Apple Pushes A Fake Indie Artist

The Real Loren Kramer

While Apple was introducing its new Music service on Monday at the WWDC, it made a point of saying that indie artists would be prime contributors to the service. That's when Loren Kramer was introduced and given about 10 seconds of prime airtime that any indie artist would die for.

The problem is that Kramer seems to as close to a true indie artist as a Blackberry is to an iPhone.

With the world filled with hard working artists slugging it out gig after gig, recording after recording, Apple instead chose an artist who hasn't played many gigs and has no presence on iTunes, Spotify, Facebook, or even a web page. He has a Twitter feed but that only went live right after the announcement.

What Kramer does have going for him is a manager who used to work directly for Apple Music head Jimmy Iovine back in his Universal Music days, and a whole list of privileged friends thanks to a wealthy family that sent him to exclusive Hollywood schools. Kramer is in fact a visual artist who's the editor of an art magazine called Megazine, hardly what you'd call indie music credentials.

Apple really whiffed badly on this one, and while it might not rise to the U2 fiasco of last year, it still proves that the company is now surprisingly tone-deaf to what's currently going on in music.

This could also bode poorly for the thousands of indie artists that were hoping that Apple Music might somehow become a new source of income. If the company couldn't get something as simple as this right given the thousands of worthy candidates available, then it really shows where the company's priorities lie.

So good for you if you're on a major label, Apple Music will welcome you with open arms. If you're an indie, not so much.

You can read some excellent posts about this in Digital Music News and The Next Web.

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