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Sounds good on the surface -- as long as somewhere, at some point, exposure turns into dollars (or landlords and grocery stores suddenly start accepting "exposure checks"). And there's no reason why it shouldn't: Exposure has been recognized as a quantifiable, profitable marketing concept for years, and the Web is a marketer's dream come true. Webmasters can track who visits a Web site, how long they stay, who's downloading which MP3 files -- virtually every demographic in the book. Web software gives artists the unprecedented ability to track and quantify their exposure so they can turn it into a tangible asset, like CD sales or bodies at their next gig.

What artist wouldn't want to know that 90 percent of her fans are concentrated in Altoona, for example? What artist wouldn't want to be able to send a message to all of the fans who've downloaded his MP3s, to let them know where he's playing and that he's got a new project in the works? Imagine being able to show up at a label exec's office waving proof that 500,000 people loved your last self-produced single.

Unfortunately, for all their breast-beating about leveling the playing field for independent musicians, some online distributors argue that details about how the public responds to an artist's work is too valuable a commodity to share. "Tunes.com provides that information [comprehensive download details] for the labels we work with, but not for the individual artists," says Barber.

The only information that is routinely passed on to independent artists is the number of times their song files have been downloaded. Artists who aren't given special, front-door promotion on a digital music site typically generate a few hundred downloads or less a month; featured artists can generate ten times as many. And increasingly, decisions about who gets into the spotlight are based on cold, hard cash.

MP3.com, for instance, recently instituted a promotional campaign called "Payola," which urges artists to bid against one another for the right to purchase extra exposure on the MP3.com site. The cost of the extra exposure fluctuates based on the number of artists competing; recently, $80 snagged top billing of an alternative band's song for one week.

Of course, with the free tools and access available from just about any $20-a-month Internet service provider, a musician can whip up a Web site with performance schedules, e-mail, and gig announcement lists. She can encode her own tunes in whatever audio format she chooses -- like RealAudio, so that fans can listen to the music but not own a copy, or a downloadable format like MP3. And she can easily sell her own CDs. (Third-party companies like CCNow will take care of credit card processing of individual CD orders for 9 percent off the top.)

The thing that online music distributors have promised to add to this mix is eyeballs. MP3.com reports more than 10 million pageviews per month. But lots of traffic to a music distribution site doesn't necessarily add up to lots of exposure for any one artist.

"MP3.com used to be a great way to get attention," says independent musician and MP3.com contributor Karl Rehn. "But now that the record companies have started putting money into MP3.com and the number of artists online has jumped exponentially, it's back to the way it's always been."

For all the hype, the Web does offer musicians one potentially revolutionary advantage over every other medium in existence: The ability to reach fans and distribute music worldwide, independent of any aggregator -- online or offline, traditional or nouveau.

But, as with any revolution, the spoils will fall not necessarily to the neediest, but to those who recognize opportunity and seize it. While there's no question that the online music battle is far from over, whether the victor will turn out to be big business or independent artists remains to be seen.
salon.com | Dec. 2, 1999

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