Drip.FM Is HBO for Music Nerds

Will Calcutt

Sam Valenti and Miguel Senquiz of Ghostly International

It's hard to pinpoint the date when the music industry stopped speaking like a shell-shocked trench poet, but the sky quietly quit falling. Last year, album sales increased 3.2 percent from 2010. That's a first since Napster's Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning came through and crushed the buildings. Total music purchases, including digital singles, now equal the calories Rick Ross consumes in a single 12-month period: 1.6 billion, which is certainly more bawse than anyone expected.

The industry isn't back to pre-crisis highs, and probably never will be. It's like a reconstructed New Orleans: functioning but filled with immense wreckage. Major-label attorneys invented 360 contracts to bleed artists, while Adele and Lady Gaga proved that superstars could still be minted in the Internet era -- even if profit ceilings and common denominators stay low.

Indie labels haven't taken over the game as some predicted, but they've seemingly proliferated; someone needs to feed the blog-industrial complex, after all. The new business model is one of many models. Some labels are vertically integrated management companies. Some press limited-edition vinyl. Others are cassette-only, some strictly digital. Most wring revenue from an array of sources. Pandora. Licensing. YouTube. Spotify. iTunes. Kickstarter. eBay auctions of Skrillex's hair. (Surely coming soon.)

One of the most interesting new streams is Drip.FM, the brainchild of Sam Valenti and Miguel Senquiz of electronic label Ghostly International. The idea is simple: a subscription-based service that delivers releases to your inbox several times monthly for $10 to $15 per label. The efficacy lies in the execution. Ghostly's drip page operates as a hub for news, tours and special offers: subscriber ticket giveaways, fan-artist interactions, excavations into the back catalog.

"When you pay for HBO, you may only use 10 percent of it, but you want access to the perspectives they provide," says Valenti, who founded Ghostly during his days at the University of Michigan, around the start of the doomsday prophecies. Over the last decade, the Detroit-New York-L.A.-based label has launched the careers of numerous internationally hailed electronic musicians, including Matthew Dear and Dabrye.