Article and Photos by Christine Beaderstadt
- The Capitol Hill Times -

Seattle is known as a music hub for sprouting artists. Beginning in the 1990s with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden,  Sub Pop Records. And now Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, and Fleet Foxes. But these are the big-tier guys, relatively speaking. What is it really like in the independent music scene?

I spoke with Brad Corrigan of Dispatch, a band that gained widespread recognition among college students in the late 1990s, and is regarded as one of the most successful non-mainstream bands in the last decade and a half. Dispatch has played around the country with several sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, numerous television appearances, and collaborations with Dave Matthews last year. In 2003, after a Dispatch hiatus, Corrigan started his own label, Third Surfer.

"The independent music scene is one of the most important pillars to pop culture," Corrigan said. "It's not the primary voice in pop culture, because mainstream music has control over mainstream media… but that's changing a little bit. There's a lot more freedom and flexibility with listeners, but on the independent music scene, the playing and recording hasn't changed much, just the distribution."

But is Dispatch the exception in indie music? In other words, is it possible to make it as an independent musician without going mainstream? In short, yes. Technology has closed the gap between the unsigned, unaffiliated guys playing in cafes and local college gigs, and the fireworks of Katy Perry.

In recent years, the ubiquity of MP3s and free listening sites like Myspace and Reverbnation allow for easy, largely unfiltered exchange, sharing, and low-cost music. Follow enough musicians, and it's no longer unusual for an artist to be unknown one month and playing the Grammys the next. This is certainly not a new phenomenon: take Elliott Smith, for example, 15 years ago. Prior to his music taking up 20 percent of the tracks on the Good Will Hunting (1997) soundtrack, Smith was largely unknown in a mainstream sense. He didn't play MTV, wasn't heard on the radio, and didn't do any national interviews. A few months later, Smith was singing at the Grammy Awards.

The notion of being largely unknown and suddenly rising to the top is, obviously, not a new concept. But the difference between the 1990s and the 2010s are the choices musicians are making: more and more musicians are actively turning away from major record labels.

"You have the least amount of pressure on your voice," Corrigan elaborates. "Independent musicians pride themselves on trying to carve away as many of the pressures as they possibly can and creating their art."

Local singer-songwriter Rory Corbin agrees that the opportunity among independent musicians to be as successful as their mainstream counterparts is greater now.

"The trend is to be increasingly independent. The more you can do for yourself, the more independent you can be. There's definitely been a shift from people seeing labels as an end goal… for one, musicians can accomplish a lot more without labels."

Musicians now have more choices. Getting signed by Columbia or Universal is no longer the Holy Grail. Now, musicians can turn down the promise of fame and fortune made by label executives because it's not a promise the labels can keep. There is a chance musicians can be successful independently, and the tradeoff for artistic control is clearly what closes the deal. An increasing number of musicians are producing their music without the help of large labels in order maintain full control over their creativity and musical product. That's not to say that being unsigned is necessarily easy, or even easier.

While independent musicians have complete control over their songs, they don't have the manpower, clout, or money to get their music to the masses like large labels do. However, this is something that is slowly changing thanks to technology and the low-cost option of selling individual songs.

"There are ways to get your stuff out there [without a big label] but at the same time there is more static, more noise and more competition to try and break through," Corrigan said. Having worked with large labels like Universal as well as on a smaller scale with his own label, Corrigan has insight from both sides of the industry, and concludes that it doesn't necessarily matter these days if a musician is on a well-known label or not. It has to do with the teams musicians align themselves with and, like any collaborative process, having a similar artistic vision.

"It has everything to do with the person [and not necessarily the label]," Corrigan explains. "It's really not about who has the most firepower and who has the least firepower. You just have to find good people wherever you go."