When DIY went digital (then to Cupertino and Washington)

And we’re back for the final installment of my history of Simple Machines. Check out parts 1 and 2 if you haven’t already. To continue my zig zag through this history, I think I’ll talk about filesharing next?

Oh hey and while you’re here, sign up for the Freq beta. It’s a nice place to hang out and talk about music, developed off the same research I’m covering in this blog.

Throughout the saga of Simple Machines, Kristin Thomson and Jenny Toomey were working from the simple premise that independent music needed good information to run well. 

When they wrapped up the label project in 1998, it wasn’t because they were done with the work of spreading know-how and independent record business sense in their communities. It’s because they were endlessly creative in the pursuit of helping working musicians thrive and saw an opportunity to pursue even more ambitious methods. 

That's when they turned to the Internet.

Their approach in the years to follow is summed up perfectly by an anecdote Kristin Thomson told me about the Simple Machines farewell party at the Black Cat in DC in March, 1998. Despite Thomson telling me the label was not an early adopter of email, Simple Machines did have a mailing list in 1998, and naturally they used it to broadcast the news that the label was going to throw one last party. 

But, she told me, she "tried not to privilege people who had email for getting tickets because I didn't want people who didn't have email to get a second-class experience. You know, 'Oh sorry, we're sold out because you've mailed us a check.' We were trying to be really fair about it because that was early on with email." This story says it all about her and Toomey's approach to the nascent open Internet. It was a good way to connect to people, it was a useful tool, but it had to be handled thoughtfully, reverent to relationships and ways of life that already exist outside of it.

The duo’s next move was launching The Machine in 2000, hosted by the early online record store Insound. The Machine was imagined as the digital successor to the Mechanic’s Guide—at once an information resource and an active online community where people involved with independent music could talk shop, share know-how, and help up-and-comers make it too. 

The Machine started around the same time as some other influential message boards such as OkayPlayer, which was dedicated to hip hop and Black American culture, and I Love Music, which was also frequented by a lot of DC-area music fans. Unlike those message boards, The Machine was more a publication than a conversation. It predated the blog boom by just a few years, but was similar in format. Thomson and Toomey didn't see The Machine as a community effort in the sense that it was an interactive space, but as a kind of digital next step from the Mechanic's Guide: a published resource for the greater independent universe collecting knowledge sourced from that universe.

I’d love to describe The Machine with the kind of detail I was able to devote to the Mechanic’s Guide in the first post in this series. There’s a PDF of the Mechanic’s Guide currently accessible online, but archives of The Machine just don’t exist. I figured I’d find it on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but it seems like there was some issue with how Wayback scraped The Machine’s parent site Insound, delivering errors instead of viewable pages. The fragility of our digital archives makes for an easy case for histories like this one.

But from what I can tell without being able to look at any archives or screenshots of it, The Machine was something of a community bulletin. It ran interviews with people from the underground rock and independent label world about how they do what they do, and collected information that would be valuable to touring bands. Expanding out of the conventional types of DIY voices, they would run interviews with adjacent experts: a lawyer knowledgeable about copyright or someone working on music policy in Washington. 

Bringing those experts into the DIY conversation was part of a wider mandate Thomson and Toomey envisioned for The Machine, responding to the scale and speed of the Internet itself. They began to see the Internet as something that could cut out the monopolies and middle men that existed in the offline music venue landscape and record industry. As Toomey put it to me, the Internet offered the possibility of building, "bigger, faster pipes that would disintermediate from them monopolies that create an artificial ceiling on what independent artists could do without partnering with major labels [...] I could see a pathway where we could play a role in trying to advocate for a better space."

One way to realize that possibility was to develop an indie version of Consumer Reports. For example, if there was a company trying to cut deals with musicians and labels to license their copyright, The Machine would try to collect people's experiences with them and assign them either a green check, a yellow check, or a red X. The Internet afforded instantaneous connection, making it easy to not only get information out there, but receive feedback on it. In addition, the process moved a whole lot faster than publishing a zine.

The Machine came online at an inflection point in the history of music and the Internet. Arguably the most seismic event in this history occurred around the same time: the rise and collapse of Napster. I'll get into Napster in future posts, but for Toomey and Thomson, they felt that if there were some sort of inevitability to the Internet being used to distribute music, perhaps they could help musicians get ahead of the ball. While record companies saw Napster as an existential threat, Toomey and Thomson saw it as proof positive that the business of music was changing and hoped musicians might benefit from the changes ahead.

From what I can tell, this sense crystallized when Kristin Thomson traveled to Cupertino on behalf of Simple Machines to attend an event Apple invited her to: the launch of its iTunes store.

In 2003, Apple gathered independent music labels and publishers in an auditorium at their headquarters and introduced them to a platform and business model that proved extremely appealing to many of them. Steve Jobs himself led the session, explaining how tracks would be sold for 99 cents each and rights holders would receive 66 cents on each sale. That was an appealing cut for sure, and the gesture was one of equity: everyone got the same cut, which meant no one was a privileged player in Apple's marketplace. Contrast that with the payola schemes between major labels and radio stations that roiled the broadcasting landscape for decades, or Spotify's current-day mafia-esque arrangements with power players.

On top of that, Apple was offering an appealing new revenue stream to these labels and publishers. With distribution in the iTunes store, they could bring out-of-print records back to the market with none of the overhead or effort it would take to reissue them physically and get those to shops. As Thomson told me, "We were making 1,000 7" [records]—let's sell 995 of them, you know, because then we could keep a few just to have them. So entire catalogs of music were completely out of print for 20 years. And now they're up and active again, making money for the labels. Nothing's ever out of print again."

Apple was confident about the deal it was offering, so confident that at the end of the presentation, Thomson recalls Jobs telling the audience that their contracts were ready in the lobby, and those labels and publishers could sign them right then and there. (Derek Sivers’s recollection of the meeting, which Thomson suggested I read, says that Apple emailed labels contracts the next day.)

My read on this—not Toomey's or Thomson's—is that this is an early statement of a theme that has played over and over again in the past two decades of music with not a whole lot of variation. Tech titans realize they need a mass of small players on board in order to make their new platforms viable, and they manage to make some kind of irresistible pitch that musicians, labels, and other rights holders impulsively agree to before really considering the implications. Apple's pitch was admittedly a pretty good one: this isn't an exclusive arrangement, your old music will be available for fans, we'll pay you decently. For the labels gathered there—the more influential indies in the wider ecosystem—this would have been a cherry on top. They could reliably move physical records, and now Apple was promising them an easy in for digital distribution.

But I imagine if you were sitting in that room, you heard the unspoken pitch too: look over your shoulders, the Napster's of the world are creeping up right behind you. Hitch your wagon to the right horse, or you might get left in the dust. Now, Apple was offering decent money, and I get the impression that the people who signed those contracts did so enthusiastically. But it does, in retrospect, feel like there was a quiet part there that Spotify realized it could say out loud, refined into a coercive enough gesture that it could leave fair payment out of the equation.

Washington punks go to Washington 

Thomson and Toomey were well aware that the burgeoning digital landscape for music could be an unfair, and even predatory one. Also in 2000—hot on the heels of launching The Machine—they founded the Future of Music Coalition (FMC) in 2000. Future of Music Coalition deserves a much more in-depth history than what I'm going to give it here. What the Mechanic's Guide was to a scrappy punk band crashing on couches around the country, Future of Music Coalition is to that band touring the world and getting spots playing on festivals and late night television. It's the mature, ambitious, and most fully realized version of the project, operating at one of the highest levels possible.

Its opening salvo was the "Future of Music Manifesto" published on June 1, 2000, a document whose concerns haven't aged a day: the Internet makes it easier than ever to get music to listeners, but no one in power has really bothered to figure out how to systemically pay musicians.

And the causes the FMC took up are just as evergreen. In March, 2010, Thomson published a study about the state of health insurance for music workers and fifteen years later, on May 5th of this year, Toomey published an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune arguing that the wealthiest corporations in the music industry should be assuming the responsibility of providing health insurance for the working musicians they profit off of.

Toomey and Thomson put crucial work into understanding how consolidation and corruption in commercial radio was adversely affecting working musicians with both reports and testimony to the FCC. As part of a founding mandate to understand how distributing music digitally would affect musicians outside of the sensationalized piracy framework pushed in the media and litigated in the courts during the first decade of this century, they worked hard to educate rights holders in how they could navigate copyright, publishing, and metadata to ensure they were fairly compensated for use of their work.

But perhaps the FMC's greatest radical gesture came with its yearly conferences. These were rare opportunities from people from all corners of the music and tech industry to come together and discuss the issues of their day. As Thomson recounted, "We did like about 12 policy summits. The goal was to bring together voices of people in the industry with indie people to talk about important issues. And they were quite contentious at some points. We would get label folks trying to defend their policies and other people saying that that was unfair."

While I was interviewing Thomson on Zoom, she then turned around, dug through a filing cabinet, and pulled out an old program to give an example of one of these panels. It was a program for the 2009 summit titled "The New DIY: Creative Control and an Accelerated World." Panels included REM's manager, a Rhode Island indie rocker, the Beastie Boys’ first web developer, the journalist Greg Kott of the Sound Opinions radio show, and Emily White of the creative agency and management firm White Smith Entertainment.

And unlike The Machine—and arguably a lot of FMC’s published research—these summits are archived comprehensively on YouTube. There’s a lot of gold in there. I love this clip of P-Funk’s George Clinton and the Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee talking about sampling fees, one of the very few times you’ll ever see George Clinton in business casual.

Future of Music Coalition’s convening of these summits, advocacy for policy, and research efforts into the betterment of independent musicians are shining examples of how ambition and savvy efforts to organize independent musicians can pay dividends.But it does seem like some shift happened in the balance of power in the music industry in the past decade or so. 

Once upon a time, intelligent and resourceful punks who got their start in the DIY scene could create a yearly forum so influential that music industry folks felt like they had to show up and talk to independent musicians about the major issues of the day. 

Today, I just can't think of an analogous table where all those people have a seat. Granted, I don’t think this is a permanent state of affairs: the United Musicians and Allied Workers are making important in-roads as an attempt to create a union for musicians and adjacent laborers—and they’ve even managed to get heard on Capitol Hill with the help of congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. With a growing popular awareness of the ills of the streaming model, platform hegemony is getting more fragile by the day. Those cracks where the daylight slips through are the ones that can be wrenched open by some organizing and grassroots resource-making.

But where are the archives?

You may have noticed I've linked and screencapped less in this post than I did in others. It's ironic that this series is concluding with an installment that takes place on the Internet, but I can't actually show you much of these projects that existed online. 

There aren't really archives available for The Machine. The Wayback Machine did not successfully scrape the Insound website. It did have old versions of the Future of Music Coalition's site, which I'm grateful for, because at some point the organization redesigned its website and removed most records of its old work. A number of links in the references section of the organization’s Wikipedia page are dead.

In such a short time, these projects have basically link-rotted into oblivion. This post ends up being a hard one to write in part because I don't have the full confidence that I'm explaining this stuff well without seeing it.

The ephemerality of the Internet means we barely have records of what happened yesterday. It is undoubtedly the most consequential communication medium of this century, but we're currently using it like we're running on a rope bridge that's been cut at one end and rapidly falling. No looking back, just one mad dash forward.

Now that doesn't make writing history entirely impossible. I was able to paint a picture thanks to generous interviews with Kristin Thomson and Jenny Toomey, and if I ever have time for a deeper dive on Future of Music Coalition, I'm sure I can get folks to dig up PDFs and printed materials that I can look at. And I do hope that publishing this blog post illuminates a different way musicians once did things online, even if I'm giving an incredibly cursory run down and can't point to something to click around.

But I do fear that if there's little trace of anything besides our present online, then it makes it really challenging to envision that the Internet could be any other way. It limits potential new ways of life online, and likely offline too. It's one thing for music online today to be dominated by platforms and marketplaces like Spotify or Bandcamp or Discogs or Soundcloud. But without archives of publications like The Machine or those Blogspot-hosted MP3 blogs that were taken down en masse during DMCA action in the 2010s, we're blinded to entire alternate ways of being and doing things online—ways that existed not so long ago. 

Culture needs its past in order to have a rich present and promising future. But history is not an affordance of today’s Internet technology. I hope that we're in a period akin to the early days of cinema when studios were burning old films to make room on their shelves for the new one—a practice soon after regarded as foolishly myopic.

The part of me that really needs to get back into meditation does find it interesting that something so massively important for our world today is so ephemeral. And to bring a little diluted, Westernized lay-Buddhism into things, I hope that means the unequivocally shittiest era in the Internet we’re currently suffering through is also ephemeral.But if everything on the Internet slowly disappearing continues to be the way of the world, then I need to make peace with the fact that what I'm currently writing on this Beehiiv blog won't be available for you to read in 25 years. And everything else you look at today on the Internet may just be gone too.

What I’m listening to

Ok I wasn’t actually listening to Fairport Convention, but I really did mean to publish this in May. Whoops!

I am listening to this rippin’ country funk though.

And hey why not a little anti-social plugg music while we’re at it.

One more… my bandmate Kiernan Laveaux turned me onto this album when we were on tour last weekend. The Memphis/Texas hip hop axis has turned out some of my favorite music in the world. Love that lascivious funk.