Gambling with the whore of Babylon

Promoting the music lottery

By David James

What is the music industry becoming? Currently, there is a flurry of legal action and punitive endeavours. We have the court case against Kazaa that is revealing that record companies are quite capable of engaging in their own form of net warfare, in effect bombing the Kazaa network with false files. In the US, "agents" of the record industry, dressed in Drug Enforcement Agency-style jackets are bursting into the houses of wicked under-age file-sharers, teaching them what's what. Hundreds of prosecutions are being mounted in America; in Australia two young file sharers at Melbourne University are lucky to have stayed out of jail.

All such activity looks a little like trying to stop the tide with a teaspoon; attempting to maintain "business as usual" by ignoring what businesses normally do. It is not going to happen. Whatever the outcome of the record industry's attempts to protect itself, their control over production and distribution - two of the main elements of their competitive advantage for half a century -- is being undermined, leaving them with marketing as their
main competitive edge. To use the jargon of management consulting, they are becoming less capital intensive and more knowledge intensive.

It is not an unusual trend: such a tendency is occurring in many industries. That it is a surprise to the music industry is further evidence that music has rarely operated like other businesses (although record executives often have a wide array of business skills). Their monopolistic control over production and punitive labour practices have protected the industry from having to adapt. Almost no other industry treats its "workers" (musicians) as equal partners in risk yet unequal partners in rewards or anything else going -- it is only because musicians are desperate for "success" that such unequal bargains can occur. The extremeness of the music industry's response to changed technology (which goes as far back as the introduction of audio tapes) is symptomatic of how much the music industry has enjoyed a protected position and how much it expects that protection to continue.

Much of this is well known and the industry's protestations of injustice - squeals as hypocritical as they are unconvincing (since when did the recording industry protect musicians rights?) -- are made mainly for political leverage. Privately, recording industry executives know the changes are irresistible. The more interesting question to answer is: What will the industry become?"

Predictions are difficult, especially when they involve the future. But one thing seems sure: the emphasis will shift to marketing, and that will mean a contest for attention. In over-supplied markets, capturing the attention of the consumer becomes the principal contest. The contest is being deeply influenced by reality TV, an odd phenomenon in which consumers watch people just like them behaving just like they would -- all to help watchers be more like they already are. It attracts a mass market defined not so much by
demographic as by its sense of its own similarity with others. In Australian Idol, for example, the judges do not decide, the consumers with phones do. The judges' analyses may actually have the opposite effect to that intended. A happy confluence of the demotic and the materialistic.

A metaphor for what might happen to the music business can be found in the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges' delicious tale "The Lottery of Babylon". In Borges' story, the lottery is created by a shadowy organisation: The Company. It starts out like any typical lottery, but evolves into one which offers prizes for the winners and consequences for the losers. In other words, a lottery just like the music industry is today, where those allowed admission may thrive, but may also face heavy penalties. Many musicians with a string of hits have still found themselves in punishing debt.

Until recently, this had been kept mostly secret. The musicians were silent, usually hopeful that they would get another deal. Few would be prepared to go public (Credence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty was an exception in taking record companies, unsuccessfully, to court)

But in Borges's tale, the lottery changes by developing new forms of entertainment, toying with those who play the game. This is what is occurring in the music industry. The ritual humiliation of musicians has become part of the entertainment: whether it be the failure to win another night on Australian Idol, or the inability to get a fair deal on a record contract or the dry satire of music executives on SouthPark. Borges hits on the reason for the appeal:

"Naturally, those (conventional) so-called "lotteries" were a failure. They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealed not to all a man's faculties, but only to his hopefulness. Public indifference soon meant that the merchants who had founded these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone tried something new: including among the list of lucky numbers a few unlucky draws. This innovation meant that those who bought those numbered rectangles now had a twofold chance: they might win a sum of money or they might be required to pay a fine--sometimes a considerable one. As one might expect, that small risk (for every thirty "good" numbers there was one ill-omened one) piqued the public's interest. Babylonians flocked to buy tickets."

In Borges' tale, the complexity of the lottery increases. Monetary prizes are eliminated, and replaced only with positive experiences. Additionally, lotteries are drawn upon other lotteries, ad infinitum.

"Some time after this, the announcements of the numbers drawn began to leave out the lists of fines and simply print the days of prison assigned to each losing number. That shorthand, as it were, which went virtually unnoticed at the time, was of utmost importance: It was the first appearance of nonpecuniary elements in the lottery. And it met with great success--indeed, the Company was forced by its players to increase the number of unlucky draws."

Borges also describes how the lottery was democratised. This, too, is happening to music. Rather than musicians being considered producers of work, they are increasingly being seen as no different from anyone else. Karaoke as democracy. Borges again

"The lower-caste neighborhoods of the city voiced a different complaint. The members of the priestly class gambled heavily, and so enjoyed all the vicissitudes of terror and hope; the poor (with understandable, or inevitable, envy) saw themselves denied access to that famously delightful, even sensual, wheel. The fair and reasonable desire that all men and women, rich and poor, be able to take part equally in the Lottery inspired indignant demonstrations-- the memory of which, time has failed to dim. Some stubborn souls could not (or pretended they could not) understand that this was a novus ordo seclorum, a necessary stage of history.... the masses of Babylon at last, over the opposition of the well-to-do, imposed their will; they saw their generous objectives fully achieved. First, The Company was forced to assume all public power. (The unification was necessary because of the vastness and complexity of the new operations.)"

Borges continues the logic to an infinite regress. The lottery is made secret, free of charge, and open to all. The mercenary sale of lots is abolished. Australian Idol or X Factor for all:

"The consequences were incalculable. A lucky draw might bring about a man's elevation to the council of the magi or the imprisonment of his enemy (secret, or known by all to be so), or might allow him to find, in the peaceful dimness of his room, the woman who would begin to disturb him, or whom he had never hoped to see again; an unlucky draw: mutilation, dishonor of many kinds, death itself."

 Eventually money is scrupulously withheld from those who play the game, just as it is being surreptitiously removed in the music industry:

"Incredibly, there was talk of favoritism, of corruption. With its customary discretion, the Company did not reply directly; instead, it scrawled its brief argument in the rubble of a mask factory. This apologia is now numbered among the sacred Scriptures. It pointed out, doctrinally, that the Lottery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the universe, and observed that to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not contravene it."

Borges pursued the logic of universal chance in his usual orgy of literary self reference: a reductio ad absurdum  concealed within a conceit inside a paradox that alludes to a contradiction. Any analogy between the music industry and the Argentinean genius's gorgeous irony breaks down soon enough.

But there is a likeness in that the mythology of chance has become embedded in the music world. Borges' The Company seems oddly familiar -- not unlike the record and television executives who roll dice on the fate of others:

"Under the Company's beneficent influence, our customs are now steeped in chance. The purchaser of a dozen amphorae of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one contains a talisman, or a viper . The Company, with godlike modesty, shuns all publicity. Its agents, of course, are secret; the orders it constantly (perhaps continually) imparts are no different from those spread wholesale by impostors."

Douglas Wolk, writing on Salon.com, said that "The Lottery of Babylon" should be "read as Borges no doubt intended, as a precise allegory of the dot-com IPO market and internal Web commerce." This is clearly ridiculous. The dot.com market had not been invented yet.

But exploitation of musicians certainly had. We can be sure that they were at the front of the queue buying tickets to Borges' Babylonian lottery.

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Barefoot across the lava plains to discover the remains of Mixdown man

Knobs. Lots of knobs. More knobs than a Young Liberal's convention. Big ones, little ones, coloured ones. I don't know what any of them do anymore. I can hear them laughing at me, perfectly eq'd mocking guffaws, complete with phaser and a touch of reverb. The studio mixing desk has turned on me.

24 hours in the studio, and cabin fever has taken hold. I wander into the next room, leaving my cohorts to listen to the guitar solo for the 37th time. More coffee, strong enough to kill a brown dog twice. Goes well with the tic-toc biscuits (now only white ones left) and naan, leftover from the barrow load of Indian take-away we bought the night before in a attempt to shake our musical aboulia. All it shook was the toilet.

It seemed like an easy enough task - two days to mix a CD, with the entire band involved. Two days of creative freedom, a nurturing environment, a musical love-in at this recording empyrean. An eclectic creation encompassing the various influences of everyone from the bass player to the next-door neighbour's Labrador. But like a Milli Vanilli live performance, it's all gone horribly wrong.

The music's starting to resemble a cacophonous pastiche somewhere in the middle of Steve Malkamus, Mike Stern, Pearl Jam, Guy Sebastian and Primus. I can't tell the difference between the six different effects we've tried on the vocals. The guitars are screeching like banshees. The bass is so processed I could well have been playing a jug, and the kick drum level is threatening to launch the speaker cones onto the floor.

The engineer, too, has transformed, his patience whittled away like the host of a two-year-old's birthday party. He was pleasant and affable man at the outset, willing to indulge our naive enthusiasm and blinding ignorance. He now looks 20 years older and is chain-smoking enough to effect a four-point rise in Philip Morris' share-price. The veins on his forehead have taken on a varicose appearance, and he is muttering something about prima donnas, limbless bodies and an early retirement to take on a Jims Mowing franchise. I'm not sure, but I suspect what he's threatened to do with the drummer's snare is anatomically impossible.

From the mixing room I hear screams from our lead singer, as the formally civil disquisition with the guitarist concerning the artistic merits of his lead-break descends into an exchange of vicious imprecations, and one forcibly inserts a burning cigarette in the other's eye. The drummer is cowering in the corner sucking his thumb, whimpering, rocking back and forward and clutching a ragged Pro-Tools manual. He is the picture of a broken man.

With the sounds of disharmony swirling in my tired brain, I trudge wearily upstairs to the shaken toilet. I stop and look out the 2nd story window to the gloomy rain-sodden evening. It looks so inviting. Surely I could shimmy down the drain pipe, skulk across the very familiar bottle shop car park, down the grassy embankment and lie between the railway lines, then hitch myself on the axle of the 7.15 to Frankston.

NEXT time, I'm doing a solo acoustic CD.

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