Penulis
Introduction
This essay discusses how the DIY movement reproduce many of the shortcomings it sought to oppose. Indeed, practices like pay-to-play, the rise of new intermediaries, the dominance of streaming platforms and other growing barriers for musicians without social or financial capital raise the following question: Has DIY become a smaller version of the very industry it once opposed?
To approach this question the practices surrounding the DIY movement are examined. This exploration suggests that digitalization has widened the gap within the independent music scene and created a domino effect that negatively influence DIY music. Independent music economy now relies primarily on musicians’ willingness and ability to pay, rather than on streaming revenues, concert attendance, or physical sales. This represents a fundamental contradiction, since DIY originally emerged in opposition to these exclusionary practices.
A short history of DIY
The EP Spiral Scratch by the British band Buzzcocks is considered as one of the first documented case of a successful “independent” release. Entirely self-funded by the band and issued on an independent label, this record demonstrates the possibility to produce and distribute music outside the oligopoly of the six major record companies (EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner, Polygram, and BMG) which, at the time, controlled all stages of production, marketing, and distribution. This release inspired a new generation of musicians to bypass the traditional music industry and prioritize artistic expression over commercial imperatives.
From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, an alternative network emerged. Independent labels played a key role in its development through a revenue-sharing model favourable to artists. To support this ecosystem, fanzines, record store and independent radio stations emerged to promote local DIY artists. Parallel to these efforts, a network of DIY venues developed, ranging from basement shows to community centers and self-managed spaces that allowed independent bands to tour nationally and internationally. Rehearsal rooms and low-cost recording studios also flourished, often operated by aspiring sound engineers or managed collectively by the bands themselves. This hands-on approach contributed to the emergence of the “lo-fi” aesthetic.
Through the development of this network, the DIY movement evolved into a coherent ethic built on several principles: total independence from the music industry, refusal to compromise for financial gain, minimization of production costs, and the encouragement of creative risk-taking. This ethic allowed the emergence of unconventional and experimental music (post-punk, no wave, post-rock, lo-fi, math rock, shoegaze, etc.).Those ethical principles are derived from the Marxist ideas of “seizing the means of production” with musicians taking control of studios, label, stores, and reducing intermediaries between artist and listeners. The movement also rejected the commodification of art, echoing Situationist ideals by promoting inclusivity for marginalized communities and democratizing music making. Moreover, the DIY ethos often aligns with anarchism, anticapitalism, environmental concerns and feminist principles.
The DIY movement also played a crucial role in fostering local music scenes and shaping their identities. While several DIY artists achieved international recognition (such as the post-hardcore band Fugazi) the movement primarily supports local, often semi-professional or amateur musicians. DIY venues provide a fertile ground for turning concert goers into active participants and to foment connection between artists. As a result, the dynamics of the DIY movement are highly dependent on geography: each local scene develops its own practices, aesthetics, and social networks. In authoritarian contexts such as China or Singapore, DIY spaces even became hubs for political dissidents. Ultimately, DIY is both an artistic and political movement. However, as digital technologies arise, the movement is confronted to new challenges.
DIY accelerationism
Accelerationism refers to the notion of pushing an ideology or system to its extreme limits to precipitate its collapse. One could argue that the recent technological advancement in both music production and distribution (artificial intelligence, accessibility of home recordings, music assisted by computers, streaming platforms, etc.) have been so radical that it represents a form of accelerationism both for the music industry and for the DIY movement.
At first glance, the rise of the internet, music piracy, and streaming platforms, appear problematic for traditional record labels, especially major companies that relied on physical sales as their main source of revenue and control over distribution. By making music accessible without the need for physical media, the internet could supposedly dismantle much of this oligopoly. Indeed, the early years of digitalization induced a significant financial decline: global music revenues fell from an estimated 28 billion dollars in 1999 to 15 billion dollars in 2014. However, by 2024 the industry had recovered, with revenues estimated at 30 billion dollars. When looking at music revenue shares in 2024, self-produced and independent music account for only 22.6% of the market, while the three major labels (UMG, Sony, and Warner) dominate the rest. Although these figures vary depending on methodology, they nevertheless suggest that major labels survived digitalization and consolidated their dominance. Independent and self-produced music, in contrast, suffered disproportionately. This result seems counterintuitive, from a DIY perspective, digitalization should represent a step forward, allowing artists to distribute their work directly online without intermediaries. Why, then, has independent music not entered a golden age?
Firstly, while piracy once allowed music to circulate freely, sometimes serving as a form of protest from exploitative labels, streaming gradually became the main medium to listen to music. Streaming services initially emerged as a solution to music piracy and the decline of the CD industry. However, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, etc., quickly became unavoidable for musicians and replaced the old major record oligopoly . Moreover, while piracy negatively impacts musicians, this impact is negligible in comparison to streaming platforms exploitative model. Despite their legality and accessibility, they pay artists ridiculous sums, ranging from around $0.003 per stream on Spotify to $0.01 on Tidal. These figures are so low that streaming can be considered a legalized form of piracy. While artists can still release music independently through personal websites, they risk total invisibility, even among audiences sympathetic to DIY ideals. As a result, digital distribution has reduced rather than expanded DIY autonomy.
Imagine buying a CD from a local independent band, only to discover that the money you spent on this CD goes the major labels and superstar musicians who dominate the market. This is essentially how most streaming platforms operate. After keeping roughly 20% of subscription and advertising revenue for themselves, streaming services distribute the remaining funds, according to each artist’s market share within their country and genre. For example, if an artist accounts for 90% of the streams in their segment, they receive 90% of the revenue allocated to that segment (after paying the rights holders). This system favours larger artists at the expense of smaller ones. For independent musicians and smaller labels, even a respectable number of streams often fail to translate into meaningful revenue. This dynamic has allowed major labels to further consolidate their dominance, as their artists regularly capture most of the streams . Since DIY music is typically niche-oriented, its share of streams is minuscule. Therefore, both niche artists and labels are exclude from streaming income, unable to compete with the promotional and marketing power of major labels.
Moreover, although technological progress has made music creation easier than ever, it also led to an unprecedented inflation of content. More music is release in a single day than in the entire year of 1989, a trend further intensified by AI-generated material. In the pre-digital era, the main challenge for artists was finding resources to record, press, and promote physical copies. Today, the obstacle is visibility in an oversaturated market. This “music inflation” affects both mainstream and underground genres alike. For example, the “math rock” subgenre illustrates the trend: on the platform Rate Your Music, 81 math rock albums were rated in 1998, compared to 305 in 2023. While this increase partly reflects the genre’s growing popularity and better documentation of recent releases, it also suggests saturation, even within highly specialized niches.
Secondly, the decline of traditional intermediaries such as retailers, physical labels, and radio has not produced a liberated musical landscape. Instead, a new ecosystem of intermediaries appeared: paid digital distributors to secure placement on streaming platforms, playlist promotion services, public relations agencies targeting music media. The number of intermediaries has multiplied to a point where every form of online visibility comes at a cost. Consequently, despite the apparent link between artists and listeners enabled by digitalization, musicians still depend on intermediaries to reach audiences. The anarchist Montréal post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor removed their music from most streaming platforms (as of August 2025) to protest against their exploitative conditions and political ties. This recalls their 2002 album Yanqui UXO, which included a chart tracing the connections between major labels and the weapon industry . The persistence of such structural problems demonstrates that digitalization has not resolved the issues the DIY movement sought to challenge; rather, it has in many ways intensified them.
One could object to this bleak portrait of independent music in the digital age. Today, it is possible to write, record and distribute music entirely from your bedroom. Yet this autonomy comes with hidden costs. The same systems that make DIY production possible also impose new economic and algorithmic constraints. Oversaturation and platform oligopolies undermine the independence that DIY culture seeks to preserve. Digitalization has not empowered independent artists but has instead produced the illusion of direct access while relocating control in the hands of a few dominant players. Therefore, by accelerating the process of connecting artists and audiences in such a short period, digitalization widens the gap between musicians and their audience.
Pay-It-Yourself (PIY)
Given this economic landscape, small labels, often run by passionate individuals, cannot afford to finance an album’s production (recording, mixing, mastering). Instead, they focus on physical releases, such as CDs, vinyls, or tapes. While this model is purely DIY, the inability of labels to fund full productions shifts the financial burden onto the musicians themselves. As a result, the willingness and financial capacity of artists often become the deciding factors of self-produced project success . In the past, releases were often co-financed by both artists and labels, with revenues shared fairly among everyone involved. Now, with the dominance of streaming platforms, it has become nearly impossible to break even. In this new context, “self-production” means that production, promotion, and online distribution costs fall directly on the musicians.
Consider, for instance, two real-world cases (left unnamed to preserve the anonymity of the artists): two fully independent, self-produced bands evolving in niche music scenes (krautrock and shoegaze). The first band invested around €25,000 (approximately $29,000 USD) into production, promotion, and distribution. This budget allowed them to hire top engineers, respected PR agents, and to team up with several labels to press vinyls. They could also fund an extensive promotional campaign and a booking agent to organize touring.
The second band, equally committed, had only a few hundred dollars at their disposal. Despite playing numerous shows and handling promotion on their own, their project remained largely unknown. Their album, while musically strong, inevitably suffered from the limited time and money that could be invested. Yet, both releases are described as “self-produced” and “DIY.” The difference is that one band had the financial means and the contacts, while the other had neither.
This contrast highlights a fundamental truth, what often separates so-called successful DIY bands from lesser-known ones is access to money and networks. Even by framing the money spent in a release as “investments” with potential returns, few artists can advance it. Moreover, given the limited revenue from streaming and the difficulties of profitable touring, it is unlikely that an expensive self-produced album could break even. This financial and social barrier is one of the greatest obstacles in today’s DIY landscape.
I have experienced this limit personally. The most expensive album I recorded with my band costs about CAD 7,000 (roughly $5,000 USD). This included four days in a professional studio with an engineer, mixing, mastering, and expenses for artwork. While we could afford it because all members had full-time jobs, it was still a significant investment. Despite having no contacts in the local scene, we still secure some reviews and collaborate with an independent label for vinyl production. Nevertheless, promotion remained out of reach. Even the cheapest package offered by PR agencies or digital campaign services costs around $1,500 USD, an amount we could not spare. Instead, we carried out our own promotion, sending hundreds of emails with minimal outcome. These experiences revealed an uncomfortable truth: no matter how much time and effort you put in your project, it is still far to match the power of money and connection, even in DIY.
Self-produced bands are thus faced with a difficult choice: to invest heavily in production, ensuring an artistically satisfying record, or to allocate resources toward promotion. While investment in production yields a tangible result, the money spent on promotion often vanishes, as streaming revenues are negligible. Increasing the number of listeners from 100 to 10 000 has practically no financial impact.
Promotion has thus become a form of parasitic intermediation, money is funnelled to PR agencies, distributors, or playlist promoters without benefiting musicians. While it is possible to save money on production by favouring a lo-fi approach that is often celebrated in the DIY movement, the latter isn’t true for promotion. Without intermediaries, it is nearly impossible to reach an audience beyond one’s immediate circle. Musicians have become the great losers of the digital transition, as promotion agencies and playlist curators have managed to professionalize themselves to the point of being nearly unavoidable. Even when these agencies are motivated by genuine passion and aim to support challenging or innovative music, they still participate in a system that exploits the artists they claim to champion.
Reducing DIY promotion to “parasitic middlemen” might be excessive, after all DIY is mainly about fanzines and webzines run by fans, not necessarily professional outlets or popular playlists. It is about passion transmitted by one devoted DIY zealots to another. For a DIY band, reaching these people might be more important than relying on external agencies. With some friends, we run a very small label and webzine purely out of passion and even in this context the volume of requests from bands seeking coverage overwhelms us. Much of this demand came from PR agencies. They maintain constant outreach, sending multiple emails per week and saturating inboxes. While we attempt to focus on bands that are entirely self-produced, it is hard to ignore artists that appear repetitively. This reality is in stark contradiction with the anti-capitalist stance of DIY. While most bands discovered through the press or playlists are excellent, their visibility was often less due to artistic quality than to the fact that they had a contact, a friend or family member in the media, or the ability to pay an agency. This is unfair yet common.
Despite those shortcomings, DIY production still offers space for artistic fulfillment. Self-recorded albums embody an aesthetic that initially defined DIY. However, ambitious recordings remain financially and logistically demanding, meaning certain genres are inaccessible to those without resources.
Pay to Play
There are different ways to fund an album when you don’t have the financial resources. Some countries provide public funding: in Canada, for instance, grants exist but are scarce. Because competition is so intense, many emerging bands end up hiring “professional grant writers” to improve their chances. France, by contrast, offers a broader range of support, including grants, artist residencies, and affordable facilities for rehearsals and performances. France also provides a modest but stable income (roughly equivalent to the minimum wage) to artists who perform live regularly. Beyond public support, crowdfunding has become a popular option, though it usually depends heavily on the socio-economic standing of a band’s friends, family, and networks. However, the most common source of funding is live performance. Bands use shows to generate income, to build momentum, sell merchandise, and gain exposure. In the DIY movement, live music has always been central, yet live music itself increasingly depends on socio-economic privilege. Touring has become prohibitively expensive even in pop music. In 2022, the American indie rock band Animal Collective cancelled their European tour, explaining :
“Preparing for this tour we were looking at an economic reality that simply does not work and is not sustainable, “From inflation to currency devaluation, to bloated shipping and transportation costs, and much more, we simply could not make a budget for this tour that did not lose money even if everything went as well as it could.”
Beyond the obvious costs of transport and lodging, live music is riddled with intermediaries who take a share of artists’ earnings: distributors like Ticketmaster, booking agents, venues that sometimes demand rental fees and a cut on the merchandise sold (between 10 and 40%). For major stars like Taylor Swift, touring can be highly profitable, but for everyone else, even mid-level acts, it is financially and physically draining. Dan Potts of the Red-Light Management Agency (who manages artists like Phish and The Strokes) has remarked:
“It depresses me how many middle- and upper-class people there are in the music industry,”, Because the working class just can’t afford to fork out £150 a day for van hire. The only artists doing that are people who have deeper pockets and can afford to take the hit.”
David Lowery, frontman of the alternative band Camper Van Beethoven, once revealed that after paying all intermediaries (managers, booking agents, distributors, venues) each band member earned only $27 per show across a 42-year career. Even applying to festivals ca requires a cost, for instance, the famous Southby southwest festival is asking between 35 and 75 dollars just to apply.
Touring on a budget in the worst possible conditions is part of the DIY history. Countless testimonies of touring nightmares shaped the lore surrounding the movement. Still, while touring was always difficult, the situation has worsened. Touring in the most DIY way possibly became insanely tedious to organize without an external booker, and without a certain amount of money. Touring has always been a kind of luxury within DIY, it requires time, money, and energy. Luckily, you can organize shows in your own city, meet new friends, and contribute to your local scene. After all, DIY has always thrived through live music and communal spaces.
Traditionally, DIY venues allowed bands to play for free while providing basic catering, giving 100% of ticket and merchandise revenue, and sometimes even a cut on the money generated by the venue. This system keep shows affordable, often on a “pay what you can” basis. From my experience, this model still survives in much of France, Spain, and Italy. In contrast, in countries where DIY first emerged, the UK, Canada, and the U.S., these principles are often ignored.
Take Montréal as an example. The city has a large student population, and a vibrant DIY scene. Yet most venues, whether bars or so-called DIY spaces charge rental fees ranging from CAD 100 to CAD 500. These venues never provide catering and rarely have backline. In some cases, the fees are justified to cover staff wages, effectively shifting the venue’s operating costs onto the musicians themselves. As a result, even a sold-out show may leave a band with little to no profit, while a poorly attended night mean losing money after covering gas, parking, and other expenses.
For DIY musicians, live music is no longer a viable source of income; it has also become an expense. Worse, these fees force musicians to raise ticket prices. In Montréal, local show prices have significantly increased making live music less accessible for working-class audiences, directly contradicting DIY’s ethos of inclusivity. Once again, the DIY scene imitate the mainstream industry, just as pop music concerts are inflated by greedy intermediaries; DIY shows are victims of questionable business practices. Despite those issues, competition for live shows remains fierce. Montréal is crowded with bands, and limited alternatives make it easy for promoters and venues to impose unfair conditions. Booking often requires connections, a manager, or a promoter.
While DIY has always involved passionate individuals booking shows for the love of music, many of Montréal’s promoters operate purely for profit, packing five or more bands onto incoherent bills to maximize attendance. It is still possible to play or organize shows in Montréal without going through those intermediaries, but only through relentless effort, as you compete with people for whom booking shows is a profession.
Domino effect?
From its earliest iterations, DIY culture has celebrated relentless productivity. There is a certain beauty in this self-sacrificing devotion to music. However, this ethos of tireless productivity has always masked a deeper contradiction. By definition, “doing it yourself” requires artists to assume nearly every role, recording, merchandizing, promotion, often with only limited support from peers in the scene. The result has historically been a massive workload. Far from existing outside capitalism, independent music in Anglo-American contexts has always operated within it, most musicians could not survive on music alone, supplementing their income with odd jobs. In practice, DIY bands often adopted a quasi-Stakhanovist mentality, sustaining themselves through sheer volume of work. This tension is not necessarily a contradiction, as its very name suggests, DIY is rooted in the act of doing. After all, one cannot seize the means of production and then refuse to operate them.
However, the rise of streaming platforms triggered a domino effect with catastrophic consequences for DIY musicians. With less income available, small labels ceased to finance album production, transferring these costs directly to bands. At the same time, visibility itself became monetized: to be heard, artists must now pay for promotion on digital platforms. Thus, what was once a system of “hustling for survival” has shifted into a system where musicians “pay to hustle”. While much of the DIY network once relied on unpaid, passion-driven contributions, many roles have since been professionalized (promoters, venue owners, tour managers, video producers, PR firms). Yet, musicians and small labels, paradoxically, the originators of DIY itself, remain unable to do so. Most DIY labels still operate on fragile 50/50 revenue splits, where both label and artist lose if sales stagnate. PR and promotion, however, function on fixed fees. This imbalance created a situation where promoters and agencies can survive from artists’ investments, but the artists themselves cannot survive.
Live music has been directly impacted by these shifts. With recorded music no longer a viable income, the live music industry has found ways to exploit artists’ lack of alternatives. “Paying for exposure” is now a structural practice. This is particularly common in Anglo-American contexts, where oversaturation fosters compliance. As in academic publishing, where scholars are compelled to accept exploitative conditions, musicians’ complacency allows such malpractices to persist.
If this trajectory is to change, systemic reforms are necessary. Alternative infrastructure to streaming oligopoly must be developed. Platforms like Bandcamp and, to some extent, Deezer, demonstrate that fairer models are possible, but broader adoption is needed. Similarly, DIY and alternative venues should categorically refuse practices such as pay-to-play and instead offer arrangements that prioritize artists. Promotional work should be revenue-based rather than fee-based. If the musician earns nothing, neither does the promoter.
Editor: Ivo Trias Julianno
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