Rock and Roll is the new
capitalism!!!!
Musicians have always been the
stormtroopers of the enterprise
economy. Whether it's the
archetypal Thatcherite small business
of Billy Bragg, or the dream
factories that spin out Take That
or the Spice Girls, the music
business has always been about 99%
business. That business re-invents
itself at a speed that puts
the rest of the economy to shame.
Every few years a totally new
mechanism comes along that
allows the struggling musicians and
indie labels to be the
parasitic slugs of five years time.
From Sheet Music to shellac,
singles to LPs, CD to the Internet,
at each stage new technology
suddenly allows you to get into the
mainstream on the back of a
few hundred pounds. Some built
businesses. Others were vanity
publishers or, lowest of the
low(!), hobbyists.
Joe Meek in the UK and Berry Gordy
in Detroit built studios
in their bathrooms and basements in
the 50's and early 60's.
This enabled them to create hits
cheaper than the "professional"
studios controlled by the big
labels. Richard Branson created
Virgin to replace several layers of
intermediaries between the
recordmakers and the public. Punk
was the convenient
revolutionary label, but the real
change was the fact that for
£350, you could release a thousand
singles and get airplay.
Cheap drum machines, sequencers and
sound effects mixed
with record decks spawned the house
boom. Baby Bird et al in the
last few years brought us literal
bedsitter albums -
professional radio-friendly hits
created at home with a few
hundred quids' worth of recording
equipment.
In every case, a few years on, the
louche excesses of sex,
drugs and rock'n'roll set in. The
artistes and their hangers-on
gain habits that thousands of music
fans pay for. They create
ever-increasing rip-off concepts to
soak the public. Six
different versions of the same
single in lovely coloured
packaging? £20 for a t-shirt?
£300 for a leather tour jacket?
Rip-off or enterprise?
And now we have "MP3"
files on the internet - record pressing
and distribution for free, and the
tapeless, diskless Walkman
that stores hours of songs at
better than cassette
quality. All the old chestnuts are
falling from the trees again.
"Democratising access to
music" "Struggling artists can get
publicity and audiences for their
resolutely non-commercial
work", "This will kill
off the music industry"
A few hours at www.mp3.com will net
you an insight into the
phobia of the "fat guy in a
Lexus". Wade through the
semi-literate doggerel on the
discussion groups and see how the
Grateful Dead fans find common
cause with the gun-toting
militiamen of Michigan. Music on
the internet, and the freedom
to make free copies whenever,
wherever, is about freedom.
Well as a recent popstar said,
round about the time he
decided that he, rather than the
record company, would decide
which bands his profits would
subsidise, "I don't want your
freedom!". Once upon a time,
the labels would sign 20 acts. 17
would bomb and lose them a lot of
money. Two would break even
and be dropped, and one would pay
for the others. Now the
successful no longer want to
subsidise the 19 no-hopers. Or if
they do, it's their mates, their
taste, their terms.
And how the citizens of mp3.com
love to howl in protest at the
idea that SDMI (Secure Digital
Music Initiative - an industry
body setting standards in music to
include copy protection)
might restrict their freedom. The
"government" of mp3.com, who
recently netted several millions of
dollars by floating their
company on the back of their music
liberation efforts talk a lot
about helping the little guy -
musician or listener. To their
credit, they have acknowledged the
importance of charging for
songs - so bands and writers can
get some payback. But all the
while, they take 50% of the sale
price of downloaded tracks - a
reduction on the 80-90% that VAT,
record shops, distributors and
labels keep, but all they need to
keep is a file on a hard disk,
an internet link open, and a (very)
few programmers to organise
the site. Unless their customers
make illegal copies, they will
coin it in.
"Meet the new boss...same as
the old boss" (The Who, Won't get
Fooled Again, for those of you too
young to remember)
If you want to give music away for
free there has always
been a way. it's called busking. At
best the authors and
performers of the 50,000 songs on
mp3.com, (mainly by unknowns
beavering away in bedroom studios)
will become the cyber-buskers
of tomorrow. I wrote and sang and
recorded in my garret, outside
the Pompidou Centre, in Greenwich
Village bars, Printers Alley
in Nashville, Detroit Blues Bars,
and the Tube and Covent Garden
in London. I did floor spots at
folk clubs.
I ran Edinburgh Songwriters Showcase. In all of these I barely covered
the cost of travel and a pint. Nice
if you can afford it.
For a few years in the 1980's I did
make a living - releasing
records and tapes and touring round
Universities and Clubs. I
joined PRS and MCPS, and discovered
that the royalties for one
national radio play, or for doing
my own stuff while a support
act to big act, netted more than
the gig fees did.
The industry survives, because it
creates mechanisms for
mass consumption, and these adapt
as fast as I said at the start
of this article. Somewhere along
the way it affords the
opportunities for writer-performers
like John Hiatt and Richard
Thompson to play all over the world
to a few hundred people in
each town, and to sell a few
thousand records in each of several
countries. But when Bonnie Raitt
covers one of their songs,
that's when they earn enough to
live. "I'd like to thank her for
putting more'n'a few sets of wheels
on the bus" John Hiatt(1993
Glasgow and probably a few other
towns!).
So, yes, the internet offers
opportunities, but deal with the
central questions before you
bother. Is this just to buy you
drink'n'drugs, or to feed a family
and pay the rent. Are you
going to create something
distinctive that everyone will want to
hear, or will this just be another
professional-sounding
radio-friendly track like the other
50,000 I can download. Or
even worse, are you doing this
"just for yourself"? In which
case, why bother telling the rest
of us?
As Billy Connolly said (to a
heckler) "You need a good agent,
pal, instead of staying in the
dark, handling yourself!"
İTom McEwen 1999
