Many independent artists love news reports like the following (taken from a news service, Jan. 10, 2001): Record sales tumble-After a brisk holiday season, record sales plunged last week, dashing hopes of a quick end to the retail slump that tainted 2001 as the first no-growth year in a decade. . . Consumers bought 13.6 million albums, compared with 24.8 million a week earlier and 13.8 million during the same week in 2001.

Don't smile just yet It stands to reason that if the majors are having problems, the indies feel better about their own puny sales stats. The strange term here, of course, is "consumers." Who are those responsible for buying 13.6 million albums (CDs)? Are they on any indie artist's email promo list?

OMDs post "charts" for their most popular tracks but never reveal the formula for positioning those tracks. Message board posts by the thousands ask why a song is number one and why another is buried at 3,200. Could it be that the number-one song has more friends connected to the artist? Most of the time this is the answer. For sure by now we all know that the people who bought 13.8 million albums are not responsible for making a tune number one at Ampcast. Or IUMA.

The OMD numbers, like a lot of information given over the internet, lie. And lies about indie sales and public popularity are rampant. Popularity and sales for the average indie artist on the internet is isolated and usually unavailable for demographic research. The majors know where the business is coming from and where, in the case of the Jan.10 report, it is tailing off. Indies are in the dark.

The answer, in part, is a dangerous proposition. SPAM, that hideous cyber-curse word, may be the only way to reach the kind of numbers where there are people available to take notice of an indie artist's product. However, Net Nazis are everywhere and all major web sites protect themselves, in one way or another, from mass e-mailings. If the Net Nazi doesn't report you for the action, then some server will put your mass-promo e-mail into the junk mail stack, where it will sit with ads for porno, free vacations and deals on cosmetics.

As the majors continue to have problems with sales, the indies will do even worse than they have before. One might think that the majors' failure to sell product would help indies, creating listeners who wish to seek alternative product, that which the majors do not produce. However, it won't happen that way. Not until some heretofore unknown force or process or gimmick develops, circulates and proves it can be effective attracting a majors-sized audience.