Future of Music Coalition

Post authored by FMC Communications Associate Kevin Erickson

Like many people, my first encounter with David Lowery was as a music fan.  As a child of the 80s, I grew up hearing Cracker’s couple of commercial radio hits on my local rock station. Later, when I was gifted a shiny lime-green iMac the summer before I left for college, I started to use the internet as a music discovery tool. Lowery’s label Pitch-A-Tent was one of the earliest labels to offered free legal MP3 samples, and I would wait sometimes for hours on my dialup connection to check out a single song by artists like Lauren Hoffman and Bugs, as well as some Camper Van Beethoven classic hits.

Years later, it was his letter to Emily White, aka “that NPR intern” that positioned Lowery and his Trichordist blog at the center of digital music debates. At the very least, White’s infamous essay was honest, and gestured toward a growing awareness of the impact of her choices. On the other hand, it was still pretty tone-deaf and many artists felt it came off as entitled. Personally, the essay reminded me of certain kids I knew from my own college radio days–who would show up at the radio station with binders crammed full of burned CDs, music that they’d paid nothing for, generally oblivious to how those choices impacted the artists whose work they’d enjoyed. These DJs would be forced to endure a lecture from their station manager (me) about the challenging financial realities faced by working musicians and the importance of supporting creativity. Many of my non-musician peers seemed to buy into broad media narratives about the big bad music industry getting its supposedly well-deserved comeuppance while never considering the actual impact on artists themselves; meanwhile many of my musician friends found it increasingly difficult to carve out a sustainable living. (Which is, of course, what ultimately led me to work for FMC. I wanted to be part of the solution.)