The biggest problem in the music business today is oversaturation. In an age where everyone can record with ProTools, design their album cover online and buy decent instruments for just a few hundred bucks, it’s unsurprising that there’s more music coming out than ever before. The issue, of course, is that not all of this music is good. It’s especially rare for people to realize when their own music isn’t good — it’s a hard thing to come to terms with after all. What this means is that now, more than ever, we have a disproportionate amount of bands trying to ‘ma it’ which leads to an issue where none of the engines that traditionally drive independent music work for anybody. It’s an important topic to get your head around, so in this article, I’m going to break down how oversaturation in the market negatively impacts show bookings, press placements, merch sales, and online interactions. My issue is not with people creating a bunch of music, but rather people trying to go too far, too fast and thus negatively impacting their scene as a whole.
Shows
This is the most obvious area in which market oversaturation has negatively impacted the scene. We live in a world in which ‘promoters’ — are all too happy to tell noobie bands that all they need to do is find the other bands to fill out the bill. Bands who themselves have no business touring hitting the road have become a common fixture. Now there’s nothing wrong with hustling, but if you can’t even draw twenty people at home, do you really think that people in a town five hundred miles away are going to want to see you for any damn reason at all? This is the thing that frustrates me the most in music – bands are going on tour when there’s no conceivable reason for them to be going out. Fans can’t attend the number of shows going on in a given night. Even small cities in the US now have two or three shows per night, all of which fail to draw a crowd. It suffices to say that frequently, it means that touring isn’t a glorious adventure but instead a nihilistic competition.
Press
There’s five or six major metal publications in the US. Combined, those five or six can run about sixty to seventy-five articles on smaller bands every week. This is fine when there’s only a few dozen releases every few days – but in these times, it’s not uncommon to have upwards of a hundred releases promoted in any given week. It means that suddenly, there’s a ton of releases that just aren’t going to get coverage on the big boys. This is fine, but again — if you’re part of that lower tier of bands, you really need to understand this and have a frank conversation with your PR person. So often, bands get upset when their first release doesn’t get covered by one of the major publications. The issue is that frequently, they don’t have the time to cover a lot of this stuff!
Merch
I always like to propose this hypothetical: the metal scene is essentially driven by a select group of people who go to at least five shows a month and spend upwards of $200 a month on merch. There can only be so many of those people in a given city. Well, out of those people, only so many can be at a show on a given night, especially in a scene that is increasingly oversaturated with shows. A major effect of this is that merch sales across the board are diminished. As an independent band, your option here is basically to step it up so people actually want to support you and to put together merch that begs to be bought. Yet as we live in a world where every metal fan has more black t-shirts than they know what to do with, you need some seriously outside-the-box thinking to combat the bleak reality that in fact, the reason why most bands’ sales are under attack is because there are simply too many bands trying to do it.
Online engagement
This point seems a little less obvious, especially since people are admittedly spending more time on social media than ever before. However, the oversaturation of bands means that if you aren’t posting every day, people are simply going to forget about you. There’s something called the ‘advertising rule of sevens’ – people need to see whatever you’re selling seven times before they buy it. As a result, you constantly need to be pushing yourself out there. I know that this can be tricky, but as I said — it’s the bleak reality. We all engage with hundreds of posts a day, and thus the onus is on you more than ever to create compelling content that people are going to want to spend time with. Otherwise, your engagement is just going to fall and everything else we discussed in this article will crumble alongside it.
I am aware that I sound somewhat like an angry old man in this article, but I just wanted to make y’all aware of the consequences of oversaturation. We didn’t even get into things like labels and agents, who at this point are so overwhelmed with requests that it’s almost not even worth discussing. They’re going to come to you these days – not you to them. So, if you can embrace the fact that there are too goddamn many bands out there making life difficult for the industry to function properly, then you might start to get somewhere. Embrace the oversaturation and try to grow with it in mind — if you’re thoughtful and operate with intent it should be easy!
MATT BACON
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Matt Bacon is a consultant, A&R man, and journalist specializing in the world of heavy metal. Having worked with everyone from Glam Rock icon Phil Collen of Def Leppard, to post Black Metal titans Alcest, by way of legendary thrashers Exhorder as well as labels including Prophecy Productions and Ripple Music, he has dedicated his life to helping young bands develop. Having started his own blog at the age of 14 he views his career in artist development as ‘a hobby that got out of hand’. In 2015 he formed Dropout Media in order to better support the artists he loves. We sit here now, years later with countless tours booked, records released and deals signed, and loving every minute of it.
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