What happens if you lock a bunch of friends that have been promoting shows for the past 5+ years?
You would see them scrambling around looking for a new thing to do. And we did just that.
Coming from the DIY roots, we know how organizing shows is hard financially, how we would see the pot at the end of each show, just to see that we’re short.
What we’ve also seen is that the same applies for the bands, on an even more agonizing scale. Especially DIY bands playing for small shows. The other side of the coin is seeing that it is even more outrageous in the streaming landscape. Your favorite musicians are getting paid pennies from your streams.
If the numbers are not enough, much has been said about the exploitative nature of streaming, from Daniel Ek’s borderline offensive statement on how musicians should simply “release more music” to the musicians themselves. DIIV, a relatively “big” band with millions of stream recently stated that “Spotify and most popular streaming platforms rely on exploitative business model that ensures that all but the largest acts are unfairly compensated for their work”
The only acceptable rate is Bandcamp’s, but the platform has some limitations here in Indonesia. Based on our study, we see that the consumer is struggling to pay via paypal. There are some initiatives out there striving to see a middle ground between streaming and owning the digital releases like Bandcamp. But still, we still have a lot to go through before we can achieve said model for growth.
We recognize this situation, and nothing in this industry can work if it weren’t for the DIY bands. Your favorite bands right now had to begin somewhere, and in most cases, it’s down to the DIY scene to lift them. We’ve seen the likes of The Panturas, .feast among many others became very big over the years, raking in thousands for their shows, and they came from pretty much the same roots. They both played on our shows in 2016, when only 30 people watched them, most of them were their friends. So it’s heartbreaking to think that there may be the next Panturas out there but they’re getting discouraged because of the pennies they’re receiving right now. There has to be another way of doing this. Forget being famous and big, the least the industry can do for its core cog is to give them something to get by, to survive financially, without having to lose money constantly.
Thus we made a little something. Introducing our very own storefront, aptly named The Store Front.
So what do we do?
As the name suggests, we put out digital (And soon physical) goods from your favorite artists, you can download your favorite releases at a discounted price (Compared to Bandcamp) and own them. Some of the releases are exclusive or contain some exclusive contents, from digital booklets to posters.
We personally reach out to the labels and artists and offer them to put out their releases here, directly to them, no middle man, no digital distributor. Whatever the price is, we only take 10% of the sales. The lowest cut out there, that’s why we pride ourselves as the most equitable store around. The 10% we receive will be used to pay our servers (Storing digital music really is a pain in the ass, server-wise) and whatever’s left will be used to pay our workers (If any)
This initiative hopefully will provide some alternative, or even provide some additional income for the artists, especially independent ones, that barely break even. We know that owning digital music is kind of an old concept, but we thought it has its own charm, makes you think of the days of Limewire or indieshowbiz for Indonesian internet dwellers looking for obscure music a few years ago.
If you made this far in the article, we assume you’re pretty much on board with this initiative, so here’s how to use the platform:
Pretty simple right? We’re open to anything, from FLAC requests for your purchases to improvement points that you think we should do. So please, reach out to info@noisewhore.com