If You Become Naked…

A Sun­day rant:

I’m a pas­sion­ate advo­cate of the noise that emanates from the dig­i­tal music explo­sion. It thrills and excites — and as Rus­sell Brown says here

The inter­net revived and rein­vented my rela­tion­ship with music.

I don’t think I ever lost my rela­tion­ship — it was, after all, a big part of my job to main­tain that link. That said, I don’t think he’s at all alone in that, and I won­der what sorts of sales of some items — espe­cially the more eclec­tic and edgy stuff that really make the musi­cal planet revolve — we’d be see­ing in 2011 if the inter­net hadn’t given renewed and ongo­ing life to cat­a­logue odd­i­ties. When I was a wee lad, a record rarely had a lifes­pan of more than 10 years, unless it was Sgt Pep­per or the ilk — and even then it was ten­u­ous: Sgt Pep­per had been two years deleted in NZ on the day John Lennon was shot.

In Auck­land in 1975 it was impos­si­ble to buy the Vel­vet Under­ground or Stooges cat­a­logues — some six or so years after release. CBS had deleted all the Dylan albums pre-1970 and Phono­gram had done the same to all The Who cat­a­logue. There was not a sin­gle James Brown release for sale in New Zealand — not even a hits col­lec­tion. Marvin’s Let’s Get It On and What’s Going On lasted some three years in the NZ EMI catalogues.

NZ local cat­a­logue suf­fered even more. In that same year, 1975, EMI had not a sin­gle 60s NZ album for sale — of the dozens they recorded in the period 1962–1972.

Of course the CD was the cru­cial item that changed that — record com­pa­nies made a small for­tune reis­su­ing every­thing they could get their hands on — full price ver­sions of things that they had sat on for years — or at least many of them — not all by any means: large chunks of the music made by peo­ple for record com­pa­nies over the pre­vi­ous decades remained — and remains — in tape vaults. Some­times the artists them­selves pleaded with the labels to release items just to have the pleas fall on deaf ears — and were usu­ally met by a sim­i­lar refusal to let the artist reis­sue their own record­ings ¹ when the label refused to.

The reis­sue frenzy, though, largely died out in the phys­i­cal world as CD sales plum­meted and it was harder and harder to jus­tify the cost of a beau­ti­fully pack­aged and anno­tated reis­sue of obscure bits and pieces. I, myself, have been try­ing to find a way to do a phys­i­cal Pro­peller ret­ro­spec­tive, but the sim­ple fact is that it would be eas­ier and less stress­ful to take out a large wad of cash and give it to some­one in the street. Things like this sell in the tens now. It may end up as a deluxe dig­i­tal pack­age — with a CD sam­pler — but my dream of a per­fectly gath­ered Pro­peller box is likely to remain just that in the near future.

Enter dig­i­tal — and slowly but surely the avail­abil­ity gath­ers pace again. I really liked this arti­cle in Slate by Bill Wyman (no not that Bill Wyman, this Bill Wyman) about the end of rare:

Fast for­ward a few decades, and we’re approach­ing a sin­gu­lar­ity of sorts—one in which the dig­i­tal con­ver­gence, in a grad­ual warm flash, is nearly com­plete. If you were born to this it’s an unshake­able, seem­ingly per­ma­nent fea­ture of the world. The rest of us mar­vel that a sig­nif­i­cant part of every­thing out there that should be dig­i­tized and made avail­able has.

On one hand of course it cel­e­brates piracy of sorts, and is the kind of story that would per­haps have the Uni­ver­sal Records exec who blocked repeat­edly the Com­sat Angels issues until these enthu­si­asts man­aged to force them out in fits. In the interim UMG launched some­thing called Lost Tunes which was at best half baked and now seems to have ground to a halt.

On the other hand, it cel­e­brates a big part of what Rus­sell means when he says:

The inter­net revived and rein­vented my rela­tion­ship with music.

I’m no slouch at col­lect­ing music — I have a ridicu­lous — Brigid might use the word obscene — amount of music but the dig­i­tal world has allowed me to fill all sorts of gaps and thrill at items like the incred­i­ble Rev­o­lu­tion 1 (Take 20) which links together all the var­i­ous Rev­o­lu­tions as a semi-coherent work:

That arti­cle cel­e­brates the dis­cov­ery of the lost or the mis­placed, and such is a huge part of this dig­i­tal thing of course. How­ever, more than that, music has been rein­vig­o­rated by the buzz of the new — by the crazy remixes or re-edits — or sim­ply by hav­ing so much new, fas­ci­nat­ing and absorb­ing sound pushed at you all the time. The frenzy gives life.

The argu­ment goes that it’s harder and harder to make money from releas­ing music — I don’t know if that’s true as it was always almost impos­si­ble to make money from mak­ing recorded music. Almost nobody did. The mythol­ogy of the artist who no longer gets the roy­alty cheque he or she once would have because peo­ple are steal­ing his or her music is mostly just that: a myth.

How­ever, what isn’t a myth is that a vast per­cent­age of those who now make music and put it into the mar­ket­place — the ones who sup­pos­edly can’t earn a liv­ing from it — would never have had the oppor­tu­nity to do so ten years ago. The sheer vol­ume of music issued now is staggering.

In 2000 there were 35,000 albums issued in the USA. In 2008 that had grown to 105,000 albums. In the UK the fig­ure was some 30,000. Who cares if only 6000 sold more than 1000 copies. They were made. It’s a flurry of activ­ity and it can all be blamed on the inter­net. It’s momen­tum. And such momen­tum is a major cause of the renewed thrill that music giv­ing to so many. The last time the music indus­try had that sort of vibrance was in the post-punk period when the every two-cent band issued a string of 45s and caused an explo­sion in inven­tive­ness that still resounds today. Or when the early hip-hop and house records were tossed out by the hundreds.

Don’t let any­one tell you that good music gets drowned in noise. Musi­cal inven­tion is the result of extreme noise, of activ­ity. Another exam­ple was the garage band / first-punk flurry of thou­sands of sin­gles in the years after the Bea­t­les — around the world. It gave New Zealand it’s rock’n’roll golden age in the 1960s. It gave the world the good and the bad parts of the late 196os and the 1970s. No garage band explosion=no Bowie, no Vel­vets, no Iggy and so on. They didn’t spring from a qual­ity con­trolled stream of releases.

——

As an aside — there is a thrill I miss and it may be one that oth­ers — left­overs from a record­ing indus­try that was filled with black vinyl and even silly lit­tle sil­ver discs like myself — also miss, and that’s some­times the joy of hold­ing a brand new copy of an item that you’ve over­seen from day one — you’ve watched it being writ­ten, sat in the stu­dio all the way through, mas­tered, directed the art and then sent it off for manufacture.

Yes I know that many — most — releases still come back in a fin­ished form at the moment but sin­gles have all but dis­ap­peared as phys­i­cal items and the per­cent­age of albums that are going to exist only as a series of ones and zeros — espe­cially com­pi­la­tions and reis­sues as they become less and less viable — in the next few years is, from my silly sen­ti­men­tal van­tage point — upsetting.

I’m off to find some new noise.….

Tagged with: Digital • Music Industry • NZ Music