In the halcyon days of yore (or so the story goes), musicians and record executives lived in a relative state of symbiotic bliss. Musicians would ply their craft at various lounges, working their way through the ranks in their quest for the elusive recording contract, until being discovered by a savvy talent scout, who would launch them into the stratosphere of fame and fortune.
At least, that's how it worked in the movies.
The reality is a bit more harsh. The relationship between labels and performers has always been tenuous at best, with both sides wrangling over who owns the music. To the labels, it's product; to the artists, it's a piece of themselves. And for the consumer, it's both and neither. We hear in the music something that resonates inside us, and prompts us to want to own it in some way. Ultimately, it was the consumer, with ever-changing and fickle tastes, who unwittingly fueled the music business.
As lame as it was, it was an uneasy triumvirate that more or less worked for decades. Particularly in the sixties and on through the better part of the nineties, the music business was helmed by people who actually understood music and popular tastes. Sure, they cultivated artists with broad appeal, but they also took chances on artists that might have a narrower base of support, realizing the superstars were making the business enough profit to take those chances.
Sometime around the turn of the century, it all changed. The corporate conglomerates, smelling new blood, completely reinvented the music business in their own image. Gone were the execs like Clive Davis and Ahmet Ertegun who shaped the benign empire that was the music business, replaced by a new breed far more familiar with spreadsheets than music, who transformed it into the music industry. It's an important distinction--when it began being referred to as an industry, rather than a business, it took on a faceless shape, a sprawling Musicopolis that had neither the energy or the inclination to attend to its core affairs.
Musicopolis is an empire doomed to an ignomonious demise if it continues on its current course. See, the problem with empires is they grow fat and lazy, relying on their past glories, rather than plotting future strategies. By clinging tenaciously to outmoded models, they ensure their own extinction. Rather than embrace the voices emerging from the hinterlands, they seek to choke them.
Article comments
1 - DJRadiohead
Well done, Ray. This was a pleasure to edit. While I might quibble with a small point here or there, so many of your insights ring sadly true. Well written piece, sir.
2 - ScooterBach
Music sounds better if you stop listening entirely for awhile. Then, when you listen you will have fresh ears and be more discriminating. You will return to being a listener instead of a mere consumer of music. When you resume listening it helps to choose music that you haven't listened to in a long while but that you remember liking.
Take a break!
3 - Joe Harris
So, you're saying that there's recent music out there that's actually good? Aside from Alice in Chains and "Twilight Zone," I find that any rock music released after 1980 is shit. You were goddamn right about "mediocrity."
Perhaps the Internet is worth another look. Sadly, the future is now and that includes downloading.
Scooter, music abstinence sounds like something that would cause a peculiar ache. What the Hell are you talking about? Nevermind.
4 - ScooterBach
Music abstinence is like any kind of fasting: it refreshes and rectifies the appetite. As opposed to constant indulgence which just gives vendors a channel to sell you increasingly fatter, saltier, fatter Bigger Macs.
5 - Mark Saleski
great article ray. funny, i got home last night, read this post, and then picked up the boston globe. in the arts section was an article about how cbs is resurrecting cbs records using a different model involving digital music and placement in television shows. (i linked to the 'printer friendly' version of the article, hoping it'll let you by the globe's (free) registration)
i'm not really sure how i feel about it, but it does show that they're doing something.
6 - Andrew Ian Dodge
Thanks for the kind words and what a great piece of writing mate. My editor was pleased with the write-up as well.
7 - Glen Boyd
Musicoplois huh? That's prety damn clever Ray, and this was also a really great article.
For the most part I agree with the gist of your point as well, in as much as the "music industry" has failed to mount an effective response to the changing technolgy of MP3's, downloads, and the like.
But as much as I applaud the forward march of progress, and agree that "the biz" has failed to recognize the writing on the wall, to me there are problems with this whole concept of the instant access offered via "music by computer".
The most obvious problem being one which you more or less acknowledge as being imminent, and I would suggest is already here. The instant access of music downloads has already moved music as an artform backwards towards a single, rather than an album driven commodity. Note I intentionally use the word "commodity". That meaning that instant access commoditizes the idea of music being an artform.
In other words, when you have people cherry picking individual songs in lieu of purchasing the complete work of art one has to assume the original artists intended, the work itself becomes somewhat lessened.
And while I wholeheartedly agree that many full length albums these days yield less than half a work containing actual memorable songs, consider this. When the delivery system of choice is a speaker sized no larger than your thumbnail in many cases, what is the artists motivation to create work as timeless, lasting, and artisticaly bold as something like "Sgt. Pepper" or even a single like "Good Vibrations" or "Born To Run"?
To my mind at least, the current delivery systems are moving music backwards as art, even as they move it forwards as an instantly accessible commercial commodity.
And having worked briefly as a "content editor" for a digital music provider, I can tell you that the mind-set of these folks has nothing at all to do with the music itself.
To them, it is just "content" when all is said and done. You might as well be talking about coffee pots.
-Glen
8 - Andrew Ian Dodge
Thought you lot might like a link to the piece I wrote. You can get it as a free download PDF.
Creative Destruction in the Music Business: a pamphlet for the Economic Resource Council
9 - Ray Ellis
Sorry I'm late for the party--I was otherwise engaged. Seriously, thanks for all the comments.
Even I would quibble with some of the smaller points, DJ--space limitations prevented me from fully exploring some of the issues raised in the post. I see it more as a springboard for discourse, and I think all of who you have commented here have borne that premise to fruition.
I think I sort of understand your "music fasting" premise, Scooter in an absense makes the heart grow fonder kind of way, but, personally, I'm not that Zen when it comes to music. And, Joe, trust me, in the 27 years since 1980, there has been a tankerload of good music--you just have to seek it out, but that's always been the case. The Internet makes it a bit simpler. We'll talk.
Thanks for the Globe link, Mark. I think the CBS Records biz model is one tiny step in the right direction. If nothing else, it gives the indies exposure they would not have gotten otherwise. I've long maintained that all pop culture is interrelated, and it's nice to see the mediums interract in a mutually beneficial way.
Marty Ian--what can I say? Your original paper pointed out the global ramifications of music business workings. It's now linked to this piece (albeit belatedly) and I suggest everybody read it--better yet, purchase it.
Glen, I do appreciate your point of view-- I really do. And I'm glad my little dog and pony show inspired you to write your own counterpoint article. After all, discourse is what it's all about. That being said, I have to say that pop music has never been an "artform" in and of itself-- it's always been designed as a disposable "commodity". The venerable Billboard charts bear that out. And it's alway been a business driven, with very rare exceptions, by the hit single. In that regard, the Internet serves the same purpose radio did before it was overrun by conglomerates.
I don't miss my 3500-plus collection of vinyl albums, any more than I miss my Cerwin Vega modified PA's or my TEAC reel to reel.I don't subscribe to the notion that vinyl has a warmer sound than CD's--it wouldn't matter if I did. The fact is that CDs trumped vinyl and cassettes.
.
Is digital delivery a threat to the music business? Absolutely not. People who want hard copies will still be able to get them, and those who don't have a viable option also.
If anything, this could be a rennaisance for music. Or it could be a death wail of a dinosaur.
You pays your money and you takes your chances.
10 - J.C.FARRELL
To All, It's 5:15 in the morning here in Southern California and I've been reading the comments above all night. I think I'm on my 17th. Google page
reading "Music Business".
This is the first time that I've voiced my opinion on
the current state of affairs in the music business/industry but first a little background.
I'm 54 and a "refugee from a garage band". For those of you who don't know what that is, we really did play
in garages and learned how to play our instruments. I
played a rock festival when I was a kid, other large
concerts, and did a single for years in Orange County.
The BUSINESS MODEL. The current buzz at present is of
course the internet and the trumoil in the "buz". After reading dozens of pages, comments, articles, and listening to interviews, it is clear that the "Studio
System" is dead. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain.
In the early days of Hollywood, the 20's,30's,40's and
into the 50's, major studios like MGM, RKO, United Artist and Paramount, controlled everything. They put
talent(actors, writers, directors) trades(set designers, carpenters) everyone under contract. From
beginning to end they ruled with an iron fist. With
the advent of television in the mid 1950s, their control of visual entertainment(movie theaters) began
to slip. By the end of that decade the system was dead. The major studios from there on in became shooting lots, pre and post production, and distrubution arms. Movies and their major players(actors, directors,etc...) became per-project
adventures. Does this sound vaguely familiar? TV
didn't kill the movie star as much as video killed the radio star.
Today the major labels that are owned by their corporate parent companies, comprise less than 25% of total assets. In other words, they are not the core(main) business of these entities. When they really realize that the "Studio System" is dead, they will merely wander off to count ballbearings or brooms or plastic blow-up dolls. Fine. They were tone deaf
anyway.
A CIVICS LESSON: Now hold on to yourself. Don't react,
get defensive - keep reading and hear me out. Remenber we belong to a civilization and this is only
the first part of the equation.
If you don't like the way that a business owner runs a car dealership or his cars, you don't have the right by mob rule to steal the cool rims and tires. This is nothing more than rationalized thievery. The act of thugs that beat up old ladies for their money because the can.
The second part of the equation is the most important and let me preface it first. This is an issue I have yet to hear from the pro or con side, the RIAA, or the PRO's, artist, no one.
Rome existed for more than a thousand years. Yet daily
life for the average person changed very little.
In the last 300 years, western civilization has lifted
humanity out of the dirt and squalor that it had been
in for tens of thousands of years. Julius Caesar would give up all of his fame and fortune to be where you are now. To look out on a world he could never see and drive that junker you own because it would still go faster than any horse he ever had.
At this very moment while you are reading this, everything around you, that is draped upon you, that
may be within you, has been or is intellectual property. It is the very foundation of the West.
It is our wealth. It is this that seperates us from those in the past.
Thousands over the years have worked in science, technology and the arts. The reward for success has
given us all that we have. Intellectual property rights have enabled us to progress to where we are
now.
Today we are faced with a far more profound question
than "free" music. Regardless of the past business model, are we willing to strip away our wealth?
Whatever you take now, you will miss in the future. "Free" music, TV programs, movies; if you rationalize
that the business model is bad so they deserve to get ripped off or rationalize that someone else will pay,
you are mistaken.
So goes "FREE" music, TV, Movies. At the present rate
and with the present beliefs, we could see the entire
distruction of the entertainment industry within the
next 10 years. Then you can get everything free thats
in the "Can" up to then and that's IT! You can listen and watch, for free, the same stuff for the rest of your life along with the Boob's on YouTube.
J.C.FARRELL