Nomy is the name of the Swedish artist releasing on Record Union who has collected over 8 million plays on Spotify to date. This is a phenomenal achievement. Creating his music from his modest home recording studio, Nomy is proof that DIY can mean success, and that one can succeed online without the help of industry professionals.

“Like most artists, I wanted others to bond with my music. But I wanted to do it my own way and in my own pace. I discovered early on how music had the opportunity to grow on the Internet and vice versa. With my modest home recording set up I create everything by myself. When Guitar, drums, bass, vocals and song are fed into my computer it becomes my music, my sound, shaped in my way” says Nomy.

So, how did he do it? Well, he met initial met success when he sent up his hit “Cocaine” to various music websites for free streaming and download. Word got out, listeners began sharing and the amount of downloads steadily increased while fans gathered at his official website. He also saw increased traffic elsewhere, such as on his MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. When his music got up on Spotify and other online services via Record Union, the response was quite simply nuts.

Nomy was quickly placed on top lists, both small and more established. For example, “Cocaine” played almost 2 million times on YouTube and he dominated the chart on www.allears.se with 10 different songs. Most notable to date is the placing of ”Song or Suicide” as the 50th most played album on Spotify, where since July 2009 has along with all his other songs collected over 8 million plays.

New Album “Disconnected” available now on Spotify Premium

Today his much anticipated new album titled “Disconnected” is available on Spotify premium. Nomy´s melodic influences spring from Skate, Metal and bands like Bad Religion, Danko Jones, In Flames and HIM among others. “Disconnected” contains songs with an acoustic feel and strong influences from country. It is an album with depth, power and striving.

The BBC technology page wrote an interesting article recently entitled “the net helps music sing new songs”. It is a great article outlining the many ways which the internet is changing music, and how musicians are utilizing the internet to empower themselves.  Discussing the continuing role of major labels, the article points out that “Some would argue that with an international reach and incredibly low entry costs, that the internet itself is the newest “major” label”. This arguement is in fact quite strong, for the many of the key roles that a major record label performs (recording, distribution and marketing) the internet also performs, and with a greater volume of music. Technological developments within music recording and production, coupled with the international reach of the internet has made it easier for musicians to record and “release” their music globally. The internet can be seen as the new “major label” for it enables far more music than ever before to be shared on a global platform,  while simultaneously putting this music in a close proximity to listeners who can discover and enjoy it.

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The tendency towards cooperation is what separates the cultural animal from the wild one, but it is only in the last decades of technical development that new digital forms of cooperation have begun to erode the boundaries between producer and consumer” writes Magnus Larsson in an article for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Suddenly there are lots of “prosumers” (a concept discussed in the groundbreaking book wikinomics). The activity of “prosumption” can be seen in the new forms of collaborative and “dynamic” internet enterprises that have begun to overtake their “static” counterparts. Wikipedia has outsourced the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Bloggers outsource CNN and Google maps Mapquest. User generated and essentially cooperative ventures are outclassing centralised domains created not by mass collaboration, but by the cooperation of the comparatively few. Those who consume information are the also the active producers of this very same knowledge, and this essentially collective knowledge is now showing its true potential.

The consequences for social collaborations like the production and enjoyment of music could not be more emancipating. The same developments in information technology which have initiated the above trends are changing the way we can create and enjoy new music. Within music, the distance between those who produce and those who “consume” has also fallen; digital music formats combined with the internet allow us to share our music more easily, and increases in technology allow us to create a good quality recordings from our bedroom.

This is an event which brings music closer to the authentic cultural expression it has always been, and within this new environment music is truly flourishing. With the new forms of collaboration and mass participation we see a window where the “static” gatekeepers of music production and distribution are outclassed by a vibrant and non exclusory celebration of music. This celebration is conducted within a sphere where everyone has the right to an audience, and this audience can exercise a new found power as the determiners of value. With global distribution of music readily available, and effective channels through which it can be promoted more accessible than ever before, music can at last be freed from the structural constraints which has for the last decades been its antithesis. It is nothing less than the digital music revolution.