Owen Rambles About The Industry: NYC and Portland

Physically not that much larger than Portland, but the concentration of music is absurdly high...

So as some of you know, I’m spending my falls and springs down in NYC, studying in NYU’s music biz program. Learning a hell of a lot, I guess. But maybe more than anything else, I’m learning about the differences between the big-ass city and my home state of Maine, particularly as pertains to their respective independent music scenes. Here, I will discuss some of these differences. You may discover that I prefer one locale over the other. But we shall see.

To start with, here in NYC we have the big old Brooklyn music scene. We always hear about it; Brooklyn seems to constantly be where the Next Big Thing bands are coming out of and getting raved about all across the internet. I have plenty of friends involved in that scene, including a band called The Motorcycle Industry which TS&TL will hopefully be playing with this summer. But the weird thing for me is just how cliquey a lot of the scene seems to be. Obviously, most musicians are ready and willing to talk to others; if they weren’t, they’d be both assholes and fools, given the importance of networking. But there are such tight-knit little clumps everywhere that all share the same fan base. It kind of weirds me out: on the one hand it’s really accepting, and you really get all sorts, but on the other there’s this strange exclusiveness that many of the bands and fans within these cliques have.

Portland, in my experience, has been drastically different. The whole community is incredibly damn artsy, and all of those directly involved in the scene are hugely supportive of new bands. We should know, being an incredibly new band. While obviously anybody’s got to build up their fan base from the ground, we’ve been lucky enough to see members of many of

A local (& personal) favorite

the established Portland bands coming to our shows and checking us out, then hanging with us afterward. And everybody in town tends to be very accepting of diverse takes on music. As such, we get Full Contact Kitty and Feel It Robot coming down from upstate, and everybody comes out. All in all, the place is hugely supportive of new takes and ideas, and it’s a welcoming environment to get involved in.

This probably has a lot to do with the huge overload of bands in Brooklyn at the moment. Obviously, every band has heard a million times that you have to Go Down To The City to Make It Big. And as a result, that’s where they tend to go. There’s a lot of truth to it, too; the whole major industry is set up there, with other clusters in L.A. and Nashville. Moreover, anybody who’s lived here in NYC knows that there’s this sense that the entire world is comprised in the five boroughs, and those outside are missing something. So maybe it’s easier to get heard by the major branches of the industry if you’re here, and if you find your way into one of the scenes. But then you also see many underground artists who find it extremely difficult to build any sort of a buzz with all the access to different bands around here.

Actually, the Brooklyn scene is extremely cool, a lot of the time. And many of the bands in it have not even the slightest interest in signing to a major label. (These are the smart ones; signing to a major right now is about the worst thing you could do, but that is a topic for another post). And when I say it’s cliquey, or hard to get accepted, I’m not saying that everybody’s that way. In particular, I want to mention A Place To Bury Strangers and the sort of scene that lives in their wake. Really cool shit. (Those guys recently signed to Mute, I think. Good for them. Definitely a label that’ll stay out of their way artistically. And they deserve the success they have been seeing lately.)

APTBS: NYC's loudest band. photo credit stereoactivenyc.com.

But on the whole, it’s just hard to get heard over the general noise here. Which is probably a large part of why the cliques have formed, actually. So personally, as a musician, I prefer Portland. Even though there’s probably much less chance of being able to quit your day job due to the lower population, the sheer personable-ness (personability?) of the whole independent music crowd in Maine makes it an ideal place to work and experiment with your music.

Then again, I always talk about how someday some A&R guy from Merge or whatever will discover Honey Clouds or HUAK, and then Portland will become the next Seattle, with just as much cluster and noise from all the incoming bands wanting to be heard.

-Owen

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