Once upon a time, the major labels controlled the charts absolutely with an iron fist. Radio stations only playlisted tracks from major labels, payola was rife and pluggers knew the station controllers on a first name basis, they were in their offices so frequently.

Today, the major labels control the charts, but independence is slowly making itself felt. Radio stations still really only playlist tracks from major labels, but even with the passing of John Peen there are still some notable torchbearers for new, fresh and independent music (think Zane Lowe et al). Payola? Well, it’s still probably there to an extent, but everybody’s pursestrings have been tightened for a whle now. Pluggers still do the rounds but more artists are embracing the music machine and arranging their own marketing and promotion with the same people.

But what’s changed in twenty years?

To start with, ‘Specialist’ stations like Kerrang Radio (playlisted in the AM and daytime, DJ-chosen in the evenings) are still going strong, and the rise and rise of the Internet has given birth to scores of high-quality, free online radio stations. Online retail, driven by the likes of iTunes, Play, Amazon, Tesco, 7Digital and HMV, continues to take market share (almost 100% of UK single sales are digital, along with a good dollop of albums).

But yet, until this year, the one remaining safe haven for the pop industry – the Christmas Number 1 – had remained unspoilt (for the major labels) since 1998, when the Spice Girls were (within 5,000 sales) almost usurped by Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls. From then onward with little exception, we witnessed manufactured pop song after manufactured pop song, with the SyCo Pop Factory doing its bit for novelty singles and two-week ‘hits’ (up to #1 in the first week of sales, then falling down past #40 within a month). But in November 2009, Jon Morter took the pulse of the music-loving nation and spearheaded an online campaign – to push Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name to the Christmas Number 1 spot. This campaign proved marvellously successful, with RATM easily making the Number 1 spot over Joe X-Factor McElderry’s (cover) single by a margin of more than 50,000 sales.

This grassroots fan campaign, coordinated through Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth, also set a couple of remarkable precedents:

• Killing In The Name is the first UK Number 1 achieved purely from online sales
• the track also achieved the biggest download sales total in a first week ever in the UK charts (more than 500,000 by the cutoff point for that week’s chart’s sales)

How’s that for democracy in action? The pop machine, if only for a week, had a massive spanner thrown in the works. Not only did the X Factor content fail to secure a Number 1 position for its winner, a first since the trend began in 2005, it showed just how much can be done by a galvanised group of passionate fans to promote and support great music (even if it’s twelve years old!) when the means to do so are already in place. Without digital downloads of the track being available, this would have never been achievable.

If your faith in the industry has been shaken over the past few years, with the overall contraction of the market and smaller revenues, hopefully this should restore some faith for you. Getting your music up online on the major hitters is now easier than ever before, and it’s one of the core services we take pride in offering to quality artists. Additional services, like promotion, plugging and tour management, are increasingly accessible to independent artists. There’s still no such thing as a free lunch, but even on a meagre budget, a surprising amount can be organised and put into action.

Through all of this, the single most important aspect of any musician’s career is the fanbase. Today, it’s far simpler than ever before to directly connect with your fans. RATM4Xmas should have proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt, first with Morton ramping up his campaign through Facebook and then with Tom Morello tweeting directly from his Blackberry to the campaign’s supporters (and showing that support to the campaign right to the happy end). Negative comments from Cowell and McElderry were forwarded by campaign supporters and industry publications (NME took delight in reporting that McElderry, upon finally hearing the Rage track for the first time, denounced it as ‘dreadful’). Rival fans duked it out in cyberspace, sales figures and rumours were swapped and spread about and – in the meantime – a large amount of money (over £65,000) was raised for charity by the RATM4Xmas fans.

Upon winning, RATM confirmed that they would donate the majority of their earnings from sales to charity, and also hold a free concert in the UK in 2010 to say thank you – the ultimate payoff for the campaign’s supporters. Would any of this – could any of this – have ever happened before now, before the rise of social networking and all the other simple means of engaging with people en masse? Probably not, not even in the 90s. The web had very little to offer in terms of small-scale communication during the first few years of the 21st century, but instant messengers, MySpace, Friendster and others began an upward trend which has not slowed since.

But irrespective of how well people could have communicated or not – everybody managed with email and texting before AIM and MSN took hold – in the 90s, there was simply a lack of legal digital music venues available for customers. Napster was still reigning supreme, downloading was on the rise and habits were changing incredibly quickly. Portable music players were still very much a novelty.

Today? Digital sales are on an equal footing with the good old polycarbonate CD single. In fact, they have an edge – a band can record a single, have it professionally mastered, given to a record label or digital distributor and available for sale within a month, if they’re in enough of a hurry. A fe years ago, the Official Charts Company granted full permission to digital music to be included in the Top 40, provided that the shops selling the tracks pass on a de minimus “Dealer Price” to the label above a threshold which is set out in the OCC Rulebook. Currently, the Dealer Price is 40p per track for digital singles; this is where some of the confusion arose around the 29p Amazon deal during the RATM4Xmas campaign (the Dealer Price is not the retail price, showing that Amazon was selling this track, and the X Factor track, as a massive loss leader… Shrewd marketing from Amazon as always).

Thanks to some visionary organisations and small groups of intensely creative people, all of the tools an artist needs to be heard are available and free to use – with a small amount of money spent, a web site can be put up, MP3s shared, social networking profiles used to chat directly with fans. Today you can find Radio DJs on national stations busy on Twitter and Facebook, talking directly with listeners and bands before, during and after shows, and bands talking to their fanbases directly, bypassing The Label. At every step, it’s more engaging. Given the right push, and enough support, almost anything can be achieved.

We at Revolver like to think we offer that step up many bands need to find their feet online, navigating the complex maze that is international digital music retail. We handle the paperwork, the legalities and the massive amount of different requirements every digital music store insists upon… And with that headache out of the way, artists can set about doing what they actually love to do (writing music, playing gigs and building their fanbase) in the knowledge that we’re handling the tricky stuff for them.

It’s still a two way street, whatever the circumstances – if you have a fanbase, provided you connect with them and give them a good enough reason to support and promote your work, what you can achieve with very little promotion and marketing (compared to splashy, big budget campaigns) is nothing short of astounding. So next time you’re having doubts, just remember: the music industry’s not dead, it’s just sleeping. Time to help wake it up!

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