I’ll start my first BrokeDownVan.com blog with this statement that I think most readers would agree with: Musicians are fucked.

OK, maybe I should qualify that a little. Up until recently at least, all but a random few musicians were totally fucked. These days, musicians are for the most part still fucked but with a small glimmer of hope. A hope nicknamed the Internet.

A good number of musicians are surviving by using tools already available on the web, from MySpace to iTunes to Rhapsody to homegrown websites. This site intends to help share that information through blogs, website reviews, resource guides and more.

We often ask ourselves, Of what use is today’s music industry? It doesn’t help the best music make it to the most people. It doesn’t match up each listener’s weird tastes with the exact right weird music mix. It doesn’t nurture talent or provide a career path for those who love to make music. If you want to be successful today you are expected to reduce your art to it’s most mass consumer friendly… and then wait around hoping to win the music lottery.

The music industry has, until recently, been flawless at taking an artist (often an “artist”), feeding them into the Big Music machine, and squeezing as much money out of their talent as possible. But the times are a-changing. More and more musicians are realizing that regardless of how successful a few artists are allowed to be, and regardless of how that success is flaunted, it is frustrating and fruitless for the other 99.999%.

A major goal of this blog is to figure out how to keep independent music alive by sustaining the musicans who create it. Hopefully that will help some artists make enough money to cover gas, others to quit their day jobs, others to just throw their sound into the din so that someone somewhere will hear it.

We must beware, the music industry is constantly circling around and patching the holes in its facade. So, let’s grab the internet by the feet, swing it in a circle a few times, and give Big Music a blow they will never recover from!

(P.S. thanks Ani for the title of this blog)