Op-Ed: 'Save the music industry'- Why?

I do not like the music industry. I would be perfectly happy to see it sent to the less appealing parts of hell. Permanently. It’s a parasitic, useless, obstructive, corrupt, greedy, nepotistic insult to music.

Basically, it’s like most production-oriented media. Get paid a million to do something, spend a few thousand, keep the rest, unless you’re stupid enough to pay people the kind of prices they charge for flipping a switch. (It really doesn’t cost that sort of money to record anything. Whole symphony orchestras, and big operas, are recorded on a fraction of the budgets of some pop music.) Then, to add a bit of excitement, just don’t pay anyone if you can avoid it, and you’re doing quite well. There are more famous deadbeats in the music industry than Hollywood. I’ve had experiences with the industry which I will never forgive, or talk about. However- I play music, I love music. I listen to a lot of music, if much less current stuff now the four track wonders and cookie cutter vocals are compulsively commonplace. So if someone comes along and starts muttering about actual musical content, I’ll pay attention, even though the disbelief will never really be suspended. The New York Times has come up with a piece on a guy called Rick Rubin, the new guru at Columbia. The piece is interesting when you read some of the painfully obvious comments, and think about the position the guy is in. (NYT articles sometimes default to login screens. Registration is free.) There are ten pages of this cultural safari, so get comfortable. For music lovers, don’t have any sharp objects too close. It’s not the guy himself, it’s the industry and its perception of itself. Consider an industry going down the drain. Consider the saturation level of material spewing out of every orifice of the industry. Try if you can to visualize a truly pitiful quality product, trying to get itself marketed in a dysfunctional collection of outlets. These are outlets which usually don’t have much market share individually. New technology has made the production parasites a dying breed, which has effectively neutered them. That’s taken a lot of the incentive out of it for the insider networks who used to make money by picking up a phone occasionally. Downloads and kiosks have removed a lot of the hardware and industrial paraphernalia. Exit the other production money stream. The real cost of producing a DVD is in cents, not dollars, and everything less is even cheaper. So margins at wholesale and distribution levels are sufficiently tight for people to want to do things where they make a bit more hard cash. There’s still money in the industry, but at +/- 99c a download the money gets sliced up pretty fine. Recording contracts are still big money, but they’re not a gift to artists. You may well have a $5 million recording contract, but don’t expect to see any of it up front. The actual amount of give on a contract isn’t that spectacular. Despite the hopelessly cobbled together bits of flotsam which get put together for that sort of money, contracts aren’t handouts. You start making money after they've made theirs. Other people, notably management, production, merchandising, hangers-on, and somebody’s little friend who doesn’t appear to do much but make catty remarks, will take their chunks. Then there’s that other inconvenience, the market. Anyone who remembers when going to buy some music was fun might agree the retail experience leaves a lot to be desired. Inventories are either stuffed full of things you aren’t looking for, or desolate rows of shelves looking like Chechnya on a bad day. Generally speaking, experienced buyers and collectors have the patience to find places where they’ve got some hope of at least talking to someone who understands their needs. Online downloads are proving their worth, if you can find what you want. It is a fairer method of doing business with fans. People are also no longer afflicted with the “single and anything else that could be stuffed onto an album” effect of the past, which really is a distinct improvement. Musicians (you remember musicians; little furry things that think they’re real people) are meanwhile enjoying the pleasures of a production methodology which is at once too simple and too complex. Digital sampling and patches can make anyone, or for that matter any computer, a “musician”. It’s not like anyone really knows the difference any more. But if you happen to be fool enough to play an actual musical instrument, look out. Cables everywhere, mysterious processes of transferring analog sounds, formats and gizmos that don’t do very much but do cost money, complexities where you just don’t need them. It all adds up to a very irritating experience. It’s getting better, very slowly, but the technocracy is no joke. At least one person I know in a band said they split because they spent more time arguing about the technology than the music. So anything referring to actual music has a pedigree of situations which you wouldn’t wish on a roadkill. It’s an obstacle to making music. Add a supply of bloodsucking, unemployable misanthropes, and you get a picture of what making music is like in the early 21st century. Now - have a look at the NYT article, in context with the above. Rubin is talking about actual music. Frankly I haven’t been impressed with “gurus” since the Beatles incident in India, but I don’t envy him. He’s seen the oncoming train, at least, and seems to be aware how thoroughly the industry has tied itself to the track. If there was ever an application to the saying, “We have met the enemy, and they are us”, the music industry is it. The article is a sort of census of musical myths and the industry’s interpretations of itself. So is the industry. If it can see its problems I’ll be highly surprised. It seems mystified with its own irrelevance. Old news appears to be something that's never occurred to them. Such revelations as a song selling because someone heard it on TV somehow leave me cold. So do simperings about The Good Old Days, where just about everyone got robbed blind. See what you think. I hear dry rot.