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June 2004
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Asleep at the wheel Has the recording industry lost control of its market? By Terry Noone
The essence of the modern recording industry is control. Control of what is heard on electronic media, control of what can be purchased in retail outlets and control of the artists who actually create the music. It is the loss of this control which is at the heart of the recording business's current problems. Much of the commentary on the industry misses this fundamental point and concentrates on cultural, aesthetic, and sociological issues. The fact is that the nature of the content is, to a large extent, irrelevant in this industry. The recording industry grew into this model from around the 1960's though at least some of the basics were probably in place long before that. It will be useful to list the elements of the model: Control what can be heard As commercial radio essentially abandoned all other musical formats and concentrated on high rotation popular music, an unhealthy symbiosis developed between the record companies and the radio stations. This is epitomised by the 'Payola' scandal of the 50's in the US. Music industry myth has it that this practise - paying commercial radio stations to play specific product - only existed in the bad old days. The fact is it never stopped. This is well documented in the book 'Hit Men' by Fredric Dannen, and in a recent series of Pulitzer Prize winning articles by Chuck Philips and Michael A. Hiltzik in the LA Times. Control what can be purchased Large record companies have enormous leverage against retail outlets. The threat of refusing to supply current 'popular' material (only made popular by the control of what can be heard) unless it dominates shelf space is usually sufficient to bring retailers to heel. Control the artists Once the means of gaining public attention are controlled musicians finds themselves in a mendicant position. If signing with a major record company is the only way to gain significant sales their bargaining power is insignificant. Typical record contracts reflect this unbalanced relationship with musicians almost invariably making no money from the deal at best and usually ending up in debt to the record company. Quality is irrelevant If you control what can be heard and what can be bought who cares about what you sell? The word irrelevant is essential here. It is not that all of today's commercial music is of low quality nor even that a greater proportion of it is of a lower quality than in the past. It is simply that the model does not require quality. This further disenfranchises the musician since if improving the quality of your product doesn't lift your chances of getting 'signed' how can you develop a career? Control the size of the unit of sale The move from the single to the album as the basic unit of sale is often portrayed as an artistically driven one with much talk of the great cultural breakthrough that the 'concept album' represented. The fact that record companies or their subsidiaries often control the publishing rights (thus giving them a 'double dip' into percentage of sale price) leads at least to the strong suspicion that commercial motives might have something to do with it. The outcome in any case is more often than not you buy 10 to 14 tracks you don't really want to hear so you can get the two you do. Incidentally the demand for original music in quantity that this unit decision creates has arguably done nothing for quality and has placed an enormous burden on musicians. This model worked well for the recording industry for over 40 years and they even used some of their surplus profits to record some 'less commercial' material (but not enough to affect their bottom line or salaries of their CEO's and executives). The essence of the model, however, remained: 'pump it through the machine and they'll buy it!'. There was even a circular variation on the theme where 'alternative' music of various kinds was presented for those who wished not to be viewed as pawns of the commercial music business. Guess who controlled which examples could be heard or bought? So what went wrong? This does sound like the ultimate virtual business where you don't have to respond to your market because you control it and where there is no obligation to pay for the creation of your product. The answers are two: inertia and technology. The first hint of danger that came over the horizon was the Internet. The threat went like this: 'we can put up our own website, sell our recordings from it and not have to deal with those unfeeling record companies.' This threat, however, neatly disposed of itself. Because anyone can put up a website, nearly everyone did. Few worked out a way to develop a profile that could even begin to compete with the record companies' enormous publicity clout. The second was the amazing increase in the quality of essentially domestic digital recording equipment. The idea was: 'we don't need the unfeeling record companies because we can produce our own CD'. Once again easily disposed of. Sure you can make your own CD - but who's going to hear it, and where are you going to sell it? Unfeeling Record Companies:2 Musicians:0. The record companies' model had taken a few attacks but was still unscathed until along came threat number three: The illegal download. This one had teeth because it struck at the heart of the model. It used both the promotion mechanism and the product of the record companies but had two distinct competitive advantages: it was free; and the unit of distribution was the individual track. Both points of view are misleading. In fact, the pirates are stealing property and the record industry is running in terror from the prospect of losing their milch cow. Undoubtedly, we require a legal structure to protect intellectual property in a new technological climate. Recorded music is, after all, the ultimate virtual product. What shape that structure will take is still to be decided. The implementation of legal downloads with mini-royalties is probably a strong indication of where things are going. One thing is clear: the record industry model is dead. With the standard unit reduced to the single track there is no way that the income stream that the former model produced can be maintained. The inevitable consequence of this will be mergers, and a wild game of musical chairs in an effort by record companies to be part of the last conglomerate standing when the music stops. This won't save them, since having a dominant percentage of the new market will still not generate sufficient income to maintain the present model (which relies on huge expenditure to maintain control). The future is wide open and there may be opportunities for musicians to improve their position as that future is shaped. Observation of the music industry over many years, however, doesn't lead to any confidence in that hope. . Terry Noone is the Federal Secretary of the Musician's Union of Australia and is allegedly a pretty good baritone saxophonist.
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Musical Train Wreck Late Friday afternoon: lying supine on my bed, pondering why anyone would put floorboards on the ceiling. (Maybe this was Lionel Ritchie's house? I hope not, the clergy are charging too much for exorcisms these days.) A palaver of errant thoughts such as these continued to resound through my suffering cranial organ, ineffectively distracting me from the dread welling up inside me. Why did we agree to do four consecutive acoustic gigs early every Friday evening leading up to Christmas? Why did I truckle in the face of peer pressure the night before and drink the equivalent of a pool full of beer? When would the resounding chorus of self-derision that did bombinate about my skull leave off? And how did that goat get into my bedroom and why did it have my pants on? Out of bed. I won't be that bad. After all, there were six people there last week, five of them friends and one we paid to do sound. We'll just sneak in, stroll through a few ballads whilst masking the pain of dehydration behind a veil of artistic suffering, and be home before Sideshow Bob finishes his Gilbert And Sullivan medley on The Simpsons. Easy. I wearily descended the stairs into the venue, expecting to be greeted with a small, intimate crowd of after-work suits, the type who would indifferently acknowledge our presence as they finished their Heinekens and trundle home. Woebegone. People. Lots. Blokes. BIG blokes. Big burly blokes drinking beer. We were about to sing ballads to the Railway Workers Christmas party. Like the 5.15 to Upfield, stopping all stations, the noise in my head intensified to the point where I'm sure a strategically placed SM58 would have picked it up. Across the room towards the stage. "Mate, are you a musician?" ("No, this thing I'm carrying is a dreadnought shaped toolbox, I'm actually here to fix the beerfridge"). "Yes". "Do you know any Johnny Cash", he languidly queried, adopting an appropriately masculine stance. "I'll see what we can do". "Mate, do you know any Doors? Our boss loves The Doors, and if he stays, he'll keep the bar open for us" said Harry. "Do you know any Proclaimers?", Beelzebub questioned sinisterly. "No", I murmured as I hastened towards the venue owner to find out why he hadn't put the chicken wire up. On stage. My look of terror wasn't lost on my partner, who had also been accosted, his own complexion pallid. Frantically we worked on set list that would prevent our untimely death, as appealing as that was to me by this stage. These Real Bloody Men would no sooner tolerate a cover of Rufus Wainright's "One Man Guy" than light beer. Open with an original, they'll get bored. Didn't work. The requests intensified. "Know any Manfred Mann?" "Well, no, umm..." "Do you know any train songs?" "The Boss' 'I'm On Fire'", I desperately and feebly offered. "Nah, mate, you know, some'in like 'King Of The Road'". ("Ohhh, that train song....!") Saved. Beelzebub came through. All those years of enduring The Proclaimers on country radio paid off in those 60 seconds (we only knew the words to one and a half versus). They swayed, arms around each other, their soaring vocals replete with Scottish brogue (and Irish, English, Welsh and a touch of Pakistani). We hastily packed out gear, looking to make a timorous but hasty exit before they recognised us for the hapless musical mountebanks that we were, Beelzebub sidled up. "Mate, that was bloody great. 'Tell ya what, it's my birthday in a coupla weeks. Do you do parties?" I ride my bike a lot more these days.
A flying duck am
I... Jim Stanton Jim Stanton presents
a selection of his favourite highland pipe-band renditions of Gilbert
and Sullivan's decorative plaster flying ducks. Furrow highbrow Skidmore Furrow
Quartet This, the latest offering
from Mia Throat's three-man septet, is the most ambitious project yet
undertaken by the former Bacchus Marsh feather-weight champion and butchery
apprentice.
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Asking
the question, 'where is the recording business going?' assumes that it
has come from somewhere. In pure modern business terms it hasn't. The
recording 'industry' is closer to a gang of ancient Roman slave galley
owners with a monopoly on Mediterranean trade than to any modern (or even
relatively recent) business. Their business "structure" is collapsing
because it is fundamentally flawed and that is why the industry is in
trouble. Why does the recording business defend its own intellectual property
so aggressively when it has usually paid scant regard to that of its artists?
How are the recording industry going to deal with the legal quagmire produced
by one US man who legally purchased a download and then auctioned it on
Ebay? The dust from this event hasn't settled yet but the industry seems
to be arguing that he didn't purchase the track but effectively rented
it. This creates a new problem since US law does not allow commercial
lending libraries of recordings. The irony is that the principal reason
for the creation of this law was lobbying from the recording industry!
The
record industry's response is instructive. After several years of almost
totally ignoring the technological developments that lead to the download
scenario, they suddenly responded with massive and widespread legal action.
The illegal download "industry" claimed, in the immortal words of
one Napster spokesman, that they were "democratising music."
The record industry claimed that they, on the other hand, were protecting
the intellectual property rights of musicians.
Some
G&S aficionados may be disappointed that their favourites have been
left off this anthology, but Stanton's appalling taste, even for a car
salesman, is well known.
Amidst
the nearly 20 hours of challenging compositional "entities",
as Throat terms the hundreds of pieces, Gomez Ansell's solos on chainsaw
stand out as discrete diaphanous droplets against Throat's sturdy vocalese
yodelling and Grindell-Phase Hollenwurst Krumperstein's machine-gun-like
32nd notes on electric skillet.