When The Music is your Special Friend

The contemporary music industry is largely dominated by a limited number of four major record companies (EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal Music). This highly concentrated or hegemonic industry is often labeled as a commercial mainstream industry. In this business, popular music is mass produced and marketed, eventually aimed to be sold to (global) mass audiences. Some critics argue that major companies are not willing to care about the aesthetic or artistic values of music or musicians and are thus only in it for the money. Besides the commercially oriented majors and their smaller subsidiaries, there are also the underexposed and often locally based small independent record companies: the so called D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) micro-independent record labels. The D.I.Y. micro-independent industry can be seen as oppositional to the corporate mainstream music business. Micro-independents not only differ from the commercial oriented record labels in organizational characteristics (like company size, division of labor, scale circulation and production, recording processes, patterns of promotion and distribution and musical genres). As previous research has shown, the motives of ‘employees’ to ‘work’ for micro-independent record labels are also different compared to the motives of professionals in the mainstream industry. These micro-independent motives are often regarded as moralistic or political, mostly caused by a dissatisfaction of the ‘capitalistic’ conventions handled in the major industry. This thesis analyses the Dutch micro-independent record industry and D.I.Y. culture. Not oriented to make a profit like the commercial major companies, practitioners of micro-independents in The Netherlands justify their actions out of a infinite passion for music as an artifact (summarized as an art versus commerce dichotomy). The research also examines the characteristics of the Dutch micro-independent industry compared to the major mainstream industry. It argues why these ‘employees’ of micro-independents want to participate in such an unstable or uncertain industry as the music industry. In addition, this thesis describes the ideologies of 15 interviewed respondents of 14 Dutch micro-independents. Finally, it will portray the characteristics and conventions of the Dutch D.I.Y. culture and micro-independent music industry as an alternative to the mainstream business.