The four-day CMJ Music Marathon, which ended late Sunday with the final tunes from about 1,000 bands, solo acts and disc jockeys, is primarily an exercise in rumor propagation. The musicians who performed at 60 clubs around the city, and during daily convention sessions at the Hilton New York, generally aspire not to conquer the Top 10 or to fill arenas, but to become more potent rumors.
It's not as glamorous as a sweepstakes for pop's next big thing, and few of the performers would be likely to turn down serious offers to be heard on commercial radio stations or to headline concert halls. But these performers have learned to operate with a cult following based not on national marketing but on college radio airplay, press attention, friends' recommendations and Internet tips. It's a realm where a band like the Promise Ring — which is barely a blip in the commercial precincts tabulated by Billboard magazine - means more than 'N Sync ever will.
Chuck D, who gave the convention's keynote speech Friday, described the music business circa 2000 as working on three levels: exploitative, Titanic- size major labels; more adaptable independent labels, or indies; and still experimental Internet outlets that he calls "inties," potentially millions of them.
He predicted that with the inties, the entire music business will grow, but not as fast as the number of hands in the pot. He urged an audience of budding musicians and moguls to learn to get things done cheaply.
That realism was no news to many of the marathon's performers. They have scaled their expectations to the college circuit, which has become a domain unto itself: smaller, more stable and less trendy than the pop mainstream.
It's a zone in which bands seem content to reach only listeners who make an effort to find them, while those listeners pride themselves on their elite tastes, not wanting to share with the uncouth masses. "It's kind of obvious but I still like it," an audience member said, slightly defensively, after one band's set at Brownies.
Many bands come to CMJ to expand their audiences but not to change them qualitatively. As in any niche, the music has evolved to serve ever more specialized needs, polishing up subgenres that don't reach much further off-campus than a 10- watt station. Collegiate bands have become like personal Web pages, hoping to attract some traffic to their particular assortment of eccentricities.
I club-surfed through the music marathon, hearing about 3 percent of the available shows; many other performers were already familiar, and the marathon's program guide assigned genres to most of the bands I missed. Even allowing for some sampling error, it was clear that much of the collegiate domain represented by CMJ has become a stubborn backwater.
College radio stations once prided themselves on being ahead of the public; now, they and their listeners have entrenched themselves on the sidelines. On those margins, they have come to prize craftsmanship and nuance, and they have a strong preservationist streak. In collegiate rock, bands are given time to improve, and some use it well.