Is the net destroying music? According to the major labels, it is.
The answer?
- Mount a massive, world-wide dis- and misinformation campaign about how ‘illegal’ music distribution is ruining the bidniz.
- Call your customers criminals and thieves.
- Try to sue them into becoming compliant consumers of cookie-cutter corporate ‘product’.
- Use governments as taxpayer-funded enforcement agencies with ISPs as online copyright police, acting against their own customers.
- Call it the Three Strikes campaign and under it, on corporate say-so, ‘warn’ alleged file sharers twice, and then cut them off the net, and all without any semblance of due process or legal protection.
We recently ran an item from Tag Music’s Ted Cohen quoting him as saying the net was “supposed to be the ultimate leveler, great music would be able to find its audience, the ‘big label’ gatekeepers would no longer control access to the masses.”
But, he observed, “things haven’t exactly played out that way,” concluding, “You’ve got to continually engage with your fans, encourage and incentivize them to ’spread the word’. BLOG, TWITTER, POST, make at least some of your music available for free to your public, let them know how good you really are! At every gig, grow your mailing list and your army, make some noise, it will pay off.”
Clark Sorely (right), a record producer and music composer in Ayrshire, Scotland, is building Legacy Records as a vehicle for current music works. So his interest in what’s happening online is somewhat more than academic and in a comment post, he points out far from collapsing, the music business is in “rude health”.
It’s the record business that’s “screwed,” he says, going on >>>
When I started out, the options available were similar to the ones that still exist today. Here are some: get a qualification and teach, get a qualification and join a professional orchestra or choir, get accomplished and become a session player, become a live performer, become a producer or engineer, open a recording facility, join or form a function band, compose music for visuals, advertising and broadcast. Or a concoction thereof.
Granted, some of these are not very sexy. But we’re talking jobs here. A careers officer might counsel caution and rightly so. The arts in all its forms is a precarious endeavour. But he wouldn’t shoo a student from the room who suggested any of the above. They are tangible. He might shoo If the student suggested becoming an artist or a songwriter and pursuing a record deal.
Why?
Because that would be the equivalent of buying lottery tickets as a career choice. It’s not an impossible prospect just an unlikely one. It always was. Nothing has changed in that regard except it is even more unlikely now.
Of all musicians, a very small fraction got on the record business gravy train. All but a small fraction of them were thrown off again. Of the remainder another small fraction got to drink from the cup. Being an artist in the record business is not and never was a viable career option. So why do the discussions around the various forums including some of Ted Cohen’s remarks here seem to assume that it is?
The new networks and associated technology add something extra to the business of making music whether one is involved professionally or recreationally. They take something away from the traditional business of making records. And that loss hampers virtually no one other than the gravy train people. So to ask what are musicians to do is a legitimate question with a simple answer: find work! To ask what are the folks on the train to do is like asking what will kings and queens do when the world is a republic. Why would anyone care?
And on his Soapbox blog, “the importance of popular music will diminish,” says Clark, continuing >>>
When an art-form becomes something that many people can do, when the skills and qualities associated with it have been resolutely identified, analysed and perfected, it no longer retains one of its essential qualities: uniqueness.
For art to achieve consensus value it has to come across unique. The people who create it need to be doing something only a few can even if all they do is win a talent show. It is their exceptionalness that gives them legitimacy and authority, their passport to importance. Such conditions are evaporating in the present age and it is for this reason that I predict the end of popular music as a cultural reference within a generation.
This is not of course to proclaim the end of music itself, only new music with broad appeal. More significantly it means an end to the idea of greatness. To be great an artist had to be approved by the mass with its singular platform and its tendency to a singular view, a view which pretty much everyone recognised. With mass culture becoming infinitely fragmented then no artist can rise onto the platform because the platform itself is effectively being taken down. Without that platform there is no widely shared recognition of what is approved. That means no consensus and so I think it fair to say that the Age of Great is over. It is over at least for a while to be reinvented perhaps in another era.
Greatness has gone only in the sense that it is no longer possible to be currently great. The celebrated artists of the past aren’t going anywhere. They are preserved for posterity in recorded works. Their cachet will increase with time as their value gets passed down and rediscovered by each coming generation. And these are the defining characteristics of greatness I think: consensus then posterity. With no consensus there can be no posterity, so greatness in the arts with its need for mass acceptance might turn out only to have been a passing phenomenon specifically of the industrial age.
All the popular music forms as they have been fashioned so far are now exhausted. The music of the folk traditions, of classical, of jazz, of the multiple genres of the rock era, are now only revisited and homage paid to the masters of antiquity. There are no new movements on the horizon, and even if there were, with the dismantling of the mass platform they would have a problem being heard above the noise of self-expression brought about by the Internet, a platform which allows everything to be in the public domain. To achieve consensus in any large degree is becoming impossible.
“It was truly exciting to be born into a great age as I was in 1956 when Miles Davis was on the cusp of producing his greatest work, Elvis had just happened and The Beatles were around the corner. The following three decades produced an explosion of musical imagination which rivalled anything that had come before it. Significantly this impressive flowering was cultivated in an elite environment. Only the chosen few from any pool of talent were given a voice. Their exclusive status made their appeal all the more alluring. While others were relegated to obscurity the “stars” shone all the more brightly, as much a consequence of their privileged status as their abilities. The rarified world of such elite players in the arts is passing being replaced by something much more devolved.
I don’t say any of this with foreboding. Music will always have its place. But for a while it is going to be defined by its posterity rather than its currency. This will be difficult for my generation to grasp, a generation brought up to consider greatness in contemporary music a part of the natural order. It was not always so. There were few to match Beethoven and Mozart in classical music throughout the 19th Century and no new towering greats in jazz since Davis and Coltrane. The Beatles are still the benchmark for pop and will probably remain so.
“Music might now return to its traditional roots, to a participation activity in which anyone can be involved,” Clark says, adding:
“Your community is just as likely to be a virtual one, connected through online networks. Artists who chose to follow the muse as a way of life may earn a modest income this way supported by those who want to hear their voice. But wiser counsel should probably discourage people from pursuing music as vocation because opportunities for success will be fewer in future. Obscurity is far more typical than ubiquity. It always was despite appearances to the contrary. And maybe it is no bad thing having greatness diminished over coming decades. For the preservation of art’s integrity there needs to be less of it in any case.”
Jon Newton