Indie Industry

I don’t suck at french, but it always takes a few tries to nail down the vocabulary of a new situation. Le Salon de la Musique Indépendant this afternoon is a first for my Indyish-en-français spiel, but it gets rolling after a few visits:

Nous sommes un réseau d’artistes de toutes disciplines: musique, film, litérature, design de mode, théâtre, art visuel - tous ceux qui se définissent comme étant artistes indépendants. Notre outil principal est le site web, indyish-point-com. C’est un site de réseautage, ou les membres ont un profil, un podcast et accès au blog collectif, ce qui leur permet de faire la promotion de leurs évènements, ou simplement de discuter les obstacles qu’ils ont rencontré en tant qu’artistes indépendants. Ils peuvent aussi vendre leurs produits à travers le site web. Nous sommes basés ici à Montréal, mais notre réseau internet s’étend un peu partout dans le monde…

As a side note, the thing that I love about translation is how it forces you to distill your message and reconstruct it from scratch. Living in Quebec, the language swap is a daily occurrence and I like to think it makes us more mindful of our meanings.

Anyways…my audience listens patiently throughout this spiel, but as I wind down, I get the sense that they’re waiting for something more. So I stumble on, inviting them to the monthly mess and then, when they still seem unsatisfied, explaining our Assembly projects. A quick tour of the Salon earlier revealed that most of the folks behind the tables were producers, booking agents, consultants, or designers peddling their services to indie artsits. Finally, I realize what they are waiting for: my pitch.

“Oh, le financement?” They nod, as if we are finally approaching familiar territory.

I honestly haven’t put much thought into the financial side of Indyish… so far, it’s been a labour of love, a network built by by volunteers. I have total faith that Indyish will find ways of funding its work, but that hardly seems the point. As I explain this, a few of my visitors stumble off looking skeptical.

Fortunately, I also got to meet a few folks who immediately got the spirit of Indyish: there was Geoff Faribault, a singer-songwriter with great energy whose aptly-named folk tune “Buena Onda” has been lovely accompaniement as I write this post. Then there are the spunky girls from La Goupille, whose évennements pluridisciplinaires sound kind of like the franco-montly-mess and the guys from IndieCan, an indie radio based out of Toronto, and Whitebird studio in Ottawa, who had some interesting thoughts about bringing together artists, recording studios and international audiences in a fun, free way. Meeting these folks and others was definitely a good reason to represent at the Salon, and hopefully we’ll be able to collaborate with them in the future.

And to the skeptics who stopped by our table and who may be reading this: thanks for checking out our website. Your traffic is our financement. And that’s taking the -ustry out of Indy since…uh…2006.