Treading Water

Anyone with even half a notion of what’s going on in the music industry nowadays would be very aware that the bottom has well and truly fallen out of what was a rather unstable box to begin with. To put it even more bluntly, the industry is in its death throes. And maybe this is a good thing, as the pairing of the words “music” and “industry” felt somewhat crass even at the best of times. It seems that as long as we had the technology to capture and replay audio there’s been a battle between those who create and those who market, with the general populous as unwitting spectator, ignorant victim and hapless consumer.

“It’s fundamentally wrong to build wealth and comfort which is based on the deprivation of others,” stated Van Dyke Parks upon announcing his hiatus from the music industry. What he saw occurring when he made that statement was the demise of the record label as patron and protector and the rise of the record label as scrooge and slavemaster. The later had always existed (witness the daunting workrate of any famous act of the ‘60s) but as the decades rolled on, the music-lovers were bought out and the almighty dollar widened its belt.

As this continued throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, music itself became more of a commodity than it had ever been before. Hordes of pop stars posed in ads for everything from cigarettes to shampoo and acts were signed as frequently for their looks as their sound. Artists were tied to restrictive contracts (hence Prince and his name-changing tactics as he struggled to free himself of a deal that denied him the right to issue two thirds of the music he recorded) while others were signed and shelved, put on indefinite hold whilst legally unable to seek profit elsewhere.

By the ‘90s, signs of decay were very evident and when Public Enemy released There’s a Poison Goin On as a download before even issuing a physical format, the major labels recoiled in horror. No famous artist in history had ever put their album on the internet prior to it hitting the sales racks and the industry reacted with fury. There’s a Poison Goin On was banned from every chain store in America, but it was too late… The damage had been done.

Online file sharing was the rot that ate at the belly of the industry but had remained the Great Unspeakable. Major labels seemed to believe that if they ignored the threat of illegal downloading, the problem would go away. In failing to recognize that the younger generation was growing accustomed to stealing their music rather than paying for it, the music industry made its most grievous error. Had they instituted a legal download system like iTunes twenty years ago, they could have ingrained the principles that they so badly desire people to exercise now and made legal, paid downloads the normal thing to do.

Their neglect has led to a culture used to getting their music for free and now the industry is left clinging to whatever pieces it has left. What this means for us is the complete absence of promotion for music with any creativity whatsoever. Record labels literally cannot afford to promote artists who won’t sell millions of copies and thus the only music that we are allowed to hear on radio or TV is shallow product, a sales pitch in sound.

So where to now? How on Earth do we get ourselves out of this mess and rebuild a healthy and workable environment that can actually support artists that don’t fit the cookie cutter? Is the idea of having a career in music truly now a pipe dream for anyone who wishes to retain their uniqueness? The next five years are going to be a very interesting time indeed…