music slaves

Wired Magazine has an interesting article, based around an interview with Terry McBride of Nettwerk, a Vancouver-based management company and record label.

Nettwerk is adopting a modified version of what I know as the DGM model, after the pioneering company set up by Robert Fripp and David Singleton in the 90s. They started with the premise that artists should retain copyright and control over their music: what McBride is calling “collapsed copyright”.

An interesting article, which details some of the apparently extreme marketing measures needed to differentiate your music in the marketplace. Allowing remixes is one thing, but to make an entire album available for this purposes is another. Music in this form could be called “premixed”, needing only to be assembled by the end user, with limited control over the mix.

Where’s the art in that? You might hope it inspires people to create their own music, but that’s as likely as someone being inspired to take up woodworking after assembling a coffee table bought from IKEA. We’ve come a long way from the idea of “the studio as instrument” pioneered in the ’60s by the Beach Boys and the Beatles.

The D Word is Distribution, the sword hanging over any artist’s head. It’s not enough to create a piece of art: how are you going to get people to look at it at all, never mind pay for it?

Billy Bragg summarises the current situation in an editorial he wrote for The Guardian last month:

In the past, if they wanted to sell records, artists were obliged to sign to a big label. Only they had the muscle to ensure that your record got into all the shops and, crucially, that you got paid. Even the independent labels, who made a great show of standing apart from the majors, often relied on them for distribution and revenue collection.

Artists paid a high price for this service, signing away ownership of their recordings for the full life of copyright, effectively until no more could be earned from them. Sure, the artists made some money, but seldom more than 10-15% of what the record company kept from the retailers to cover manufacturing, marketing, promotion and distribution.

The rest of the editorial is about the harsh licensing terms imposed by the new MTV Flux channel, such as signing away all moral rights to your work, for the privilege of appearing on cable TV. Independent artists, understandably, should approach the F Word (Flux) with extreme caution, unless these conditions change.

A simple view of the current situation might make it seem that more distribution options are opening up for artists, but is that really the case? There is iTunes, which has a monopoly position in commercial downloadable music. They gained this position with the help of the big media companies, exploiting artists in the same way as they always have. Their position is being challenged by other businesses, such as the gentrified Napster, and Microsoft’s Urge collaboration with MTV – still in cahoots with the music industry, looking for new ways to make new money from old music. All use Digital Rights Management (DRM) to restrict the ways that music can be listened to.

In the news last month was a deal between MySpace, the user community site (owned by Rupert Murdoch), and Snocap, a downloadable music service started by Napster founder Napster founder Shawn Fanning, to allow MySpace users to sell their music from their MySpace pages. Great, but where does this leave the listener? A normal record store can be a daunting prospect without a friendly clerk to guide you; now imagine a mile-long record store shelf, stocked with ten million different CDs, all at the same price, and you have an idea of what we are faced with today.

In an essay and an interview from 1995 Brian Eno looked at the value that art can have beyond mere music, and posited a role for a Curator service for music. Instead of paying for music directly, you would engage the services of a curator, who would examine your tastes and requirements and suggest new and interesting art for you. There is so much music out there, not much of it any good, that this kind of role is becoming more and more important, and this can be seen in MySpace’s “friends” system, among other places. There have been several attempts to automate the discovery of music you might like, particularly in the form of music recommendation engines such as last.fm and Pandora.

A consensus seems to be emerging in the online music world, including MySpace: don’t expect to charge any money for your music alone, not while you’re an unknown artist with no audience. Because the barriers to entry for music creation have come down so far, you can’t expect to get paid just because you made a piece of music, but there is a renewed appreciation for bands that can deliver the goods live.

Putting it all together, then: simple Distribution, in today’s overcrowded music market, needs a major rethink, a move towards delivering individual people the culture they want to experience – even if they don’t know it yet. In this attention-focused world, wasting someone’s time is a cardinal sin; make it relevant, or people will just do without.

It’s not enough to get your music “out there” if you’re fighting millions of others with the same basic idea, chasing the ears of listeners who have no inherent need for your works. To paraphrase Lily Tomlin: it’s a rat race, and even if you win, you’re still a rat. An artist’s real chance of standing out starts in front of an audience, which is where you find out what you can do for people to help them remember you.

Today’s Daily Mirror has a story about Nadine Coyle, star member of Girls Aloud, who finds herself broke, despite having had major success in the pop industry in the past few years. According to the report, Nadine has been unable to afford plane flights home from wherever she was performing.

What is remarkable about this story is not just that it made the front page of the Daily Mirror – at least the Irish version, because Nadine is from (London)Derry. It is also the subject of an excoriating editorial, the first time I can recall the mainstream media taking this issue on in such plain language. Quote:

What Nadine has found is the dark side, where young hopefuls are exploited and the men who pull the strings grow rich.

These are people who control the purse strings and can make figures jump through hoops so that huge amounts end up in their bank accounts while the kids on stage pay all the bills.

A good quote with which to kick off this particular blog: it’s a subject I’ve been following for years, and I’ll be throwing in some older stories along with new cases of artists being exploited by music industry fatcats.