A textbook definition of delusions of self-importance?

…. the Commerce Commission in New Zealand earlier today invited interested parties to make submissions to its inquiry into Universal Music’s proposed takeover of the EMI record companies.

As reported here, the New Zealand Commerce Commission is to make a decision by May the 13th as to whether the EMI/Universal merger will be allowed to proceed. Now, unless you’ve been swimming underwater for the last six months or so, you are likely to be aware that the very large multi-national media corporation, Universal Music Group – headquartered in France –  has decided it wishes to purchase the smaller multi-national media group, EMI – headquartered in the UK.

This may or may not go ahead.

The decision that decides this will likely be made in Brussels, at the European Commission (the US equivalent is more likely to green-stamp – anti-monopolistic law seemingly long dead in the water in the USA). It will not be made in New Zealand. Nothing that is considered or decided in New Zealand will have any bearing, nor will it even be noticed.

Maybe this is the Kim Il Dot Com effect – we think the world is watching (they’re really not, at least not beyond Kim).

And consider a couple of potentially ludicrous outcomes:

1. The NZ Commerce Commission says no merger. The EC says yes. Do the two companies really merge everywhere aside from New Zealand?

2. The NZ Commerce Commission says yes. The EC says no. The two merge fully – but only in New Zealand?

Perhaps they’re obliged to look at this – if so one could reasonably argue that law is ridiculously broken. Either way, it’s an extraordinary waste of New Zealand taxpayer money.

It’s also really embarrassing.

A tweet from David McLaughlin found me thinking, silently reflecting I suppose (and that’s mostly what this post is – an attempt to put those down), about the very (at least to me) interesting place the music industry has found itself in as we head – already – into the second month of the second year of the second decade of the second millennium.

I retweeted David’s Forbes link as it’s a pretty fascinating read that handily summarises the [renegade] rise of the-soon-to-be-household-name, Daniel Ek from geek to owner and visionary behind one of the most important musical delivery platforms on the planet right now, Spotify.

Essentially it’s a story which has been repeated hundreds of times over the centuries: man/woman, often odd, driven or a loner, has a wacky idea comes from way out on the fringes, from a place where all the corporate or establishment R&D bucks in the world can’t or won’t reach. He or she runs with the idea and it finds both its time and its audience and changes the world.

Think Gutenberg (and I’d refer you to this piece in The NZ Listener (not online yet) and by extension the book, which I’ve yet to read but will, although I having a niggling feeling it may annoy rather than illuminate in places), Henry Ford, The Wright Brothers and you get the idea. Bill Gates was one, despite the fact he ‘borrowed’ much of the framework needed to achieve his grand vision. Jobs too of course, but I think that both digital entertainment and the handheld computing device, despite the fact that he too borrowed much of the conceptual framework, will be his enduring legacy, rather than the computer I’m writing this on now.

So we have Spotify and it arrives, brilliantly, at a time when we have the technical delivery mechanisms and – finally – the arrival of a mindset rooted closer to commonsense on the part major content owners.

Spotify offers cheap (read ‘free’ in most of the world) access via 21^st Century technology (read fast unlimited – apart from NZ but I guess it will get there eventually – internet) access to almost everything musical. And it will grow from there.

It’s a radio station, and one that the user/s programmes. Welcome to the eventual death of commercial radio as we now know it. Yep, people still listen to radio, and in some numbers, and radio folks will tell you of growing audiences and more, but this technology – along with the other arriving variants on the theme – have drawn the line in the sand. Tailored audio will eventually dominate private listening, factories, retail and just about everywhere else where we currently listen to things from a radio broadcast. And algorithms will ensure that we get what we want and the tailored broadcast will evolve as our tastes and desires evolve.

It’s a tuning knob, XFM, podcasts and niche radio all rolled into one. It has only just begun. It may take a while but that’s where it will end up. And, mostly, major content holders and corporations will control it – the RIAA’s dominant voices already own 18+ % of Spotify, thus the noise - justifiable - about double dipping by companies who already pay their acts a fairly lowly amount under contractual terms which are often less than generous.

But, man, did these same content holders fight it tooth and nail. Five years back record companies were hollering in horror at anything close to the world they now live in – and are now doing rather well in.

Remember Peter Jenner’s words, back in 2006:

….. I think in two or three years blanket licenses will be with us in most countries.

It was Jenner, former manager back in the distant past of Pink Floyd (early days), Ian Dury, and The Clash (it was he who tried to save the band from themselves and their errant destructive but inspired original and successor manager, Bernie Rhodes without success) who both touted subscription and was heavily shot down by the establishment for doing exactly that.

And yet he was (mostly) right, although it took a year or two more than he predicted in that interview. ¹

Half a decade on we have found ourselves in the obvious place where all-you-can-eat audio comes from both a free model (supported by ads on your desktop) and a subscription model (on mobile devices).

And that’s not all. As shown in this (incomplete) data from Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, the entertainment industries are doing, despite the endless howls of collapse, pretty darn tidily. The news in there is nothing new of course. I was blogging something similar a couple of years back – income was rising and we had been scammed by half-truths, partial stats and more to produce a picture that was mostly smoke.

If you looked beyond IFPI, MPAA and RIAA media then the stuff you’ll see below was there for the curious to find.

Emerging from the shock of Napster, from the collapse of CD sales, to the arrival of iTunes and the war the music content industries fought against the modern world, and lost, came an industry that somehow had been bludgeoned so many times that they eventually were forced to adapt.

The industry had been dying from the death of a thousand cuts: not only digital piracy (which was and is a far lessor villain than you are supposed to think it is, but I won’t go into that here), but the rise of the track as the primary unit of music, alternative demands on disposable income, recession, relentless mostly self induced bad press, awful A&R, accountancy trumping creativity and so on.

Somewhere, slowly and with some inspired new blood mostly driven by the indie sector which has both boomed and is soon to dominate, as the bigger indies evolve into the new majors ² the death of a thousand cuts has become the life of a thousand cuts.

Witness YouTube. We all do – all the time.

Once you get past the first few pages and the fact that it reads like an extended version of the opening scene of The Empire Strikes Back, the Megaupload/ Kim Dotcom indictment refers several times to the copying of files from YouTube to fill up the MegaVideo site. If you read through to page 30 you get this detail:

In approximately April 2006, members of the Mega Conspiracy copied videos directly from Youtube.com to make them available on Megavideo.com.

The irony in this – which seems to have escaped the Feds – is that almost everything containing third party copyrighted material on YouTube in April 2006 was deemed by the owners to be pirated. It wasn’t until the Viacom case in 2007 and the content ID system introduced that year followed by progressive licensing through to 2009 that the songs and music were legitimised on the Google site. That aside, I guess scraping copyright material technically hosted illegally is still taking copyright material – it’s almost like stealing from a fence.

That question aside, and it’s nothing more than an aside to this, the point is that the things you now watch on YouTube are more or less legit now and the industries found a way to monetise that ‘piracy’ (read the Viacom link above – it’s no more or less virulent, wide ranging and somewhat irrational than the MegaUpload indictment) and extract cents from every play.

And extract cents from countless other sources – video, sync, games, streaming, software, toys, performance and so much more – to slowly rebuild the collapsing walls of the house that Ahmet, Geffen, Blackwell, Gordy, Davis and so many others built in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

And so it survives, albeit radically changed – the days of the massive superstar acts are drawing to a close despite Adele (the exception that proves the rule – even Lana Del Rey’s number two US chart entry figure is, for all the fuss, way less than an album would have achieved if it had entered in the 20s a decade or so back), as is the dominance the surviving trio of majors.

Which brings us to to Megaupload and it’s alleged share of the internet. Given that, really, its offences seem to be little different in scope to the rogue YouTube, as documented in that Viacom indictment, one wonders why the ‘man’ is so keen to stomp so visibly and brutally on the founder and face of the site.

The indictment seems to be both ridiculous and absurdly insupportable in much of its content and any court outcome, even just the extradition case, is likely to take years to play out as convincingly explained by Rick Shera here.

Clearly Kim doesn’t have a massive US corporation as a parent as YouTube did by 2007, and he has rubbed all the MegaCorps severely up the wrong way in so many documented ways. Boy has he pissed them off. He’s the rogue geek that never came in from the cold and couldn’t believe his luck when all that cash began arriving. He’s not that clever, obviously. If he had been, he would’ve taken the opportunity to ensure that he was forever safe and loaded. It was do-able.

However, for all that I can’t quite work out exactly why no real attempt has been, or is visibly being made, to monetise the fact the site clearly makes lots of money by attracting millions of people who like both music and film. Indeed, it’s long been documented that the people most likely to steal music are the same people most likely to buy music. They are fans. It is simple commonsense.

So, if an algorithm can be constructed to identify and reward for content watched  on YouTube, why is doing something similar not being done for the cyberlockers?

Or do they still want to hang on for the off-chance that it really will somehow return to 1998 and all will be fine.

I’m still not sure they quite get it, Mr. Jenner.

I think I mentioned Andrew Dubber’s Deleting Music blog once before. Yes I know I did.

He’s been kind enough to mention this blog a few times too.

It seems an appropriate time to mention it again in the wake of the possibility (and I’ll say that, because until the EU sings it’s still up in the air) that EMI is going to be absorbed by Vivendi Universal next year.

In my quick, very much off the cuff, thoughts about this a week or two back, there was one thing that I found more disturbing than anything else, even though I didn’t develop it at the time, and it’s not really been dealt with anywhere that’ve seen, in the mad rush to proclaim a victory for the ‘music people’ (I’m not sure exactly what this means – Warners and Sony are no more or less ‘music people’ than Universal in my experience. Indeed the current head of Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. is Doug Morris who built Universal to what it is over the past decade). That the most quoted person here was silly old Mick Jagger, a man who probably lost touch with the people, music or otherwise, around the time of his last half decent contemporary album back in ’78, doesn’t help.

I’ll repeat what I said in that last post:

• It’s a negative for back catalogue. Expect more of the vast catalogue owned by the group to languish unheard. Once again there simply isn’t the time or resources there to ensure it gets the space it needs.

Man, that’s an understatement.

Consider the labels and their catalogues Universal will control or have under its wide wing:

Polydor, Decca, Philips, Vertigo, EMI, Parlophone, Harvest, Angel, Capitol, A&M, Island, Motown, Columbia (the EMI one), His Master’s Voice, Deutsch Grammophon, Pye, United Artists, MCA, Liberty, Imperial, Chess, Blue Note, GRP, CTI, Impulse, Fantasy, Apple, Charisma, Electrola, Cooltempo, Ruthless, Bronze, Mercury, BASF, MPS, Deram, Death Row, Trojan, Backstreet, Dot, Paramount, Roulette, London, FFRR, Odeon, United Artists, ABC, Smash, Dunhill, Geffen, DGC, Pathe Marconi, Regal Zonophone, Hollywood, TK, Go-Beat, 4th & Broadway, Duke, Peacock, Sanctuary, Chrysalis, Virgin, Ten, Siren, Mango, Rocket, Def Jam, Interscope, EmArcy, Polar, Dreamworks, Talkin’ Loud, Solar, Fontana, Tabu, Verve, Pablo, RSO, Fiction, MGM, Urban, Motor Music, Casablanca, Manhattan, Coral and Universal itself.

There are countless more. That list doesn’t include the many, many regional labels or most of the labels absorbed by both companies in the cloudy recesses of history. Nor does it account for the vast size of many of those catalogues –  at Discogs the EMI label on its own lists some 22,000 releases, Polydor 28,000, Island 13,000, and ….well you get the idea.

There are massive vaults (the good news) that go back to the end of the the 19th century in several locations around the world, full of tapes, imagery, graphics, masters and digital data, as well as regional archives (although not in New Zealand – the PolyGram and EMI archives were long ago trashed). Given their respective histories (both go back to Emile Berliner‘s European branches in the late 1890s) they would hold the copyrights for at least 1/2, or – not unreasonably – closer to 2/3 or all music recordings currently in copyright (recently extended in the EU to stretch it back to well over half the period since recording began) and at least that percentage as a total of all music ever recorded by record companies, bearing in mind that both EMI and UMG have absorbed a large number of companies that have themselves gobbled up many indies.

It’s terrifying and there is absolutely no way any one record company can understand, curate or do justice to a catalogue of that volume.

So what happens to it?

Well, that’s the easy part of it: the star and major cult acts get endless deluxe reissues, a few fans periodically compile a few collections after convincing some exec that there is money in this and other passionate souls in the company rework or revitalise the small part of the catalogue that they personally have a thing for.

The odd boutique division will appear and, as the company loses interest in the minimal return for work put in, it will get quietly folded. This pattern has been repeated across the majors many times over the years and this uber-merger will likely throw up a few such archival projects or labels. Universal currently has Hip-O Select, who’s releases have included some wonderful Motown sets, and their Japanese divisions have long been active in recycling things like jazz and prog-rock. Unfortunately Hip-O Select, if you look at their website which is copyrighted 2006, have almost no resources and thus their scope is very narrow. Another catalogue label was launched a couple of years back, supported by an exec who was soon moved on, and got no further than a press releases and a website announcing its imminent arrival.

It released nothing.

But, mostly, the bulk of the past will disappear forever. The Long Tail was a nice theory which turned out to be a myth and there is little interest in exploring costly ways of not making it so. Even if, with the best of intentions, Universal throw substantial resources into making their history available there is almost no way a single company can retail and market that much music adequately without it simply overwhelming the company.

The obvious answer is to pass the catalogue onto specialist independents but major labels have long shown a reluctance to do so – they acquire catalogue rather than disperse it – since the days of Rhino, who licensed all sorts of archival material from Warners and invented the smart compilations and themed albums we took for granted in the late 1990 and 2000s. Unfortunately they did it so well, Warners decided they would buy the company. This they did – and slowly suffocated it before shutting it down.

Say goodbye to 80% of everything ever released on those labels I listed above.

I had an email from Google.

I get quite a few emails from Google – most are either one or more of the various alerts I find so handy to keep me feeling in-touch with the world without having to make the extra effort to hunt, or notes telling me that somebody new – at least half of whom I don’t think I know – has added me to a Google+ circle. This, of course, adds some social media variation to the endless requests from people I’ve never heard of wanting to add me as a friend on Facebook, or the ‘followed’ advice telling me I’m now haunted by a marketing or travel advice bot or, and this happened last week, an account owned by a tractor factory on Twitter (the first of which is ignored, the second of which is blocked – I’m not ardently craving ‘followers’ nor ‘friends’).

Then, I still belong to Old Friends, but the only notification I seem to get from them is when one guy, with whom I went to boarding school and haven’t seen since, endlessly changes jobs.

He’s now the warehouse manager at a tractor factory in Perth so there may be a link.

But, yes – a letter from Google sat in the junk mail. Well, not Google, per se, but YouTube, which is a Google underling of course.

It was fairly straightforward bit of official-ese.

It told me that I’d breached copyright, and under the DMCA I was in minor trouble. The offending video was this one:

Yep, that’s Toy Love. They were a New Zealand band of some import who released one fairly influential album back in 1980 – but of course any ardent New Zealand music fan/buff/follower/addict/trainspotter knows that. The album was released via WEA Records Ltd. – now Warner Music New Zealand – on a label called DeLuxe owned by a guy called Michael Browning, the former manager of AC/DC. The other major act on the tiny label at the time was INXS.

[An aside: this post is yet another rant about things copyright related - if such irks it may pay to stop reading now.]

Time passed and the Toy Love album was deleted. In fact it was deleted for years. Decades. It went for big money second hand. Toy Love had no communication from DeLuxe, and the whole ownership of the album was up in the air. In the early 2000s the band finally managed to get the rights back and reissued the album, licensed to Flying Nun Records. Flying Nun, in 2005, became a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, administered by Warner Music New Zealand. The copyright in the record remained with the band though. In 2010 Flying Nun went back into local hands and with it went the rights to distribute that album.

[Another aside: Michael Browning still has, via a murky Australian company (who also saw fit to issue a bootleg of the NZ punk album AK79 under the title Australian Indies Vol.1 a few years back), an un-remastered shocking quality copy of the original Toy Love album listed for sale online - avoid it and buy the band's version if you are inclined.]

Last year – whilst hunting through junk – I found a disc of old punk video footage. Amongst it was the video in that YouTube clip. I contacted the band members and, with their approval, uploaded it. I guess I thought I was in the clear. Nothing on that video actually came from the album, and even if it had done so, I had written approval from the band, who now own the copyright in all recordings.

Warners have never owned it. Ever. Never.

Unfortunately Warner Music Group don’t see it that way. Without any proof, legal right, paperwork or substance, they’ve claimed the rights to that (and another similar Toy Love video uploaded with permission) and, according to the letter, they have the right now to run advertising with the video if they want. In other words, they’ve stolen the clip’s copyright from Toy Love and are now asserting a right to profit from something they don’t own.

Piracy is a good word for that. It has currency these days.

Anyone who’s been paying attention in recent years knows that the big labels – Warners are the worst – have done this to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of videos, almost randomly it seems. They claim enough, they get to keep a percentage I suppose – and get the performance fees spinoff.

So, YouTube have a process to deal with that, they claim. You can write and contest pirated or dodgy claims like this and they say they will look at it.

Yeah, sure…..

I’ve already been through that and know how it works – or more, doesn’t. At least not in favour of the smaller copyright owners.

Here’s another video:

That’s a cool, funny, video – made as a school project by some students in Hamilton – to the parody tune, Stole My Car. Now Stole My Car in itself is a grey recording. It’s a parody of OMC’s How Bizarre – yes you knew that – created by a guy at a radio station in Rotorua in 1996. It was a massive airplay hit all over the world, following How Bizarre’s trek around the planet – it was a top ten airplay record in Queensland in its own right- but was never officially released anywhere. ¹

I own the copyright in the audio – 100% unencumbered – and, given that visuals are lifted from the game Grand Theft Auto, owned by the indie Rockstar Games that company could perhaps make a claim on those. However, they, to date, haven’t done so.

I liked the video so much, and I’ve always loved the parody, that I uploaded it to my small YouTube channel. All cool – or it should have been.

I received a letter from Google/YouTube. Sony Music had made a claim on the audio. They owned the rights to the recording I was told.

A mistake I guessed.

I filled out the correction form and sent it off to YouTube. They own no part of it I explained.

The response was:

All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content:

• Entity: SME  ²  Content Type: Sound Recording

I looked at this and tried to work out what this meant.

It came down to one or more of the following:

a)Sony Music are mistaken
b)Sony Music are lying
c)YouTube are mistaken
d)YouTube are lying

I fully understand that this is a minor nothing-blip in the copyright enforcement maelstrom, being that the master recording was probably identified by an algorithm that was not as clever as either Sony or Google thought it might be and that a) was the reason this clip was tagged. That led to c).

However, my bigger problem was the second claim by YouTube that ‘All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content’. Given that Sony played no part in releasing this anywhere on planet earth, and have no justifiable claim to any part of the sound copyright, I’m very doubtful that, at any time, ‘All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content’.

It is, bluntly, a lie by YouTube. It’s d). SME did not review the video and did not confirm anything.

It’s bullshit. Brazen, open and unashamed.

Yes it’s a small thing, but once again it’s theft of a copyright. The copyright I own has been compromised, and courtesy of YouTube’s lazy lie (and I think it is just a lazy lie rather than some grand conspiracy), handed to a third party who do not own it.

There are 5 more videos on my channel on which similar claims – all bogus – have been made. I only have 15 videos up there, so that’s about 50% of all videos I’ve uploaded that have had part of the copyright stripped from them whether it be lazily or with malicious intent – the end result is the same – by Google. I have no say in whether advertising is run with them, and – worse – Warner Music, Universal Music and Sony Music are all getting paid each time they are played.

Multiply that by the number of videos on YouTube (and the meeting I had with a couple of indie label owners recently where we all asked “Have you ever had any money from YouTube, despite being duly registered to receive such?” “No”, “No”, “No” – major labels DO get YouTube monies – large monies) and it adds another dimension to the unpleasant conundrum.

Grand Theft Video indeed.

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…..

Is The Sky Falling on The Content Industries?

A must read from Stanford Law School’s Mark A. Lemley found at The Social Sciences Research Network:¹

Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition of the theatre business is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Believe me, to be closed by the plague is a bagatelle in the ups and downs of owning a theatre.
Fennyman: So what do we do?
Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Fennyman: How?
Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery

We’ve talked about this at work, where you might spend the time to do a cool package, it just doesn’t have a disc in it. And instead of a disc, you’ve got a little piece of paper that says “go here for your download.”

So says Jeff Kleinsmith, Sub Pop’s Art Director, who muses the idea that you buy a piece of art and the audio comes free with it (thus, of course protecting his job whilst theoretically providing the music an outlet).

Whilst the idea is not anywhere nearly as radical as the blogger suggests, the notion of tying music as a downloadable sync with a higher level of art and design than acts who have in the past given away their music with newspapers of magazines as a download (and there are a few) sounds like yet another potential value-added way to sell music.

But is it any more radically inventive than selling a video with a song as the soundtrack? I’ve bought Anton Cobijn videos of bands I dislike simply because they offer me something I wanted to enjoy visually ¹:

However, this scurrying around to try and preserve an industry that is still not doing too badly still strikes me as odd. Yes albums sales are down, but overall unit sales, even if there are some hiccups, are roaring ahead.  And performance income, as I’ve stated before (yes I know I’m a stuck record) is at record levels and growing.

If you are a writing musician it really ain’t a bad time to creating right now. 5% growth…in a recession.

But what is just as odd is the idea that music, if it needed saving, can be saved by packaging it with a bit of art.

Very, very odd.

I’m sure many is the music consumer (not music lover..that weird phrase so used by the NZ media..what does it mean? ‘Music Lovers queued up for tickets to…’ was, typically, on TV One’s news a month or so ago – no people that like that particular artist may have queued up, music lovers, whoever they are, did not en-mass) who likes a bit of art or design, cutting edge or otherwise. However, passion for music being what it is, I doubt if swarms would be driven to to purchase that music solely, or even primarily because it came free attached to a cool package.  I’ll leave that to the artlovers. Isn’t that what the album cover is all about? And many many album covers are already works of art..some quite extravagant. Anyone remember the Santana Lotus packaging? It must’ve almost bankrupted CBS.

Or maybe I’m the odd one. I buy music because I’m likely to swoon to it; to dance to it; or mostly, because it makes me feel fucking wonderful, even if that wonderful is miserable sometimes.

If those booming unit sales mean anything they show us that music is about music, not the way it’s packaged: those sales figures are dominated by sequences of 1s & 0s that have no sleeve or artwork.

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing, but it simply is. So sorry Jeff Kleinsmith, you are actually a hell of an Art Director, responsible for all sorts of iconic bits and pieces, but the music will and does speak for itself mostly.