thebooksmusic:

Finding a home for this record was a pain in the ass. Everyone I’ve played it for says it’s our best, most daring record yet, and still, all of the labels we admired that we thought would go for it wouldn’t touch it. Our former label Tomlab was not an option since we felt we needed better representation in North America, and it would have been nice to have been paid royalties without a fight for the past five years, although we can’t blame Tom personally for that… music sales are low and getting lower, of course, and the first streams to dry out are the cash flows of small labels. There were a number of sparks of support from key members of ‘major indie’ labels and our conversations with them were very promising, until we would find out after weeks of silence that it wasn’t going to happen. The story we kept hearing was as fascinating as it was disappointing… “our label is run by a democratic process and everyone on the team has to be on board for us to commit to a new artist.” Makes sense, superficially… everyone loves democracy, but the more i thought about it, the more i realized that that sounds like the perfect recipe for the homogenization of music. i don’t know any two people who agree about music, let alone a whole group of them, and at any rate, people who agree about everything are certainly not our target audience. So it’s probably for the best they won’t work with us.

This is probably the best description I’ve read of the “talking to labels about maybe getting signed” process. It’s a mystical thing, and it’s interesting to hear someone else’s experience with it. I actually think consensus makes sense if you’re trying to get the entire company behind something, and a bunch of creative people with differing opinions can still end up signing some truly weird stuff, and — perhaps more to the point of the above post — not signing some totally palatable MOR indie fare. But I can see where these guys are coming from, and it sounds like we’ve been on the receiving end of some pretty similar, occasionally frustrating emails.

This also functions as a pretty good State of the Indie Nation, at least in regards to independent record labels and the way bands experience them. From here, the band (The Books) considers self-releasing, and ends up going with a small label (Temporary Residence) basically just because they really like the guy behind it. All the bases are covered, from big indies to good and bad little indies, to no label at all.

Also, the guys in The Books sound like really cool people, which is absolutely not at all surprising. Their music radiates thoughtful decency and, as they put it later on in this post, “emotional intelligence.” Now their blog can do the same.