An Army of Tori Amoses

I must confess that my favorite genre of music is that of the single female singer&songwriter. And so it goes that some of my favorite artists are Tori Amos and Ani Difranco, both of whom, you may notice, are American. Don't ever say that America is a cultural vacuum because virtually all of today's modern music comes from this big shaggy dog of a nation. Such talent does not rise up in a vacuum. For every Tori Amos found by the recording industry of America (who are flailing about in their last throes of death by suing their customers), there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of could-have-beens.

So where are these could-have-beens and should-have-beens? As the mainstream music publishing houses implode, just below the radar, a massive parallel universe of independent musicians has emerged. These guys don't sell their souls for the possibility of being a star. They control their own music, happy to make a little money, and play at small venues. Of course, until just a few years ago, the dream of selling your music yourself would have been a quick route to destitution, unless you are Ani Difranco. There's just so many fans you can reach without the helping hand of a large music company, with all the compromises that entails.

But as the technology juggernaut has barrelled forward, music distribution has changed irrevocably. Of the things I have stumbled onto, the most mind-boggling has been the web-site www.cdbaby.com. These guys sell the works of some 64,000 artists from around the world, though most are from the united states. On their site, you can download a sample of the music of all the artists, trying before buying. But most importantly, cdbaby makes sure the artists gets $6 - $12 of the price of the cd, and that the artists gets paid weekly. A successfull artist selling their cd's on this site will be able to eat.

I've been browsing this site since I discovered it about a few weeks ago. It's been a joyful experience where the only link between you and the artist is the music - no hype, no advertising, no pornography inducing you to buy. What you buy is what you hear.

The sublime irony with this new system is that to navigate your way through the world of 64,000 indepedent-minded artists who have bucked from the mainstream, one is utterly required to categorise these artists in the most meticulous way possible. It is just not physically possible to listen to everything. So to make the browsing process possible, one must narrow down the search to one's favorite genres. And even after I've narrowed down to a list of artists in the same genre, I find that I sample only those cd's where I like the cover and the blurb written about each artist.

In the end, I found myself skimming the blurbs, looking for key-words. Whilst the quality of the writing fluctuates from blurb to blurb, in the end, most of the blurbs ends up making comparisons "...if you like Tori Amos and Ani Difranco...", "she has the sweetness of early Metallica, with the banshee soulfness of Michael Bolton", "...if David Bowie was an androdgynous alien from outer space, implanted with the left lobe of Brian Eno's brain, you might get something like...".

In the end, one cannot escapes one's taste and I found myself scouring the solo female artists in folk, pop looking for artists, inspired by, sounds like, similar to, influenced by but sounds completely different from ... Tori Amos. And boy, did I find them, hundreds of them. So now I know where the army of proto-Tori Amoses can be found if I ever need to unleash a strike force of quirky emotional banshees of song and piano onto the world.