Since 1996, I’ve often thought about “the problem with music”. That’s when I found an old copy of Maximum Rock n Roll which included this now-famous article by Steve Albini. The gist of the article was that a typical recording/distribution deal amounted to little more than a bad loan.
I no longer think the problem with music is limited to the financing of projects. I think the problem is something more general and more important. If this coffee keeps working I’ll elaborate further down this page. For now let’s just accept the assertion that music is “broken”.
How should we fix music?
There’s a lot of talk about the future of the music industry, often in the context of its relationship to the internet. Generally I see two proposals on fixing the problem:
- Eschew the concept of a music industry altogether
- Empower artists to manage their own sales/promotion/distribution
I like both of these ideas, but I wonder if they’re just short-sighted reactions to the status quo.
Which music deserves to be fixed?
How long has music existed? Ten thousand years? Wikipedia says “The earliest and largest collection of prehistoric musical instruments was found in China and dates back to between 7000 and 6600 BC.”. It’s a safe bet that music predates instruments, so let’s call it ten thousand years.
How long have we packaged music for retail? Printed music was bought and sold a couple of hundred years ago, but selling recorded music is a 20th century phenomenon.
Hear this: The last one percent of the time humans have spent with music has become it’s definition. Ten thousand years of earnest human expression reduced to MP3s and stock keeping units, almost overnight. This is a cultural train wreck.
Internet to the rescue!
Don’t cut your ears off just yet. There may be a way to get rid of the barcodes and restore music to its true self. We’ve seen what RedBubble does for visual artists, promoting discussion, engagement and participation for artists of all types. I reckon we can do the same for audible art.
There are a gazillion web-based companies building services to help artists sell and promote their work online, and in my not-so-humble opinion they’re all backwards. As far as we can tell from outside of their offices in San Francisco and Berlin, these services are designed to capture the value of the artifacts created by musicians. That’s a fancy way of saying they take some money when a musician publishes or sells something.
Déjà vu!
Extracting value from the artifacts of music is what started the problem. Now we have companies leveraging new technology to start the whole mess over again. If they succeed, we’ll spend another hundred years with products where music once stood.
Think of music as a verb.
The real value of music is in the authorship and participation, not in the artifacts it produces. Participation can be as author or listener – our CDs are worthless compared to the moments spent engaging with the work.
Putting on my new and quite ill-fitting business hat, I see an opportunity here: There’s more value in authorship of music than in the consumption of its artifacts.
It’s not uncommon to see a band of 20 year-olds get on stage in front of their friends, to earn fifty dollars and a couple of free drinks. The thing is, they participate in this performance surrounded by ten thousand dollars worth of equipment, paid for out of their own pocket.
Which side of the stage really has the value? It starts to look like Apple should ditch iTunes and just start selling drum kits.
Coda:
If we work on improving authorship and participation around music, we don’t need to encourage artists to produce heartless products, and we have a chance at restoring music to its natural position as a fundamental creative voice available to all of us.
- I reckon RB artist will have a lot to say on this.. I would love to hear your thoughts, either in the comments or by email to grant@soundfolder.com. Cheers. *
Tania Rose
with technology so affordable these days, musicians are now more than ever empowered to focus on creativity within their own time-frame. No more having to squeeze all of your music through the eye of the proverbial recording-studio needle in a 2 day session.
In this way, everybody wins, because the final product is probably a truer representation of the original intention of the artist (providing they have some producing/engineering skills). The artists gets to take their time creating their art, and the listener gets to appreciate art which has evolved over a given period, not unlike the journey of a painter and their final painting.
It also means artists have a more hands-on aspect to their final recordings, which doesn’t necessarily mean a better quality recording…but it does mean they have taken the work from concept to creation.
Being a professional musician (and by that i mena i make my living from music) i could write my own very large response to this, but suffice to say, this is a topic which every musician must consider.
berndt2
fascinating article, and though I haven’t given it as much thought at you have, I kind of think something similar. I also think the internet has been good in some respect for people or organisations that already existed before it : they have a brand, an identity, a presence that transcends the current noise and wash.
One thing that’s irritated me is this idea of having to not just monetise (there’s a freaking verb) everything while at the same time being so stingy with a lot of other things. I was at the Arias last night and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t have been able to get onto itunes and download the very performances I enjoyed. But I can’t. They’re too busy trying to hawk other performances by the same acts done at different venues WHERE I WASN’T. I’ve been on holiday in France and in Italy and Germany and heard fantastic music while I’ve been on holiday. I get back on iTunes and guess what… my local version of iTunes doesn’t carry those artists. Why? Regionalism, territorialism… do you think the artist cares? They’d probably be overjoyed at the prospect of getting new fans elsewhere but the greed of business is overriding that on their supposed behalf.
And I’m sick of hearing great music heard in movies and movie trailers and then finding out that nobody has bothered to put these things on sale online. THE DEMAND IS OUT THERE AND ONLINE HAS ZERO DISTRIBUTION COSTS. But why can’t I get the same closing credits version of the song I liked in the movies? Why are certain tracks only available if you download a full album?
The music industry is absolutely making things worse for itself. What’s totally ironic is that the net, filled with pirates and illegal versions of EVERYTHING, is made up of people who love music a whole lot more than these greedy but massively shortsighted and totally imaginationless corporate twats.
peter
As you know I think you’re onto something. Your challenge is to build a tribe of musicians who feel that there’s merit in using the Internet to assist with authorship and participation … my gut says that a lot of musicians have grown to accept the status quo and so the challenge is to shake them out of it. My gut also says that there’s a ‘snob’ element to music … where deep participation with the masses somehow stains one’s artistic credibility.
But I’m completely on board with the message …
Tania Rose
As a musician who has gone against the “norm” (or what USED to be the norm), it’s interesting to hear other muso’s take on this. One only has to understand the success of Derek Sivers and the independent music distribution company he started CDBaby to realise that the biz has been evolving for many years before the record companies even acknowledged it. The fact that peeps still thing of a “record deal” as something good to strive for is just symptomatic of the mainstream media’s flogging of the dead-horse. It’s an old model, but folks still look at being “discovered” because either they don’t realise that the times have changed, or they simply don’t know (or dont want to find out) how to make a go of it themselves.
The “snob” element to music that Peter refers to is also the myth perpetuated by the old-school record companies. They create a “star” which is untouchable, and therefore create the myth of music being some secretive thing that only they can manage and operate. Basically it’s not unlike the housing industry saying there’s only one way to build a house. Believe the myth and you think you can only have a house if you get them to build it for you