To give individual artists a better chance of reaching the public than via their own web pages, a number of shared websites for independent music have been launched over the years, selling themselves to musicians on the premise that it’s a lot easier for people to become aware of a common environment housing many artists, especially if the shared service does a bit of advertising.To undiscovered musicians, this can feel equivalent to renting a stall in a swap meet or flea market.

But unlike in a bazaar, on a website, the musical “goods” have to be presented in some kind of algorithmic order.  Invariably, the most “popular” (i.e., best-selling or most-listened to) items appear first, on the premise that they’re the best.  This gives whatever’s already established on the site such an advantage that more recently added material can be rendered effectively invisible.

In recognition of this problem, most sites offering independent music (or any other type of independent content) now provide an alternative “what’s new” view.  The idea is that in a smaller “nursery” just for newbies, the best work can gain enough popularity to later stand a chance competing among the already-established favorites in the general population.  

There’s a fatal flaw in this mechanism, though.  Within the “what’s new” section, songs are also presented in order of popularity.  And at least up to now, shared sites for presenting independent music have drawn so little traffic that it takes only a tiny number of purchases or plays to establish a new song as a “popularity leader.”

To complicate the situation, some garage bands and undiscovered solo musicians have more friends than talent, while it’s also common for truly talented musicians to remain undiscovered largely because they’re not good at self-promotion and networking.  The net effect is that with depressing regularity, the former prevail in the initial popularity contest, while the latter are consigned to the dark nether reaches of continued obscurity.

With the primary avenue for good new material to come to visitors’ attention thus degraded, the site is left featuring largely the same songs it started out with—when it was almost completely unknown, with hardly any musicians submitting their work, and therefore not a lot of genuinely good songs to offer.

As a result, the few visitors who somehow manage to show up at the site aren’t often impressed with what they find.  They typically check out only a few of the most “popular” songs, believing these to be the best—and when they’re disappointed, they form the impression (often wildly incorrect) that the site doesn’t have any good music.  They leave in disappointment, usually never to come back.

Nobody is well served when people who have taken the trouble to check out a new, more open and inclusive way of presenting music—the kind of people who might have become not just customers, but dedicated aficionados—are given so little exposure to the genuinely good material that shared independent music sites contain that they throw up their hands and walk away.

Certainly not the musicians who have shared their best work, along with their hopes and dreams.  Not even the creators of the sites, whose business models typically enable them to make a modest profit purely from the fees they charge musicians to post their work:  they have dreams, too (typically of creating a fairer and more vibrant system than traditional music companies).