The
Quad Cities' Future Appletree Records is back in a big way this
year, but that might create a false impression. Put simply, the label
- home to some of the Quad Cities' most distinctive musical
outfits - is struggling to find its place in the new music economy,
even as its bands are creating some of the best music of their
careers.
"Nobody's making money," said Pat Stolley, one of the label's founders.
After
a quiet 2005, Future Appletree has returned with a flurry of fresh
music in 2006, including new material from Tenki, Chrash, Track a
Tiger, and Struggle in the Hive, along with a Multiple Cat
compilation and the release of 10-year-old material from Grogshow.
Due this fall are a new Marlboro Chorus CD, a second EP from Tenki,
and a new CD from Driver of the Year. And the winter might bring
releases from Track a Tiger and Chrash. (For reviews of recent Future
Appletree CDs, visit http://www.rcreader.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11425&Itemid=48).
Stolley, a member of multiple Future Appletree bands and the label's de facto administrator, said in a recent interview that many of these bands are reaching musical high points. He singled out upcoming Tenki and Driver of the Year releases, saying that they're not merely good local music but "some of the best music anywhere in the world that I hear."
And Stolley will be taking a stripped-down Marlboro Chorus - that would be him and a reel-to-reel tape machine - to New York City in October for some dates there. "The machine will be like another person," Stolley said. The hope is that in place of extensive touring, these targeted shows might generate some buzz among music critics and spark some sales.
It's a bit of a lark - "I have no expectations at all," Stolley said - but it also represents some of the frustration of Future Appletree. For all the label has been able to accomplish musically, there's disappointment that it's not more successful as a business. "We're artistically sharper than ever but logistically a mess," he said. "We aren't doing these releases correct at all. We're getting these CDs [at the label] a day after the release date," meaning that they're not available to people who want them when they're supposed to be.
Certainly, Future Appletree isn't helping itself when something such as that happens - or when advance copies of CDs don't get sent to college radio stations or print outlets.
Future Appletree bands generally don't tour extensively, so they don't have large followings. And if the CDs aren't getting out, they're not getting reviewed, and they don't get played on the radio. Put simply, the label is producing music that few people are hearing.
Yet many of those issues are part of the nature of the collective that is Future Appletree. The label is not an organization with rigidly defined roles, and that means that much of the grunt work doesn't happen, or doesn't happen in a timely fashion. "You get a bunch of artists together ... ," Stolley lamented.
Sean Burke, drummer for the Future Appletree band Tenki, said that his band is happy with Future Appletree, and that logistical problems are a fair trade for the control, sense of ownership, and shared resources that the label provides. "Our focus is not necessarily to make a living" at music, Burke said. Tenki's primary interest, he said, is to have an avenue to create and record music - which Stolley provides with his studio in Rock Island.
He also said that the label is "in its childhood" and will grow over time.
That sentiment was shared by Driver of the Year's Jason Parris, who said that a collective "definitely has its pluses and minuses." Promotion, distribution, and booking, he said, are "draining. We've become big enough [as a label] that it can ... be a headache."
He added that the label could over the next year clarify roles, or bring somebody on who isn't in a band and could dedicate more energy and time to the business side of Future Appletree. "We could definitely take it to the next step," he said.
Beyond growing pains, Future Appletree is operating in a music industry that's changed dramatically in the four years since it was created. The label traffics CDs in an age when music consumers are turning their backs on the "album" and music as a physical object in favor of single songs and digital downloads.
The biggest change: The iTunes Music Store launched in April 2003 and in less than three years had sales of more than a billion songs. The online music boom resulted in Future Appletree losing the two distributors that handled the label's CDs, Stolley said, meaning that the music isn't available in record stores any longer.
Future Appletree music is available through CD Baby and on iTunes, and Parris said that represents a major opportunity for the label's bands. The single-song nature of iTunes means that "you lose a lot of art" in terms of album sequencing and packaging, he said, but each artist, and each song, is on equal footing. "It just gets down to the song," he said. "Is your song good, or is it shit?"
But Stolley said that it's not merely an issue of how the music is distributed; it's a changing of people's relationship with music. The downloading culture, he said, means that consumers "don't connect the artist with the art."
While networking sites such as MySpace.com can create a bond between bands and their fans, that doesn't necessarily translate into sales. File-sharing networks and promotional mp3s have given many music fans the feeling that they're entitled to music at no cost.
The result, Stolley said, is that while Future Appletree might have sold 200 to 500 copies of each release a few years ago, now it sells "a fraction of that amount."
Yet as downbeat as he sounds - Stolley said he's a natural pessimist - he also recognizes that it wouldn't take much to turn Future Appletree around in a business sense, to get a review to spark sales. As Parris said, "One good review ... ."
The local Daytrotter Web site - whose sessions Stolley records at his studio - exploded when the popular online music site Pitchfork (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com) reviewed a Sunset Rubdown track, which has now been downloaded nearly 12,000 times. And that site has only been around since February. (Daytrotter was featured in the River Cities' Reader on May 17, 2006.)
Daytrotter, though, is primarily the work of one person who's committed to the project, Stolley said. Future Appletree remains a loose collection of musicians.
And although Stolley said he won't commit to the label beyond next year, he said the challenges the label faces haven't hurt the relationships among its participants. "We're all better friends than ever," he said. "And we really like each other."
But Stolley said that for him to continue manning the ship, "there needs to be some return."
For more information on Future Appletree, visit (http://www.futureappletree.com).
