Exposing McMusic

Would you like fame with that?

By David James

There can be little doubt that the music industry is in trouble, despite the improvement in on-line sales brought about by initiatives such as Apple's I-Tunes. A recent feature in the "Financial Times" noted that global sales had fallen by 20% from the peak in 2000. Revenue fell by over 10%. Prices for CDs, adjusted for inflation, have fallen by up to 15% in the past four years in Europe's five major markets. In the documents justifying the recent merger of Sony and BMG, it was noted that sales of CDs by HMV, Britain's largest specialist retailer, have fallen from 62% to 45% of total sales.

A study of consumer habits in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and Germany found that for every consumer who bought more after making an illegal download or CD burn, there were almost two consumers who bought less. On-line subscription services may be proliferating, but they will not restore the former glories of the industry. According to Informa Media Group, even if digital sales of à la carte downloads and subscription services grow an expected 20-fold in the next five years it will account for only $1.8 billion, or under 6%, of the global music market. This pales into insignificance against peer-to-peer file sharing, which, according to Informa, will deprive the industry of $4.7 billion of revenues in 2008.

Such estimates are highly speculative. They require estimating what customers might have done had they not done what they did do: download free music. Overstatement and exaggeration, never very far from most music industry executive's lips, has led to much scepticism and has diminished sympathy for the industry (long tarnished by persistent reports of its exploitative treatment of musicians).

One obvious problem is pricing. Buying a track for US99 cents on I-Tunes is hardly cost effective: at that rate a buyer may as well purchase a CD. Failing to add value is another. Just providing files is not likely to be considered valuable when the alternative is free. On-line retailers need to provide more innovative offerings that cannot be replicated by the pirates.

It is little comfort for the music industry that locating price points and value-adding strategies are conventional business problems. Record executives are anything but conventional business people; it is a chronically ill-disciplined industry, and still as immature as many of its new teenage signings.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the industry is the need to recognise that music, paradoxically, is no longer its primary product. It may come as an unpleasant shock to musicians, but the post-war music industry was never just about music, and often was not about music at all, except as a pleasant accompaniment to the jangle of commerce.

The music industry is really a hybrid of three elements: music (to a point); cultural expression or commentary; and the seductions of fame, or notoriety. Some performers have been able to combine all three. Bob Dylan, for example, wrote highly memorable songs that were accompanied by expressive and penetrating cultural commentary. Dylan also played the fame game cleverly, essentially by scorning it and creating a further diversion.

Other performers have tended to concentrate on one feature. Abba, for instance, was mainly focused on the music, which is superbly suited for the (thoroughly banal) function for which it is devised. Like bubblegum music, it is about confecting catchy melodies with slightly unpredictable harmonies; there is no attempt at more intense forms of expression, still less of any social commentary.

Madonna, by contrast, concentrated more on the notoriety; converting her acquisition of fame into a metaphor of female self-assertion. While those who purchased the music may well have liked the music, that was often not the main reason it held for them a magnetic power. Watching the "material girl" make her way to success was itself a major part of the allure.

Fame kisses fame: Britney and Madonna

Rap music, and its various offshoots, puts a much lower emphasis on the music, and elevates cultural commentary and various forms of urban despair into a form of expression that has proved surprisingly durable. Reducing the harmonic and melodic to an absolute minimum, rappers instead concentrate on forms of expression that seem to offer some freedom from what they perceive to be the heavy burden of contemporary materialism and trivialisation. Apparently the drugs are also quite good.

When the business of music was reasonably healthy, the industry was content to keep this threefold emphasis. Any problems posed by market saturation or weak demand could be solved by commoditising the product and increasing throughput. Just as the film industry seeks to get its return in the first couple of weeks - a technique that relies on marketing saturation rather than actually having an instinct for what products will sell - the music industry is churning out short-life-span musical clones. Blonde-young-thing-with-slightly-husky-voice-sings-lyrics-about-sexual-longing-with-cute-melody -based-on-harmonic-suspension-plus-video-in-state-of-partial-undress (cue mammary glands). If you are wondering why all the music sounds the same and the performers look alike, it is because it is designed that way: a production line for the post-pubescent. Commodities are more predictable and easier to manage. A commodified, replaceable musician is also easier to rip off.

On-line piracy shook the industry, however, and it is having a much greater impact on the first two parts of the music industry hybrid: the music bit and the expression/commentary bit. The fame bit, which is retailed through mainstream distribution outlets such as television and film, is less affected. And it is to fame, and its democratisation, that the industry is starting to turn.

For musicians, this is important to understand. Music, at least in its more developed and adventurous forms, is likely to become far less important to the music "industry". Musicians should also understand that the fame myth - that musicians get more sexy partners, go to better parties and get paid far more money - is being so aggressively prosecuted by record companies and the media that the truth - that musicians are probably doing something else to make ends meet - is poorly understood by the public. The furtherance of the pernicious myth that musos "get it good" is one of the downsides of the heavy emphasis on fame.
The music/fame link-up is spreading into different cultural conduits, and down into the general populace. On sale is fifteen minutes of orgiastic notoriety to which even the ordinary can aspire.

An amusing example of how fame is being co-opted by the music industry occurred with Jennifer Hawkins, the new Australian Miss Universe. She said from her apartment in New York that she had been offered a music contract from a US label. Hawkins told journalists: "I said: 'Mate, I can't sing for anything'. And the agent said: 'That's alright, we will dub over your voice.'" Obviously failing to grasp what makes the industry tick, she responded: "But I would never do something like that."

There are many who will do something like that, and without a second's thought. Never mind if you cannot sing, we have singers and sound studios for that. Just give us your fame and we will do the rest. Recent television shows that combine fashion and rock stars are just one example of how the "music" industry is using its ability to capture attention to garner new forms of revenue.

The more novel and ultimately more profound development is the dispersion of fame. The music industry is effectively marketing itself as the provider of the baubles of fame and wealth. All you have to do is participate, preferably abase yourself from time to time, and, above all, get the most votes from the public.

Compare Australian Idol, or its American original, with talent shows from the past. Judgements are made by the watching public, not "experts" (a happy form of democracy that generates lots of revenue for telecommunications companies). The winners, who succeed not so much because of ability but popularity, (usually because they best match the marketing demographic) are ushered into the inner sanctum of soft drink sponsorships and recording dates, lauded for being someone almost like us, only a bit more so. A life of dionysiac excess beckons, although one must never forget to go back to one's roots, especially to assure former school mates that they, too, could have been just as ordinary, sorry, lucky. Songs are released (written, of course, by someone on the judging panel) and, because of the pre-marketing, there is a reasonable chance it might actually sell.

This appears to be the future of the industry, at least for now: a reality TV/communications technology/mass market machine that provide lots of opportunities for post-modern marketing. For record executives it appears to have happened in the nick of time, because their previous mass market, which they could partially control, had become hopelessly fragmented.

Another influence is the proliferation of musical technology. It is becoming easier to produce musical artefacts because of technological advances. This democratising process removes one of the main barriers to entry: the prohibitive cost of recordings.
One consequence is that some very surprising businesses are starting to encroach. It was recently reported that the US coffee chain Starbucks would put recording studios in its outlets so that customers could become pop stars between cappuccinos. Not exactly consistent with the picture that musical expression can only be acquired after years of wrestling with an instrument and musical theory.

Jason Doonan, a sound engineer (see this issue's ProFile), says: "For the older generation to embrace technology is a difficult thing to do. Now you get families at home with the kids working on the internet with adults. That kind of technology is making kids very aware of the capabilities that they can do on their own.

"For a lot of people technology is going to be the progressive step in music, rather than being classically trained at school. Whereas schools before were buying 20 violins, now they are buying 20 mixing consoles and software packages.13-17 olds are biggest buyers of music. These kids aren't buying Beethoven. They are buying Eminem and dance music.

"Traditional instruments are getting put on the back burner. DJs, Hip hop, R&B, are all computer generated." Doonan says instant music is now on offer. "They can be the drummer, they can be the bassist, they can be the MC, they can be the backing vocals all on a computer system. A technology package for $200 and a computer system that everyone now has in the home makes it possible."

If the production of music is no longer scarce, then the business emphasis inevitably shifts to what is scarce: fame. Or, more accurately, the experience of fame converted into a performance in the mainstream media. Or, to refine it further, the capturing of the public's attention for a period of time that can be used to sell ads and sponsorships. That appears to be the industrial future of music, a future from which real music will hopefully find an escape. In the meantime, we have our fifteen minutes of fame. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen seconds should be quite enough, thank you. Please pay at the door.

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Sundaes bloody sundaes
(Dessert of Vampires)

Three Sundays ago I bit a bullet and sent a demo CD to a certain radio show that I've liked for bloody ages. I'd stalled sending it for bloody ages, mainly because I've sent stuff to radio before, and my confidence drains through the plughole of my soul when the cretins don't put it straight into prime-time rotation. Dark thoughts siphon through, "They wouldn't want any more of it. OBVIOUSLY didn't like our last stuff. Is it me? What will I wear to dinner on Thursday? I wonder how I got that pus-y* sore. Sigh."

Most of my Sundays are very silly and/or strange, so much so that I usually forget to do or take notice of anything and before you can say, "Sunday roast!", it's Monday again. But Sunday three weeks ago I decided to get productive and, happily tipsy, I wrote some letters. One of those letters just sat up and begged to accompany our demo, so off it went that night to the post box by the light of the blurry moon and by the grace of my cold little hand.

That letter and CD lay there overnight doing absolutely nothing at all, but nobody cared yet. They lay close, that paper and that disc, together at the bottom of the postal box, and waited. They had a long journey ahead of them. They were watched by a large grinning bug who had crept in to shelter from the rain, but that is another tale and you may not like its end.

Meanwhile, I lay on the floor where I had fallen (within spitting distance of my bed) fast asleep, and getting faster, and dreamt about falling off cliffs and bouncing like Tigger because of my bouncy tail.

Seven unfruitful days passed by in an instant. Many letters passed each other in transit, but who knew which would arrive? Only the postie, whose mysteries are not for mortal man to know.

Next Sunday arrived, rudely awakening me from a dream but generously offering me a slab of beer. Noticing I was nude and no longer asleep, I prayed to the God of High Rotation and so waited drunkenly all day for the demo program to stimulate my receiver. Finally! As I staggered along the border of consciousness, trying to walk a straight line, the announcer mentioned our band, the CD and a "funny letter". Well done, I thought. They got there.(Tragically, the bug had been squashed, which wiped the smile of his face and along half the letterbox...I warned you.)

The announcer read a bit of the letter. I didn't remember writing "Maybe you'd like your show better if you would play our tracks during a massive orgy". I knew even less about the picture I'd drawn her of a power plug for reciprocation purposes, but all this appealed to some bright corner of her mind, and she said she might play some next week. Maybe the letter had written itself.

The next thing I knew I was calling into a mate's place under the guise of friendship, but with the subtextual intention of using their phone to call the radio station, subscribe so as to ensure the song would be played the next week, and get plied with grog because my friends thought it was so nice that I had popped 'round to say hi.

When I called, I was answered by a woman receptionist who, while lovely, obviously hadn't slept in a week. Deleriously she talked and talked, which was lucky I guess, 'cause I just listened and listened. She extolled my virtues immensely for subscribing and, before you could say "WHADDATHEFRUGENJEBESUSishappening?", she proceeded to hand the phone over to a moderately famous person who was on his way out of the studio after an interview. He talked to me about my letter whilst I whimpered with confusion, and we both went to bed that night broken men.

Another seven wasted days passed by in a second. I contemplated the variations in production of ear-wax between my childhood years and my halcyon days.

Predictably, the Third Sunday of this saga finally lumbered 'round, collapsed on the bed, and together, finally, we listened to our song on the radio. We tiredly looked at each other, as lovers in the throes of ennui do.

Time to bite a bullet again, methinks.

*Well, "pussey" just looks wrong and you can't spell it "pussy" because some of you might confuse the meaning...

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