MxPx On Music Business: ‘Everything Is DIY Today’

PPunk legends MxPx have been in the music industry for long enough to know how much the show biz world changed during the past several years. And if a band, used to be signed on a major label, went DIY to get maximum of its success, isn’t it the right time to rethink your own goals, once again?

Read below an inspiring excerpt of Joe Matera’s interview with MxPx’ bassist and vocalist Mike Herrera, conducted for Ultimate Guitar last month.

Having spent quite a number of years on a major label, how does it differ being on an indie label today, especially in the current musical climate of downloads and whatnot?

Image credit: Alexandre Cardoso on Flickr

Almost everything about the music business has changed in the past five to ten years. We were on a major label for so long that we kind of got lazy. But now we’re even putting out records ourselves. And a lot of our contemporaries in the same sort of genre are doing the same thing too, putting out record themselves because it is all digital. So you don’t really need a record label anymore, you can put it up on iTunes, on Amazon, all the different websites out there. It is all about promoting yourself, being on tour and doing it that way. It is way more D-I-Y. In fact, everything is D-I-Y today.

It is actually going back to the basic work ethic of what the punk and hardcore bands were and are about, so in a sense D-I-Y is appropriately the accurate word to use.

Yes it is completely. Even though you are using the internet or using whatever companies online to help distribute your digital albums along with online web stores, you are still doing it yourself. And that still means, putting it up online, updating the websites, updating all the social networks. It is a lot of work, it really is.

Have you got an advice to impart to other musicians from all your years in this industry?

Obviously that it is about keeping up and in contact with your fans. Nurture those people because building a fan base is very hard to, especially outside your home town. But once you do that, keep them involved with what you are doing. Also, I think putting out music often is a little bit more important than putting out one big release like every two years. And that is changed too because it used to be where you could do that one album every two years. But that is not what people expect nowadays. You have to keep people interested more often now.