Sacramento Can Rock

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Restarting the Local Music Scene

By Anne Gonzales

Mitch Koulouris is on a simple mission. He wants to make Sacramento the center of the digital music universe.
     “People ask us all the time, ‘Why Sacramento?’ ” says Koulouris, whose Digital Musicworks International is a leader in digital downloads.  “I say, ‘Why not Sacramento? This city has great people making things happen.’ ”    
     Koulouris is at the forefront of a new surge of business people envisioning a lively music industry just on the horizon. While the local business has been struggling to gel for years, die-hard area music lovers — and even the harshest critics — say the levee definitely isn’t dry.
     The music business begins with the artists and bands, and there’s no shortage of raw talent in Sacramento. But what happens after that is sometimes not in sync. Critics of the music scene cite a shortage of properly sized venues in the city, paltry wages, Sacramento’s notorious low self-esteem as San Francisco’s country stepcousin and a recording industry that doesn’t take the time to cultivate talent.
     “Sacramento just has this… thing, I can’t really put my finger on it,” Joe Johnston, owner of Pus Caverns Recording Studios, says about the disharmonic momentum of Sacramento’s music industry. 
     For a number of years, Sacramento was considered a top city for signing talent, but now most record companies have pulled out, complaining that the market is dry. One of the last bands to sign was Die Trying, which apparently did just that. After signing with a major label, the band recorded one album and was shelved.

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