The Internet has been often touted as being the great distribution medium that finally levels the playing field between indie artists and the major labels. What’s surprising is how many artists aren’t taking advantage of their newfound abilities to reach the public.

The other day I sat down to scope out some new music to feature here at Gigatracks. I figured this time I’d try something a little different in my quest for great new music. I’d start out with one of my local music directories and try to focus on some of the artists that are close by. I open it up and start browsing from artist to artist and I notice something surprising. Very few of these bands have web pages at all! In a college town!

In this day and age of free Myspace accounts and other free digital music repositories like Garageband, Epitonic and forty other sites like them, there is very little excuse not to have some sort of web presence. But giving the benefit of the doubt, maybe they aren’t that interested or maybe they aren’t that web-savvy. But you know what happens in that case for me? NEXT! There went a promotional opportunity for the band and their chance to reach a new LOCAL fan. One who would more than likely have gone out and paid to see them play, and maybe buy a shirt, because I’m kind of a t-shirt junkie.

So, I continue my quest and focus on those bands that do have web sites. I start opening up their different sites and I begin to see a trend that I have seen quite often on many other sites that I have scoped out looking for new music. Artists that have web pages with no music on them. Sure I can read about how three guys met in third grade and wrote a song and “Magic”-(note the capital ‘M’) was immediately felt. My curiosity is peaked, but wait… I can’t actually <b>hear</b> any of this “Magic”. Or let’s not forget the artist that posts a couple of his songs in 30-second snippets. Are you guys trying to get people to listen to your music or not?!? Now I realize that the media and the RIAA have made the Internet seem like it’s the big scary monster just waiting to eat artists and leave them with no music to sell, but as an indie artist, I think you should be focused on getting your music out to anyone who is interested. Not posting it on your website is like putting it in a box and only taking it out every once in a while for a couple of hours and putting it right back under your bed, so to speak. OK, that analogy was a tad strange, but it does seem to sum it up for me, so I’m gonna’ let it slide. To put it another way, it’s like telling someone, “Yes I’m a musician, but I don’t want you to hear me play, and I’d really like for you to be a fan of my music.” That makes absolutely ZERO sense.

And of course, every story has it’s most insane example. I actually found one guy who had his music in wma-(Window Media Audio) that was protected and would only play for 10 days, because you KNOW “Obscure Artist X” has so many problems with his music being traded on EDonkey. He should actually be thrilled if his music was in high demand on EDonkey. It would mean that he was well on his way to dumping his day job.

Anyway, the outcome of all of this was that I simply skipped past these artists and didn’t give them a chance. If they aren’t interested in letting the world hear their music, then why should I be interested in trying to convince you guys to listen to them.

And so we get to the moral of the story. As the old quote goes, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture”. If an artist wants to have their music reach an audience, they’ve got to… well… reach the audience! That means letting people hear them play and sing and hopefully, in doing so they will be finding new fans. Yes the Internet may one day become the great field-leveling tool for artists that it has been hyped to be. But first, artists have got to start with the most basic idea, and that is putting the music in the ears of their audience. (And slightly off-center website review guys)