A Question of Industry
You have to be suspicious of the music recording industry. This handful of large entertainment conglomerates, and other various recording artists, who have been particularly active in the defense of their own distribution rights. They have been complaining a lot. They say they are being pirated out of their well-deserved billions. Worse, they say it is everyone else’s fault.
While most industries have found a way to profit from Internet technology, the recording industry (a term I use loosely, and with some regret) has not been able to wrap its greedy head around a successful strategy. Instead, they have let their characteristic opportunism get in the way of true innovation.
Ten years ago, the formula for success in the music business was straightforward. Promotion and lifestyle niche marketing led to celebrity and successful branding. At this point in music history, every music form had its own brand and its own celebrity. Major recording musicians and their labels had a license to print money, and they were so busy at it, that they failed to notice that the currency was changing.
Their core consumers were growing disinterested. It’s not as though Tweens and college students all of a sudden decided they wanted to steal their music. They just decided it wasn’t worth anything. The promotional tactics of the Nineties were fast becoming irrelevant. The albums and singles on offer no longer captivated the attention span, or allegiance, of music’s key consumers, and they certainly didn’t need the products that the music industry was offering. Hillary Duff purses were not a substitute for the bold changes occurring in other mediums.
For the rest of the public, the promotional veneer had already worn thin. Adult consumers were growing interested in purchase affordability and flexibility. The music industry was offering over-inflated boxed sets and pricey concert DVDs. Where was the daring solution to capture our attention? There was no effort on the part of the recording industry to stay ahead of the curve, in terms of manufacturing a relevant product. They were far from proactive in telling consumers how the Internet was going to change the way they interacted with their industry.
Instead, the recording industry has worked hard to describe file sharing as piracy – fleeting customer loyalties as naivety. They are trying to guilt customers back into buying music. As a result, the pact between musicians and the public has never seemed less glamorous.
The public is being spun into believing that albums are not like every other commodity. In the post Back Street Boys era, consumers are now supposed to now understand music is an art form. It is built from the blood, sweat and tears of the musician. It is intellectual property and we must compensate someone for his or her talent. This assertion rides on questionable integrity.
Read today, that music industry giant Garth Brooks has signed an exclusive distribution deal with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Following the lead of other industry mavericks like the Rolling Stones and Elton John (with Best Buy Inc), or Alanis Morrisette (with Starbucks), Garth is going to make some of his products harder to get. What’s more, he is doing it in style. Imagine the cachet that will be added to his artistic credibility. (Wal-Mart: a company that reeks of authenticity and culture.)
I’m sure that this latest wave of corporate synergy between the recording industry and big-box retailers will do nothing to reduce the commercial crassness that makes most people feel so cynical about buying music in the first place.
To boot, it’s not daring, and it’s not what consumers want. I feel no pity for an industry without industry. And I’m going home to download the next big star.
August 23rd, 2005 at 9:39 am
Even worse for the music industry, the biggest stars have gone and made reality shows where we are treated to intimate glimpses of their lives, confirming for us what we suspected all along: Britney really is a moron. It’s hard to maintain a pact between musician and audience when it’s obvious a marketing machine was responsible for someone’s success – “you got suckered into making me rich and famous and gosh, look how stupid I am”, they seem to be saying.
Additionally, the assertions that alternate models for music distribution like file-sharing would lead to a stagnation in the music world have turned out to be false. A great deal of music by musicians without recording contracts that was previously unaccessible can now be found. Some genres, like many of the electronic music genres, seem to thrive in this free environment. And big stars that really are innovative, like System of a Down, seem to care little about file-sharing – their second-last release was called “Steal This Album”.
That said, there are other factors at work here, including the technological factors of increased bandwidth (i.e. ability to download a lot) and the file-sharing networks which are easier to use than ever. It’s true that industries need to find a way to make money in the Internet age. But no one has it more difficult than those who sell products that are easily duplicated on, transmitted over, or replaced by, the Internet: albums, movies, software, news. Anyone whose product can be reduced to 1s and 0s is going to struggle to adapt. Regardless of whether people feel a product has value or not (Microsoft Office is a suite of programs that fills vital roles yet it is massively pirated, for example), if it’s widely available for free, it’s going to get pirated. Albums aren’t like every other commodity – they’re like every other digital commodity.
I agree that demonizing file-sharers and guilt-tripping consumers is not the answer, and I agree that the music industry will need to adapt. What has them scared, I think, is just how much they will need to change. It must be scary to wake up one day, look in the mirror, and realize that the entire business you’ve built has been made obsolete. Some are adapting and will succeed – those innovators who look at problems as opportunities – others are still putting a new coat of varnish on the latest turd arriving at a Wal-Mart near you and will fail. I don’t have much pity for these folks either.
August 24th, 2005 at 8:22 am
This issue – (about a humourless music industry bent on keeping its profits) – reminded me of one fantastic article I read back in December. I liked it so much that I had to buy it from the Globe’s archives and paste it here for you all. Please read on:
“Who says irony is dead? Apple, apparently” – By Carl Wilson (Globe and Mail, Dec. 11, 2004)
In a splendiferous show of good corporate humour, the legal department of Apple pitched in on an artist’s Internet prank last week, contributing the crowning touch to his satirical work about digital music and copyright issues.
Either that, or Apple proved it has absolutely no trace of a whit of a ghost of a hint of a sense of irony. Which way do you bet?
Here are the facts, Mac: Last month New York artist-programmer Francis Hwang bought an iPod, one of the shiny new cross-promotional, black-and-red “U2” editions of Apple’s psychotically popular line of digital-music players and stocking stuffers. It came engraved with the Irish rock band’s signatures and loaded up with the bestselling new album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
Then Hwang loaded in seven additional albums, all by the California group Negativland, and craftily modified the packing box so it read “Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition,” bearing photos of both groups. On Nov. 30 he put the set up for sale on eBay, with a proper legal disclaimer. It got nine bids, peaking at $455 (U.S.), before eBay shut the auction down on Monday, citing a complaint from Apple about intellectual-property rights.
It was the perfect punchline to Hwang’s elaborate inside joke.
To get the humour, you needed to know that in 1991, U2’s label — Island Records, now part of the Universal Music conglomerate — sued Negativland and its indie record label SST almost out of existence over a single called U2.
The track was a sound collage of, among other elements, U2’s hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For with behind-the-scenes tapes of disc jockey Casey Kasem of America’s Top 40 sputtering obscenities after someone called in to dedicate the song to a dead dog named Snuggles. It was hysterically funny.
Equally hysterical but not so amusing was the litigious force the rock behemoths unleashed against this dire threat to U2’s existence. Negativland had been juxtaposing comical fragments for years, partly to provoke critical media analysis, so it tried to use its own plight as a case study. (See the snazzy video documentary The Letter U and the Numeral 2, or the book Fair Use.) But its “culture jamming” was no match for mainstream culture’s gnashing gears.
Thirteen years later, Universal executive Jimmy Iovine said in a press release, “U2 and Apple have a special relationship where they can start to redefine the music business. The iPod along with iTunes is the most complete thought that we’ve seen in music in a very long time.” Knowing U2’s secret history, Francis Hwang saw a way Iovine’s grand thought could be even, well, completer.
“With the continuing legal battles over the sampling and copying of music,” he wrote in the text accompanying the auction, “there has never been a better time for such a tribute to the impact of technology on the flow of culture.”
Hwang’s “artful mash-up of the forces of corporate megarock and obscure experimental music” nodded to Negativland’s significant early defeat in those battles. It was a commemorative act, in a struggle over who owns cultural memory and has a right to build creatively upon it. On the Internet, collective memory tends to win. In American legislatures and courts, it usually loses. The public domain seems to shrink year by year.
This time, though, experts say the law is on Hwang’s side. He was careful not to include the banned single on his iPod, though you can download it from Negativland’s website. In a report in the on-line Wired news service, California lawyer Scott Hervey observed, “He’s just reselling the box that the goods came in.”
Have pity on poor, confused Apple. In a business so compulsively fixated on piracy that police raids have been ordered on small children and grandmothers, no wonder Apple forgot it’s legal to resell an object you own. Even if you modify it. Apple, for instance, purchases metal, wire, plastic and programmers’ ideas, “mashes them up,” as the kids are calling it, and retails this remix as a “computer.”
Don’t get dizzy, but here’s another twist: As quickly as Hwang’s eBay fun was spoiled on Monday, U2’s spree atop the pop charts was cut short. After only a week at No. 1, How to Dismantle. . . was knocked out by Jay-Z/Linkin Park’s Collision Course, the first product of MTV’s new Ultimate Mash-Ups series. Like Apple’s iTunes downloading service, it’s the legit rip-off of a black-market model.
On the dance floor or the web, “mash-ups” are made by DJs or computer hackers, descendants of Negativland who splice disparate songs together into new patterns. Jay-Z’s raps are a favourite ingredient: In fact, Downhill Battle, the anti-music-industry non-profit to which Hwang was planning to donate his eBay gains, made its reputation promulgating a DJ Dangermouse mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album called the Grey Album in an Internet protest early this year.
Jay-Z is finally taking his revenge with Collision Course. Trouble is, while fanciful hackers match his vocal flow to unlikely music such as Queen, Pavement or the Bangles, Jay-Z himself settled for Linkin Park, a guitar band that gained fame by mixing the quicksilver verbal wit of hair metal with the complex melodic invention of gangsta rap. (In case anyone at Apple is reading, that was irony.)
I guess the new flavour here is to do the mash-ups live. But I’ve actually been running a club series myself all year in Toronto billed as a “live mash-up night,” where musicians from clashing backgrounds converge. Think I should sue MTV? True, someone like Dangermouse might sue me in turn, but then Negativland could sue Dangermouse. . . . Justice at last!
Meanwhile, Jay-Z is safely lawyered up, about to become an executive at his label Def Jam. Which just so happens to be another subsidiary of U2’s Island/Universal.
And there you have it, the fervid, paranoid entertainment world of 2004, an intellectual slave plantation where all ideas are property and all their owners also own each other.
It cries out for more debate. But, of course, if you repeat anything you read here to anybody, Snuggles, I’ll see your ass in court.