A friend of mine sent me a link to a website today (http://vimeo.com/2245449). On it, a bunch of guys have posted a home-made documentary called ‘How to Fix the Music Industry’, a hoary old subject and one I have written about before and yet still seems to provoke passion and debate (mainly amongst people who work in the Music Industry - the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn).
The documentary itself took a laid-back approach, positing the question of the title to various movers and shakers within the industry before letting them witter about their own particular area of expertise with nary a comeback question, challenge or follow-up.
This approach may well have been intentional - let the buggers hoist themselves by their own petards - but only really works if you have an informed audience who have a take on the matter. Most people are quite happy to sit passively and let others decide for them. It became clear during the film that no-one was going to do very much deciding at all, the only merit of the piece was that it illuminated the fact, as if it needed illuminating, that the music industry is floundering like a wounded seal while everyone comes up with their own self-centred prognosis but with little joined-up thinking.
In contrast to the Industry figures who felt some sort of responsibility to at least come up with some burbling response, members of the public when asked, either had no idea or didn’t give a fig either way; apart from some Jack Sparrow look-a-like who declared the best thing would be for music to return “to the 1800’s... or some shit”.
And the reason? Like I said, it’s because they really don’t give a damn. As far as they’re concerned there’s a surfeit of music, loads of the stuff, coming out of every radio, Ipod, stereo-system, TV-show, phone, shop, movie, car, airport lounge, elevator... why should they think there was anything wrong with the music industry?
The original question is in fact disingenuous. The real question that should have been asked was, “How do we keep getting paid?” Because at the heart of the matter, this isn't really a question of music, it's a question of money.
If all the record companies in the world folded tomorrow would music go away? Of course not. Kids would still be playing it. There would be gigs, smaller of course... weekend ‘hops’, people gathering to see and hear a word-of-mouth band. Perhaps more folks would return to playing musical instruments themselves, as without a vast machine promoting and marketing music through every possible outlet, there wouldn't be so much of it freely available. People might then feel a need to fill the void themselves; a Saturday night gathered around an old Joanna perhaps?
Maybe I’m being too romantic, but music as a communal experience is already returning to the fore, the rise in attendances at live gigs the proof. The solitary soundtrack one builds for one’s own life only comes into its own when you are able to share it with like-minded souls, even if that only turns out to be one other person... the person you probably end up falling in love with.
Of course now that the Internet is here there will still be downloads and websites... plenty of avenues through which musicians will make themselves heard and eventually, slowly, we’ll return to a pattern of filtering, much like the record companies of old. The average member of the public neither has the time or the interest to plough through a myriad of channels to search for the music they love. Instead people will provide that service. The public will grow to trust in these arbiters of taste and therefore, as they have done before by tuning into a specific radio station or buying a particular music paper, they will pay a fair price for them.
I get bored of listening to the Music Industry bleating. It does it every ten years or so until it manages to come up with a new way of fleecing the public and replenishing its coffers. The last time it managed to do so was when it convinced us suckers to replace our vinyl collections with CD’s. If only they could come up with another must-have technology now. The funny thing is someone else did, and in doing so, the Ipod blew a hole right through the recording industry’s model.
The only way record companies can maximise their revenue these days is by signing bands to an overall deal, demanding percentages of live ticket sales and merchandising rights. To compensate for this loss, the bands and agents ramp these prices to a ridiculous level. As a musician friend pointed out to me the other day, remember when going to the gig was cheaper than buying the album? Well that’s all changed now.
I suppose what annoys me most about the music industry is the overriding sense they send out that somehow they have been hard done by, that they’ve been caught out, blind-sided, had the carpet pulled from under their feet. It’s as if they’re a special case, a pouting adolescent moaning “life’s so unfair”. Yet when you look around, far larger and far more established industries than music are finding themselves under the cosh.
The banking world as we know is currently imploding. This seems to be down to the same frailties found in the music scene; greed, arrogance and stupidity. The City felt it was infallible, and while money poured in, despite all the warning signs, ignoring any doom-mongers, they maintained their corrosive business practices and partied like it would forever be 1999 (...when I see the number of Award shows the Music Biz still enjoys, I see a strange similarity).
The American Auto Industry is also heading for meltdown. Why? Because it has been building the wrong type of products for the last 15 years. It is being brought down by its own lack of foresight, having whipped the public into believing an SUV or 4X4 was the only vehicle worth driving through those rocky canyons of the flat American suburbs. In the 1980’s the US car industry nearly went to the wall because of low-fuel-consuming Japanese imports. When the economic good times returned, they tossed that model out of the window, went Supersized and wilfully created another disaster-in-waiting. Thanks to the volatility of oil prices and the credit crunch, their erstwhile market has suddenly disappeared, forcing Chevy, Ford and GM to look for a 25 billion dollar Federal bail-out, on top of the $25bn they have already received to fund belated research into hybrid models.
Will the Music Industry be looking for government backing as well? Because if you analyse their business practices over the last 15 years, you can see that their investment was also in all the wrong places.
During that time the music business treated the public with contempt. To them they were sheep to be bamboozled and battered. The industry genuinely feels that if you hammer the public’s consciousness hard enough - multiple plays in heavy rotation, TV prime-time, wall-to-wall poster campaigns, expensive videos and magazine covers - they will always succumb. And it’s true. More often than not they do. Simon Fuller and Cowell have built entertainment empires on just such an approach. But note, these are entertainment empires, not music. Their forte is understanding that once the public tires of one of their products, they can immediately replace it with another.
Looking back on their dominance of the last decade in British Pop, these men have essentially, for all the tens of thousands wannabes, brought the world two acts - The Spice Girls and Will Young (for me the jury is still definitely out on the longevity of Leona Lewis). But then the top end of the music business hasn’t really been about music during the last ten years. It’s been about cross-platform selling, product placement, hitting demographics, market share... creating and selling a brand.
Once the major labels began to be bought out by global media conglomerates in the early 1990’s, music itself became no more than one small piece of the overall puzzle. Artists were signed as much for what they could do for the label as what the label could do for them, not just in terms of sales but in terms of profile. Labels were prepared to take a market loss on an act if, having them signed, it positioned the label optimally in the eyes of the paying-public. This was a ludicrous position and one the music industry had wilfully put itself in: sign two types of acts - those that sell, and those that make you look good. One would have thought that if instead they had concentrated on finding bands that managed to cover both requirements, the world of music might have been a hell of lot more interesting over the last ten years.
For too long the companies got away with selling inferior product in the knowledge that thanks to a marketing blitz, the kids would impulse buy. And with the economy strong, discovering that the CD you had bought for £14.99 contained only two decent songs, was no great loss.
But thanks to Steve Jobs and individual track downloading, the arrogance which that propagated went out the window. Kids realised they’d been shafted and now had a way out. Besides, since the demise of vinyl, there was no artwork worth owning either (who the hell stares at a CD cover?) so what was the downside of downloading?
So what’s to be done?
Bottom line it’s about being smart. Whether that means predicting new markets (culturally & musically), forecasting trends, innovating products, spotting and nurturing great talent... those with the imagination, knowledge, taste and wisdom will always rise to the top.
In my opinion those characters within the business still exist.
There’s nothing wrong with the music industry apart from the fact that than it has grown too big and is subsequently over-staffed with people who are in it for the wrong reasons (money & lifestyle). Because of its size, it is forced to sign numerous mediocre acts simply to give its bloated workforce and all its knock-on industries, Radio, TV & Film, which the parent company also owns - something to do.
Four great bands on the label - you only need a small staff. Make it forty - of which only fourteen might be any good - and the costs rise exponentially.
So my prescription? Downsize. Music isn’t going to go away just because of massive lay-offs and less record labels. Let the kids form bands. Let them form their own labels. Let them play for years, scrimping and saving, not going to some automaton Brit School. Give them time - on their own - to get good, to build up their songwriting, their stage craft, their stamina. Stop signing these numbnuts straight out of school.
If any of them really are any good, it’ll become clear. They’ll have built up a following through their own ingenuity, through their own talent, through their own self-belief.
At which point one of the handful of record companies that still remain could offer to take them on, for a fair deal, and bring them to wider, perhaps global audience.
At which point the artist themselves might actually be good enough to create something worthwhile.