Things have changed a lot in jazz this year underneath the bonnet if you are a regular listener and in terms of sourcing where you are going to go listen and consume. 

The main one is because musicians have seized back the initiative to make their own DIY labels more professional and crucially universally available by the web mainly by using sites such as Bandcamp that have been around for a while but seem at last to provide a better alternative, rather than the large number of specialist sales sites that don’t really serve the purpose musicians want from a label (eg mainly a way to sell their stuff without taking too much time or being too corporate or needing a lot of time spent on it) and are more like mini-Amazons.

As someone interested in hearing the latest jazz preferably at the promo stage or real time release stage it is the first port of call for me now. It has the great advantage too of bypassing professional publicists who distort our perception of the music and cost musicians so much that a lot of Kickstarter campaigns are based around funding publicity costs which often see little return as publicists are not always able to do what they are supposed to do: get column inches.

One upshot of all this is that indie labels like the ‘pro’ non musician-owned single artist ones within the list here aren’t necessarily the curatorial gatekeepers that they used to be. Why? Well musicians typically go to labels because of good distribution and sales potential. Physical distribution for anyone in jazz is hard to achieve. So a good label with a good distributor will get the product out. If a label has a good distributor relationship that is probably their greatest benefit for any musician wishing to achieve modest but regular sales and yet that is not always achieved.

The key problem is the label doesn’t usually pay for recording (only pressing costs and tiny marketing campaigns if at all) so the musician has to invest loads to get the record done and then they only get small sales in the short term not because the music is crap but because the market is small and stuff takes time to sell even with a distributor and label and the label and distributor then take time to pay what they are contracted to.

Without marketing or word of mouth buzz most jazz distributors don’t sell much product anyway because they can’t devote much time to it. OK that lag in payment might be a couple of months or longer but for young musician bandleaders struggling to pay off student loans, invest in buying instruments etc and then having to pay the hefty costs of professional studios and their bandmates’ session fees deep pockets are often needed.

It is far better for a musician to own their label and crucially be able to sell via it themselves. If they can do this by being organised and have a competence for doing it then sites that allow them to sell and get paid quickly a bigger cut is possible.

Before the web running your own label was harder to do because individual musicians could not afford marketing costs so the labels often were very obscure and relied on the post and pressing CDs and vinyl was much more expensive than now.

People can listen to good samples online now before they buy and the listening is a far better free advert than looking at an album pack shot cover without the audio which was all that most buyers could do even in the web a while back before better audio provision for sample listens became more common. SG

Further reading: Click for more on the power of Bandcamp and its huge growth