No Future For Dinosaurs

When I was a kid the music business was really simple. Labels discovered artists, artist made music, shops sold music, we bought music.

Things have gotten complicated in the last 15 years and if you’d like to get a handle on why, there's a book and a film could shed a lot of light.

In Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age Steve Knopper does a fantastic job of recasting the recent history of music as a page-turner whodunit of epic proportions. ‘Epic’ referring to epic greed (with a complimentary side order of monumental stupidity). The ‘who’ of course are the major labels (and the RIAA) and the ‘it’ that they ‘dun’ is killed the record industry.

Yes, they did it.

Anytime any new technology appears from CDs & DAT to mp3 players and, yes, of course, Napster, they try to sue it or kill it. Examples abound. Here’s a few of my favourites.

1981-82. After a presentation to executives what they could expect from the new CD technology, they throw it open for questions. Jay Lasker, head of ABC-Paramount records asks why his cable TV picture is sometimes cloudy.

2007. Doug Morris CEO of Universal Music Group explains in an interview with Wired magazine why the majors were blindsided by the digital revolution.

“There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist…It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”

The interviewer replies,

“Personally I would hire a vet”.

The sad thing is that Universal did have amazingly talented technologists, like Albhy Galuten, working for them already. They were just overlooked and ignored. They should have been easy to spot. They were the ones wearing Napster T-shirts.

Speaking of Napster the labels had their chance to buy it or make a deal with it. As one artist manager said later, in Napster there were 30 million music users in one place on the net, ready to be sold music, advertising whatever. But the industry killed Napster, Grokster and every other –Ster including a few they created themselves.

Eventually they were left with only one option.  

Steve Jobs struck a deal whereby he would get 22 cents on every one of their songs in return for the labels making 0 cents on everyone of Steve’s iPods. And because the labels had already killed off the bricks and mortar record stores the only real record store in town was (you guessed it) Steve J’s online emporium.

The examples of greed are too numerous to mention but on fact above all others should make every self-respecting musician want to grab a handful of dirt to throw on Sony’s (et al) coffin. When CDs replaced vinyl the retail price jumped $8. Artist’s royalties increased by 6 cents.

If Appetite for Self-Destruction looks backward at what the industry has killed, Brett Gaylor's film RiP: A Remix Manifesto has feet firmly planted in the present and does a great job at looking at what amazing new genres and music media the present copyright-heavy culture is stifling. The journey takes you from mashup artists to Walt Disney as an uber-remixer (who took previously created art from fairy stories to Buster Keaton films and created something new) to the Disney Corps, who are committed to stopping anyone having the freedom to do what Walt built his career on. It ends in South America where we get a glimpse of what a whole culture built on remixing is like.

What was really interesting was the interview with mashup artist Girltalk who has made a whole career of infringing copyright to make some amazing new music. His day job is in medical research where he comments that copyright on medical procedures and even genes could be holding back the pooling of resources which might lead to a cure for cancer. He say "I think  eventually everyone's gonna realise it's beneficial to share ideas". 

I’d really recommend both.

(Amazon Links)
Appetite for Self-Destruction
RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Links to this post: NicholasTozier.com/words

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Rotten Apples?

Apple doing something less than perfectly? Surely not!

Well, it looks like even Apple believe the "Macs never get viruses" hype and have been getting a little sloppy with their security. Forbes.com has the details.


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The Album Is Dead

...at least in the form we know it.




Music sales have declined massively over the last eight years, and though the record industry would have us believe that illegal downloading is largely to blame, I think a big factor is more and more people are buying single tracks rather than albums.

This is not necesarily a bad thing (unless you're a money grabbing major label, or a prog rock band creating three hour concept albums) - it's a byproduct of spending years having to buy albums where the majority of tracks are more 'filler' than 'killer'.

But is there a future for anything bigger than single song downloads?



Radiohead think EP's are the way forward.

Image by Manohead


Thom Yorke, speaking to The Believer magazine said,

"None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off, I mean, it's just become a real drag. It worked with [2007 album] In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we've all said that we can't possibly dive into that again. It'll kill us."

He added that Radiohead "need to get away" from releasing albums in the traditional format...hinting that the band may release new music via EPs or online (as they did with new song 'Harry Patch')

Doing EP's would also free them up to experiment without having to commit to a way of working for an entire album like their plan for

"writing songs for orchestra and orchestrating it fully... and then doing a live take of it and that's it - finished. That's one possible EP because, with things like that, you think do you want to do a whole record like that? Or do you just want to get stuck into it for a bit and see how it feels?"

Image by SuperPimp

Weird Al is another fearless pioneer (You can even paste yourself into one of his recent videos!).

He is releasing Internet Leaks, a 5-track digital EP, on Aug 25. Unusually he pre-released the tracks one by one, with the final one, Ringtone, being released the same day as the EP.

But then all the tracks will appear on his next full album some time next year and those who've bought it on iTunes will be able to use the 'Complete My Album' function to "painlessly add the missing tracks [with] the price of the EP [being] deducted from the cost of the album".


Others, rather than subtracting from the album, are adding to it. Yahoo reports that

"Apple and the four major labels are working on launching...a music offering code-named "Cocktail" that aims to add value to digital albums sold [in the] iTunes Store." The rumours are that "the new package will include liner notes, artwork and potentially cell phone ringtones and music videos in a unified software package that the labels hope will boost sales of albums"

In a similar vein Apple and EMI unveiled an 'iTunes Pass' in February, "which gave music fans...access to early release singles, a new album upon its release and exclusive videos, remixes and other content".

Reuters, in an otherwise turgid report on Apple's attempt to wring the last bit of money from music lovers via varible pricing, posited this interesting concept

the lowest price tier may also give labels the flexibility they need to develop digital products other than the album. For example, if a popular new single sells for $1.29, labels or retailers could identify four other songs from similar but unknown acts and sell them as a bundle.

Creative as some of these solutions may be, the greatest hope for the good old 'long player' surely rest in the 'music like water' model predicted in the outstanding book The Future of Music and starting to come about in

new digital business models...such as Nokia's Comes With Music model and the kind of collective licensing being pioneered by Choruss, both of which would bundle the cost of music into other services or products. Both rely less on a revenue-per-unit model and more on revenue-per-user. Or "pricing the consumer versus pricing the content," as one label digital executive puts it. "We think the real story around price as it relates to the audience for digital music is with respect to the new business models that are user-based as opposed to wholesale price-based."

In other words, when we're playing a flat fee to get access to all the music we want, perhaps we'll find more and more people going back to enjoying whole albums.


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