A little over a week ago, Patterson Hood, a guitarist and singer in the Drive-By Truckers, stood in front of a sleepy but amped noon crowd at Bonnaroo, the music festival in Manchester, Tenn., explaining profanely that it was time to, um, wake up. As he kicked into “The Righteous Path,” a song from the group’s new-ish record “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark,” it was if the space in front of him was filled with sunburned bobble-heads, each bouncing in unison to every word: “Trying to hold steady on the righteous path, 80 miles an hour with a worn-out map.”
Like much of Bonnaroo, the set was a display of the fealty between band and audience so thunderous that you barely hear the sound of a dying business.
Yes, the traditional music industry is in the tank — record sales are off another 10 percent this year and the Virgin Megastore in Times Square is closing, according to a Reuters report, joining a host of other record stores. That would seem to be bad news all around for music fans — 70,000 of whom showed up in this remote place to watch 158 bands play — and for Mr. Hood and his band.
Not so, he says.
“The collapse of the record business has been good for us, if anything. It’s leveled the playing field in a way where we can keep slugging it out and finding our fans,” he said while toweling himself off after the set.
With their epic Southern rock sounds whose influences range from William Faulkner to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the kind of musicians who don’t live for a photo shoot, the Drive-By Truckers were never going to be record industry darlings. As it is, they have found a sustainable, blue-collar business model of rock stardom in which selling concert tickets and T-shirts have replaced selling CDs.
“Thank God they can’t download those,” said Mr. Hood, the son of the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studio bassist David Hood. “They follow us from city to city, see the shows, get drunk and buy shirts.”
After investing early and continuously in the Web, the Drive-By Truckers have a MySpace page with 37,000 friends, offering four songs from “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” with almost 800,000 downloads alongside a touring schedule that would put James Brown in his prime to shame. This week, they will be in five cities and two countries (Canada, remember?).
Before file sharing tipped over the music business, bands used to tour in support of a record. Now they tour to get the dough to make a record. Cheap recording technology, along with all manner of electronic distribution, means that bands don’t need to sign with a giant recording label to get their music out there.
It has been going on a while. Ani DiFranco, the singer/songwriter, saw the future back in 1991 and skipped signing with a label, making her own records instead. “She would tour, endlessly, in her Volkswagen bug, and have two envelopes, one for the gig money and one for the record money,” said Scot Fisher, the manager and president of Righteous Babe Records, the label they created.
There are still pop acts that drop a record from on high with the help of a big label and see touring as a nuisance, but Bonnaroo in particular is a place where bands and fans have a much closer relationship, with direct sales of merchandise and recorded product. It can make for intimate ties: a woman in a cowboy hat who was carpeted with tattoos was asked the name of a particular song. “I don’t know what the name is, but I know who it’s about,” she said, with a wink.
In a sure sign of détente between the old and new faces of the business, Metallica, which very publicly went after file-sharers with corrosive rhetoric and aggressive legal tactics, showed up at Bonnaroo.
Back in the day, Metallica had good facts — downloaders were stealing their work — and a bad argument, one that could not stand up to a shift in paradigm where many fans walk around with their entire music collection in a shirt pocket. “We support live music,” the band’s singer and guitarist, James Hetfield, told the cheering hordes.
Established bands like Metallica and Pearl Jam, which also played Bonnaroo, may have taken some hits on overall sales. But the lower (iTunes) and nonexistent (file-sharing) profit margins on recorded product are a little easier to take, because ticket prices have doubled in the last 10 years, according to Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, a trade magazine that covers the live music industry.
For some bands, like the jam band Umphrey’s McGee, some music sales are a direct offshoot of the shows. The band reserves five tickets at every show for people who want to tape it and also records every set with room mikes and the sound board. Three-disc sets are burned on the spot and sold for $20. (Other bands have taken to popping the evening’s performance onto a thumb drive and selling that to departing fans.)
“If we can break even on a recording, then the rest of the business will take care of itself,” said Joel Cummins, the keyboard player in the band. “I think that the Internet gives us a way of getting connected with our fans. We get to make the kind of music we like — it’s definitely a little more complicated than just three chords and the truth — and use a long-tail business model to find and play for people who want to see what we can do live.”
The buy-share-trade dynamic was visible all over Bonnaroo, whether it was food, space in the tent or other substances. To one crusty old attendee, it felt a bit like the Yippie camp-in at Spokane that he stumbled onto back in 1974. (Speaking of which, when did tie-dye come back, and how can we make it go away again?)
But for musicians, the network is all part of the business. Selling out, once the death knell for bands seeking credibility, has now become an end in itself.
“This is by far our best record, if you ask me, so the tickets for shows are doing really well,” said Mr. Hood, sounding very much like an old label hand. “But then, the gas prices are killing us.”
