.
Can you tell us a little more about what it means to “provide a voice” for your membership?
A2IM makes itself available to important services that want to work with independent music. So we’ll frequently hold meetings with the MySpaces, Pandoras, and Spotifys, as well as those who don’t necessarily treat independents fairly like YouTube. We’re constantly promoting how beneficial it would be for their businesses to do right by independents and not consider who owns music as the arbiter for what the value of the music is. Black Keys is on a major label and The National is on an independent – The National’s music shouldn’t be treated as less valuable in terms of revenues available to them by virtue of who owns their masters.
On the education side, we do any number of things to educate our members — no matter what the size of their company is, they have an agenda that over-matches their size. They’re overwhelmed, and there are too many people talking about too many things that aren’t making them money right now. They’ll say, “I have an artist on the road, my distributors need information, my staff needs to be motivated…How do I keep up?”
A2IM has a several-pronged strategy for keeping them up to date. There’s a password-protected member Website where members can communicate with one another, and keep up with industry news and happenings. We have volunteer members run chapters in the Pacific Northwest, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Nashville and NYC, and they’ll have events that can be as informal as a bar takeover to a presentation on new media, publishing, licensing, publishing, marketing, from the best and brightest in the industry.
It’s a good wide spectrum and they deal with the issues that are relevant at the time. A presentation about social media dives into the economic side of your plan: You have Facebook, but do you know what drives your friends there back to your Website? Everyone does eBlasts, but when you do it are you looking at the analytics and making it an effective tool?
Who should join up with A2IM that may be reading this and isn’t a member yet?
Our members range from self-releasing artists who are in effect serving as their own labels, to companies like Wind-Up Records, Roadrunner Records, and Curb in the country scene. Large or small, they all control their masters independently, and so they all have a stake in what A2IM is working on and can derive benefits from membership.
So I would say that all independents who are in business should consider joining A2IM. We’re a 100% member dues supported not-for-profit organization so we rely upon membership dues but if you’re not generating income from your music yet, you should still contact me — I want to put you on our mailing list, keep you up to date on issues that are or will be important to you, invite you to our open events where you can meet other independents or commerce partners, and also be able to contact you when we’re working on a legislative issue where your help may be needed in reaching your local congress person. There’s a full-time staff of four here, so call and we’ll answer the phones. Contact us. You should be in the loop as to what’s going on.
If you are in business already, an established indie with some stake in the game, and you want to remain independent, I think there’s a lot of benefits to joining A2IM. For one, you have access to other members through A2IM. Too often indies are an island unto themselves, and A2IM alleviates that — we turn to members to help direct us and our members have the benefit of being able to learn from one another, share general problems and potential solutions…it’s a hazardous landscape out there, no one should have to face it entirely alone. A2IM in our five years has a fairly significant role voice representing indies – I would think you as an indie would want to join so that you have a say in what we’re talking about.
Why is New York City a natural home for A2IM?
There’s a concentration here of indie labels, like very few places. Our offices are here in Union Square, and six blocks North, South, East and West I can bump into 20 or 30 of our members — it seems the only thing I could do to top that would be to be located in DUMBO (laughs).
So there’s a big concentration of indie labels. Being that close and in personal contact, and literally having one to two hundred music executives that we can gather regularly — that’s valuable. When you’re talking face-to-face with somebody, you get a different perspective on an issue and you go back to work educated and thinking about something you just wouldn’t have come up with on your own. That’s the biggest benefit to those indies operating in NYC.
Good for us at SonicScoop to hear! Anything else you want to add?
I said it earlier, but my message whenever I talk to somebody is, “Please be in touch.” Let me add you to our mailing list. I know you’re busy, but read some of our material because it really is important. If you’re just trying to sell downloads and little round discs these days, you’re not going to stick around: You need to maximize your repertoire whether its performance royalties, building direct-to-fan businesses, or building up your artists and your audience. These are the things that we work on nonstop.
— David Weiss
