Indie Bands Are The New Pets.com

In one of the more blatant plays for publicity we’ve seen lately, ousted Vimeo founder (and fameball enabler) Jacob Lodwick announced that his company Normative Music is helping an indie band to incorporate. Francis and the Lights–who, as the press release notes, “opened for MGMT in Brooklyn”!–are now Francis and the Lights, LLC. If you spend most of your time on the internet, this probably makes sense. Lodwick is Tumblr-famous, dot-com rich, and what could be more copyfighty than a band incorporating itself and finding outside investors rather than relying on the Faustian funds of major labels? Only problem is, the numbers don’t quite add up.

Says the release: “The move includes a $100,000 investment from The Normative Music Company, giving the new entity a valuation of precisely one million dollars.” Now, how does that work? Does the band have $900,000 worth of assets stashed away in a Williamsburg warehouse somewhere? Do they have a guaranteed current revenue stream that will net them that much money in a certain period of time? Nope. Basically, Lodwick–again, in a good publicity move!–really hopes that the eventual return on his investment (ROI) will be a milli. And in this, he’s treating them like an online startup rather than a band.

Again, if you spend a lot of time online, this might seem like a great idea. But think back to that one million dollar valuation. It doesn’t stem from actual current revenues, but from a clearly overstated (if, statistically speaking, conceivably true) estimate of how valuable indie bands like this will eventually be. And in that, it’s way more like a height-of-the-bubble internet company. Companies with no plausible business model or firm source of income were somehow worth millions of dollars. The rhetoric here is vintage Wired hippie-capitalist heavy breathing, too:

When we hear the term ‘independent music’, we should recall its actual, forgotten promise of unmolested artistic integrity. In 2008, such music cannot exist with submission to the whims of a brittle industry, nor with automatic rejection of anything ‘corporate’. Artistic freedom requires an awakening, from the artist, that business is good — because music requires it, because life requires music, and because life is good.

“Normative, the dictionary word, refers to how things ought to be — what would be normal in an ideal world. Normative, the company, applies this concept to the music industry. Our basic concern is the vision, which begins as a spark in the musician’s mind and must be absolutely realized, irrespective of cost. We believe that art must exist without compromise; if it is compromised, it no longer qualifies as art.

Now, maybe (probably?) Lodwick is kidding with all this. But if he’s serious, it’s a fantastic example of the strange situation we find ourselves in. Rather than scampering toward more practical and viable business models, people’s grand ideas for fixing the music industry look a lot like the demonstrably failed rhetoric from the height of the dot-com bubble. Even worse, though, it’s like a pathetic version of all that. Lodwick hopes that the band’s eventual value will be $200,000 less than Pets.com spent on a single Super Bowl ad. The music business’ self-esteem is now so low that they can’t even pretend to be worth a hilariously inflated amount. But hey, maybe Lodwick’s play will attract more investors and become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Shoot for the stars, guys!

Francis and the Lights Incorporates with $1 Million Valuation [Normalist]