There's a short piece up today on the Orange County Weekly's website on DJ Kaskade. He's released a new mixed CD, The Grand, on Ultra Records. I haven't really been a fan since he began tinkering with his sound, but that's a different argument we can have another time. The interesting thing to me was that, with the quantity of free mixes available on the Internet, he finds himself justifying the act of even attempting to sell a mixed CD in today's market:

This is a fascinating subject for me, and one I don't hear discussed very often. I've written about in passing before but thought about quite a bit more.

House Music (and most other forms of modern music) used to have a splendid underground economy. I don't mean drug dealing or illegal parties in abandoned industrial death traps, but something that is, by some in the industry's views just as bad.

I'm talking about the economy of underground mix tapes. If you were around in the 1990s, you probably remember buying dubbed Maxell cassette tapes from record stores or the DJ himself. There were international networks of mix tape traders, and even a few backyard mail order companies.

None of it was legal then and it's not legal now. It was, however, regarded as a sign of the health of House Music. Outside of a few shows here and there, House Music hasn't been on the radio in most US markets - certainly not in a 24 hour format - in years. The recording industry for its part has almost always been focused on selling music to DJs. This left a huge, untapped market filled by the underground mix tape economy.

It didn't make anyone tons and tons money, but here's the thing: everyone did it. Mark Farina and Derrick Carter are international stars now, but at the time they were working at Gramaphone Records in Chicago and their mixes always sold well. I should know: I still have some of them.

The underground mix tape economy worked like this:

Who was the loser here? The record store sold vinyl, the DJ was able to buy more music and maybe have a hundred bucks or so left over and the only person not making bank was the non-DJ music junkie, who for his ten bucks got 60 minutes of music that even then you couldn't hear on the radio. Buying more music meant the labels and artists made sales they wouldn't have otherwise had, too.

But something happened which utterly destroyed the underground mix tape economy. It's the same thing that happened to newspaper publishers and the rest of the music industry. The Internet made the production costs of distributing a mix non-existent, the perfect duplication of the original music possible and the record store (though not Gramaphone or another Chicago vinyl shop we love, Kstarke) has gone the way of the spotted owl and Crystal Pepsi. The new non-economy of underground mix tapes works like this:

As you can see, NOBODY is making bank anymore - except for that non-DJ music junkie, who in a few hours can now grab enough mixes to last for weeks.

In the final analysis, two losers emerge from this. The DJ used to make tapes for promotion and to pay for still more new music, and maybe the tiniest bit of scratch left over. He can no longer buy as much music as he used to, which filters down to lower sales for the record label releasing the music and the artists producing it as well.

But the real loser is the record store. I know for a fact that shops that cater to House Music still have people that wander in wanting to buy mixed CDs (though they're more likely to want to buy something from a Lego or a Rahaan or whoever your local hero is than Kaskade, who they probably have never heard of), but there's no doubt that the culture has declined. There's still a market for film projectors too, but not enough to justify calling it an economy.

How much money was the underground mix tape economy worth in the 1990s in a city like Chicago, which has far more DJs than clubs that can support them? Individually not much, but collectively it's nothing to sneeze at. When a hundred DJs made a hundred copies of a mix every month, that's a sizable amount of cash sloshing around through the House Music scene (back of the envelope math: 100 x 100 x $10 = $100,000 per month, or $1.2 million per year). That money's gone.

As a music fan, I can tell you that I've spent exactly 1 second worrying about how the DJ playing that slammin' track got ahold of it. I expect labels and producers worry about that all the time, but the only thing the dancefloor worries about is whether or not the tune is good - not if someone downloaded it off RapidShare or got it from his buddy.

Fully licensed and legal mixed CDs are still out there, though they're struggling for existence - OM Records is still putting stuff out, and Mark Farina is not likely to stop making Mushroom Jazz anytime soon.

But that underground area is dead and gone and won't come back unless we wake up one day and an angry Jehovah has taken the Internet away.

Image, oddly enough, from OM Records.