Well here’s an interesting turn of events. The flailing Warner Music has now hired former Napster senior executive Leanne Sherman in an effort to develop digital markets in Europe, Africa and western Asia. Huh. They claim:
“The breadth of her experience will be invaluable as we evaluate opportunities in music, music-related and wider entertainment sectors, and her proven ability as a dealmaker, coupled with her high-level understanding of new technologies and business models, makes her a great fit for the team.”
Things are getting heated for record companies, and no one is developing new models for music consumption in the context of capitalism. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails (in addition to performer-first [called 360-degree deals] contracts for Paul McCartney, Madonna and Coldplay), seem to be at the forefront of our ‘digital music age’. Evan Serpick for Rolling Stone reported this week (RS1047) that EMI’s new chief Guy Hands’s big new idea for the company is simply to downsize and spend less. To his credit, there’s a lot to be said about the music industry’s taste for bling and big lunches:
Hands was appalled at the label’s wastefulness, citing expensive gifts sent to artists, multimillion-dollar severance packages for executives and salaries the rose even as revenues drop.
All true. But why are they relying on artists to come up with the silver bullet? The facts are plain and simple: aside from a dedicated audiophile core (myself included), they way people experience music has fundamentally shifted from quality to convenience. While it’s true that CDs have incredibly higher quality audio, it’s fundamentally easier for someone to quickly download an over-compressed version of the song straight to their computers (when you’re listening to the majority of your library through crappy laptop speakers, the nuances of audio quality aren’t that important). The backlash since P2P systems have become widespread, have not been toward the innovation of the record industry, but directed at consumers, who now face a jungle of digital restrictions, lawsuits, and the increasing fascism of the RIAA. John Naughton of The Guardian makes this point last week:
Accepting the music industry’s demands would mean a radical transformation of the ISPs’ role – changing them from common carriers into organisations which have to know about every file they handle. This would be technically challenging and have terrifying implications for privacy; but it would also create horrendous legal liabilities for ISPs. As common carriers, they have very limited responsibility for what users do with their services; but as Taylor’s proxy snoopers they could be held liable – and not just for copyright infringement, but for lots of other questionable or controversial activities that people get up to on the net.
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An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.
All you free-market capitalists must be scratching your heads. But let’s put this all in perspective: there is no threat to music here; music will still be produced by people in the world inspired to do so and consumed by everyone who has access to it. What we might see, on the other hand, is a tanking of pre-packaged bands sold to consumers as art. And I’m okay with that. Bye-Bye-Bye Justin!
The record industry is also responsible for disseminating musical art to the masses; I agree. Talent needs to be heard. Music is a source of change personally and politically. We need to stop worrying about our idols ‘making it’ in the biz, and starting listening to music that is made and supported by our appreciation of it.
Sound is free, and in the internet-saturated age (widely available to 1/6 the world’s population), our access to orchestrated sound should also be free. Live music and hard copies of music are where the record industry needs to focus, not on the facsimiles of songs themselves.
The Vinyl Polis 