Independent Label Fest Comes Up Lame
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Why, indeed? The music business is overcrowded. Flip through thousands of CDs by bands you’ve never heard of at any record store, particularly in the cut-out bins, and it’s clear that there’s a serious glut in the market. As for rock-biz confabs, there are already two huge ones–CMJ, in New York, and Austin’s South by Southwest–and the death of the original, New York’s New Music Seminar, would seem to indicate that the industry can’t support many more.
No convention is better than its band showcases. Most of the business happens in the nightclubs, not in panels. Judging by the high concentration of club owners, booking agents, publicists, and media types that descend on these conferences, the need to create a word-of-mouth buzz about young signed bands or veterans with a new album now drives these events at least as much as hopes of discovering unsigned acts. To be taken seriously by the industry, convention organizers have had to attract major acts. SXSW was instrumental in fomenting a True Believers reunion a few years ago, and last year CMJ organizers got a rare Brian Wilson performance. CMJ has thrived because its organizers go out of their way to program exciting music, including many European acts making American debuts. The ILF has somehow failed to attract even the city’s more interesting bands–Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Red Red Meat–much less its most popular. Festival literature claims Veruca Salt, Triple Fast Action, and the Wesley Willis Fiasco as success stories. But these bands attracted significant attention that had nothing to do with the ILF, and none seems to have benefited from the sort of lessons taught in its panels. The Fiasco has seemingly disintegrated; Triple Fast has foundered; and unless their next album extracts them from creeping anonymity, Veruca Salt will earn blip-of-fame status at best.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photograph of Leo Lastre (captioned “Gathering the Flacks”) by Yael Routtenberg.
