The Future Of The Music Industry: Non-Dualistic Punditry

One of my favorite music-related movies is Festival Express, a documentary about the summer-of-1970 train-based Trans Continental Pop Tour of Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary, Canada by a variety of musicians and bands…the Grateful Dead, Janice Joplin (who would die later that same year), The Band, Buddy Guy, and Sha Na Na (believe it or not), along with many others. One of the more notable sequences in the film (although perhaps overshadowed by a memorable late-night drunken impromptu jam by Janice Joplin, The Band’s Rick Danko and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia), showcased the Winnipeg demonstration and gate-crashing by protesters who believed that "the music should be free, man…". I don’t have the disc in-hand at the moment, so I’m going to have to paraphrase the exact quote, but I remember thinking how ironic it was that the rabble offered to disperse if they got ‘free tickets, free food, and free pot’ (the planned Montreal show was canceled by city officials at the last minute, in fact, due to similar protest concerns). Equally ironic was the scene of Jerry Garcia, whose band epitomized the free-the-music aspiration by allowing the audience to freely record and pass along performances, lecturing the crowd on the necessity for paid admission tickets as a means of paying for rent of the facilities and compensating the musicians, security detail, and other involved personnel.

As I most recently pointed out in early July, "regardless of what you think about record label intermediaries, at the end of the day no budding musician is going to make this his or her primary occupation if there’s no tangible income-generating potential involved." Which is why I’ve been closely following the ‘free music’ and ‘no-label-intermediary direct-music-purchase’ recent experiments by bands like Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Marillion (? ). The results remind me that (among other things) no matter how compelling Internet-based content distribution may be, a tangible role for traditional physical media will continue to exist for at least a few years to come. Witness, for example, NIN’s most recent (but not only) free-album test: The Slip. After making it available for free download in a variety of lossy- and lossless-compressed formats beginning in early May, Trent Reznor (who split from his record label last October) unveiled a not-free CD/DVD combo in late July.

Radiohead’s twists and turns regarding ‘In Rainbows’ (of which Reznor was critical) are, if anything, even more interesting to analyze. The band released the album online via a ‘pay whatever you think is fair’ program last October (and yes, I thought it was pathetic how some people whined that the free-if-you-want MP3 downloads were ‘only’ 160 Kbps), optionally including a ~$100 deluxe discbox which contained the album on LP and CD plus other goodies. But Radiohead later pulled the online content, coincident with the launch of a traditional not-free CD published by a traditional music label. And the band has no plans to repeat its online experiment in the future.

Note, too, that both NIN and Radiohead were already well-established, popular acts when they pursued new online distribution and pricing (or not) schemes. In spite of alternative channels such as MySpace by which music fans might become aware of and obtain content from new artists, It’s my contention that the music label intermediaries (no matter how much I might grumble about them) will in one form or another still largely play a key role for musicians and consumers alike going forward (to wit, I wonder how ticket sales for NIN’s most recent and BSOD-cursed concert tour compared with years past when Reznor was still label-backed? Labels provide the upfront money and other resources that enable musicians and bands to publish their material. They also shell out cash and coordination to promote the artists, and to send them out on tour. And for listeners, they perform a culling function, separating the ‘wheat from the chaff’ and presenting consumers with only the highest-quality slice of the total-musician pie. Theoretically, at least…

And yes, they deserve to turn a fiscal profit on their efforts. As Peter Glaskowsky points out in a follow-up to a Comcast writeup that I responded to last week:

Some people seem uncomfortable with the idea of businesses having rights, but this is equally a question of individual rights. Comcast has rights because Comcast’s stockholders, managers, and employees have rights. In this case, these rights include setting the terms and conditions for the company’s services. If it was your company, you’d insist on the same freedom.

The same logic holds true for music labels. Where the labels and I part company, though, is when their pursuit of profit becomes so all-encompassing that music talent gets tossed out the window and we end up with ‘artists’ that might look good and dance well, but who can only ’sing’ and ‘play instruments’ by virtue of Auto-Tune and studio musicians.

If the topics I’ve raised in this writeup are of interest to you, I encourage you to continue your education by perusing three outstanding articles, all from the January 2008 issue of Wired:

• Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games
• David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music
• David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars (commentary from Slashdot)

And, as always, I welcome your feedback and perspectives.

p.s…the Dead-now-minus-Jerry’s perspective unfortunately seems to have…evolved…sigh