time for ranting…

yesterday i had a look at the e-book-preview-thing of the indie-band-survival-guide and again the long tail was mentioned. i’m not explaining what it is, check out the link if you haven’t heard about this yet. now, i just spent the last 2 hours or so over at reverbnation because i thought about writing a blog post with just recommendations of cool new music i found online. but you know what? i didn’t find a single song i’d like to point you to. there was just one (!) tune that made me think “hey, that’s different” – unfortunately, it sucked….in a way that i do believe it was meant as something mainstream and just put into practice very poorly. everything else was just standard. don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with mainstream. i mean, hey, it’s the main stream… but i didn’t want to recommend something to you that you’re already hearing all the time anyway. something you get automatically as soon as you turn on whatever media it is you use. i wanted to recommend something different, that’s what i’m trying to get across here…

2 hours without finding something freaky. wow, now that was a  waste of time. so where is this long tail? where are all the artists that aren’t into making what everyone else makes and now, for the first time, have the chance to get it to the people? where are they? all this time before the internet worked its magic, the only way to get your music out there was through the major labels. well, there were independent labels of course but their possibilities were very limited. but now everything’s possible! every creation, no matter how strange or weird it may be – no matter how far from mainstream it may be – no matter if there’s only one single person on this planet who might like it, it’s possible to get it out there. ain’t that great?

so i ask again: where are they? why the hell couldn’t i find one single out-of-the-ordinary tune? not one! i searched in genres, from ‘jazz’ to ‘experimental’ to ‘other’, i searched in areas, i just let the reverbradio play randomly – which turned out to be more like a skip-marathon for me, but nothing worked.

i really, deeply hope that this was either just me being unable to find what i was looking for although it is out there or just bad luck when it came to the random-party. because if our answer to endless possibilities is that lame, if our answer to the fact that we can now, for the first time, make whatever music we desire, without having to care if it’s mainstream enough… if our answer to this is: “AWESOME! LET’S DO MAINSTREAM!!!” then our species just doesn’t deserve to exist any longer.