In his latest essay, Paul Graham, whose company Y Combinator helped fund Reddit and Dropbox among others, explains one of the inherent complications of investing in startups:
The best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas… If a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it… One of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter.
In other words, it might be wiser to invest in a startup's underlying ambition and competence rather than how well its ideas presently speak to you. After all, our gut feelings are shaped by what's already out there in the world, the same world that everyone else lives in. So anything that speaks to you probably speaks just as well to many others. This doesn't mean it's not a good idea. It just means it's unlikely to be the next big innovation that takes everyone by surprise.
I've argued before that the indie label habit of trusting gut feelings, of signing bands that best speak to them, is what's killing innovation in music today. But I'm slowly realising that it goes way deeper than that. In the past week or two, as I've renewed my search for bandmates, I've gotten a few responses from those who really enjoy the music and dig what my band is about, but just don't see it as something they personally want to join.
Now, the notion that a record label should be like one big, happy family united by a common sense of purpose is probably specific to indie rock. On the other hand, the notion that joining a band is a deeply personal decision, much like being in a relationship, is embraced by everyone. A band has to be the right fit on an emotional and spiritual level. To argue otherwise would be comparable to endorsing forced marriages.
And yet, those gut feelings telling musicians which bands to join are really no different from those telling labels which bands to sign, aren't they? That is to say, they're shaped by what's out there in the world, the things we already know, the things that are familiar to us. So if you're a musician, the bands that best speak to you probably speak just as much to everyone else. This doesn't mean they can't be good bands. It just means they're unlikely to be the pioneers of tomorrow that take everyone by surprise.
Is it possible, then, that the Internet, which makes it so much easier for us to find bandmates with similar habits and ideals, is also keeping our latter-day Lennons away from their latter-day McCartneys? It's probably no coincidence that many of today's promising bands are essentially one-person operations, like Bon Iver or Tune-Yards. The praise is well deserved; they sound amazing. Of course, it's no surprise they can pull it off: They're one person making the kind of music that one person can reasonably be expected to make.
But what about the future of musical innovation that necessarily requires lots of collaborative effort? It's not likely to come from musicians joining only those bands that best speak to them, nor from one-person bands making one-person music. Our best hope, perhaps, is the epic bedroom recordings made by lone individuals who remain unconcerned with tailoring their sound for live performance. The ambition and competence shown in such works can be taken as proof of the promise they hold as future collaborators.
And if their works don't speak so well to us here and now, or if they sound too polished or too rough or just plain off, that shouldn't be cause for concern in the long term; after all, at present they're just one person trying to make the kind of music that one person can't reasonably be expected to make, especially live. Of course, as I've said before, live performance is exactly what matters most to indie labels. Which is understandable, given that it's the main source of revenue and a reliable means by which word gets spread.
But that doesn't mean we should just give up on these bedroom artists completely. Surely there's a middle ground to be found, where labels can publicly assert confidence in them without undertaking the same financial risks demanded by the official bands on their rosters. In fact, validation from a respected source might just be the final step needed for these bedroom artists to find interested collaborators. It would be the indie rock version of a startup incubator like Y Combinator.
Because until someone finds a way, we're probably not going to discover the indie rock versions of Reddit and Dropbox. Right now, those bands are being killed off before they're even given a fighting chance.
Footnote, September 15, 2012: For those unclear on the Beatles reference, Lennon was as much threatened by McCartney's talent as he was in awe of it. But he was also a working-class kid, during a time of limited social mobility, who saw music as his ticket out of Liverpool. Thus, the only practical option was to make McCartney a Beatle (or rather, at that time, a Quarryman), rather than risk losing him to a rival band. And through the years, this friendly competition between them kept them both in top form as songwriters, making the Beatles the greatest rock band of all time. But the two weren't ever really close. My point is that this isn't a situation most musicians today would consider ideal. They'd probably try to avoid it if they could help it.
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