There’s another major piece of the puzzle, here. The problem with the economics of indie classical, right now, is that we are creating products that don’t have efficient conduits to the consumer level. That is to say, I believe that there are many people who might be interested in our “product”, but don’t know that it exists because the places where they go to find out about culture don’t bring new classical music in front of them. It’s just like any niche product in the consumer marketplace, which stays local and weird until suddenly a major corporation decides that it is broadly marketable, and then you have bagels all around the country, or carne asada, or panini (or organic produce). Hopefully the dismal, diluted fate of those products, extrapolated to the broader marketplace, will not be shared by us. Better would be the fact that you can get decent coffee in more places around the country, and more, different kinds of vegetables, and so on.

So the infrastructure just isn’t there to support us, yet; we’re using venues and media outlets that were designed with other purposes in mind. If we can develop a new infrastructure to support this new model of music-making (which isn’t really new, it’s just more prominent than ever before, for a variety of reasons), we can develop nationally-known artists and make the field more closely resemble other indie musics. That said, most bands, MCs, and other musicians remain local phenomena, and this will be true of most classical musicians who go that route (as you note). It’s hard to make it in any field….

Thanks for writing and I’ll look forward to part II.