Abstract
Has technology helped or hindered musicians’ artistic expression? Journalist and musician
There is a familiar debate about whether the onset of the digital age has killed the music industry’s business model or whether it has led to a democratic revolution. The answer, as ever, lies somewhere in between.
Various established artists have bemoaned the impact of illegal filesharing on record sales. Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks has claimed “the internet has destroyed rock…I’m financially stable. I’m okay. But what about the kids trying to make it in this business?” Blondie’s Debbie Harry agrees: “Computers and the internet and downloading songs completely ruined the music industry and everything artists used to work for.” But Greg Kot, author of How the Internet Changed Music, suggests that assessing the internet’s influence is more complicated and multi-faceted than that. “The biggest problem a band has is getting its music heard. For years, the music industry was confined to four multinational corporations that dominated the revenue stream of 70 per cent of the music coming in, and four or five radio conglomerates that controlled what music was going out. Now all that has been broken up into millions and millions of little pieces and subcultures and niches that are serving small, really dedicated communities of music lovers.”
Overall, despite the changes wrought by the digital era, the music industry’s performance is reasonably robust, worth £3.5bn ($5.7bn) to the UK economy according to recent research by UK Music. However, there is a structural change that people should probably be more worried about than they are. Illegal filesharing is having an impact on the shape of our culture, as well as on opportunities to participate in it.
The truth is, at the top, despite ongoing concern at falling record sales, the guys with the gold-plated cell phones are still managing to do okay. Forbes magazine recently published a list of the highest earning musicians of the year, headed by Madonna, with $125m and a top 20 worth well over a collective annual billion, mostly based on the continuing rude health of live music. While revenue from recorded music sales has dropped dramatically, when taking into account concert, publishing and other streams, total revenues of the music industry have actually increased, from around $50bn in 1998 to around $60bn in 2011, according to a study by professional business services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Big acts are able to leverage their star status in a different way than before. Mobile phone company Samsung paid $5m to secure advance rights for Jay-Z’s new album for owners of their latest Galaxy phones to access through a free app. Similarly, Madonna cut a 10-year “360” deal with Live Nation, worth a reported $120bn, which allows for the exploitation of all aspects of her brand.
And the new technologies that are supposed to be killing record sales are beginning to turn serious profits for some shareholders (many of whom are the same people that run the major record companies). Spotify has a market capitalisation estimated at over $4bn and is waiting to float, and although it is still a loss-making enterprise, the nature of tech funding means it has netted its founder Daniel Ek £190 million ($309.6 million) and put him 10th in the Sunday Times Music Millionaires Rich List, equal with Mick Jagger.
Lower down the food chain, the possibilities of digital technology have made it much easier to record and disseminate music. Some recent music trends reflect this: the prominent feature of 2012’s “chillwave” was the sound of people in their bedrooms singing softly into computer reverb plug-ins. People can easily make songs on recording software like GarageBand and use tools like Tunecore to sell them online. Some of these acts will go overground and become wider success stories; some will remain personal concerns with niche audiences. But the tools are there if you just want to make some music, put it out there and see what happens.
Where there is a growing structural imbalance is among a “squeezed middle”: the collapse of record sales has hit a broad swathe of struggling working bands. The rewards of the music industry are increasingly congregating around the top and new opportunities are, perhaps, offering most to those at the bottom.
The point was made most clearly by Andrew Falkous, singer for Future of the Left, in a blog about the leaking of their second album. “Please be careful, or we’ll get the world we deserve. Hobby bands who can tour once every few years if they’re lucky, and the superstars…running the corporate sponsored marathon of £80-a-ticket arena tours and television adverts ‘til their loveless hearts explode.” This was written in 2009 and reprinted in full by UK Music as part of its anti-filesharing campaign. All the evidence suggests Falkous’s dystopia is creeping into existence. The majority of music acts are unable to leverage the sponsorship deals, command the huge ticket prices or secure the big-paying publishing syncs that allow the lucky few to continue to thrive. Continually declining record sales – US album sales are at a historic low according to Nielsen SoundScan – are still the bread and butter of many working artists. As Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s long-term producer, noted on his blog, the new high revenues “are being generated solely by larger already established artists who can set very high prices for their tickets and T-shirts to make up for their lost other revenue. Smaller artists who are not in the position to charge anything like the Rolling Stones or Madonna are not the ones to benefit from these new incomes.”
ABOVE: Independent record shops participate in Record Stor Day, conceived in 2007, Soho, London
Credit: Matthew Chattle/Alamy
The situation is not being helped, some argue, by streaming services such as Spotify or Pandora. The music industry has invested heavily in legal streaming in the war against illegal downloading, but the low returns to artists generate controversy. On the music website Pitchfork, Damon Krukowski wrote that his band Galaxie 500’s song Tugboat “was played 7,800 times on Pandora, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: for the 5,960 times Tugboat was played there, Galaxie 500’s songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).” As Thom Yorke put it in a tweet: “Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will not get paid. meanwhile shareholders will shortly be rolling in it. Simples.”
As Thom Yorke put it in a tweet: “Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly be rolling in it. Simples.”
It seems little coincidence that these changes in the financial structure of the music industry are taking place at the same time as a noticeable social restructuring. John Major recently criticised a “collapse in social mobility”, saying that “in every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class”. Journalist John Harris pointed out in The Guardian: “People who have had expensive educations dominate journalism, law, finance – and, of late, even the supposedly meritocratic powerhouse that is British pop music (witness Mumford and Sons, Florence Welch, Lily Allen, Laura Marling et al).” Word magazine found that the majority of artists from an October 2010 chart week had been privately educated, compared to the same week in 1990, when nearly 80 per cent were educated at state school.
The long-term social stranglehold of the middle classes has been strengthened recently by the rise of the unpaid internship. For many of the kudos-carrying careers in public life, a period spent working for free is now a requirement. Ross Perlin wrote in Intern Nation, his expose of the proliferation of unpaid work in the modern economy, “those who can’t afford to work without pay are effectively shut out…Internships quietly embody and promote inequalities of opportunity.” In the past it has been record companies who have supported fledgling acts through the payment of advances on future record sales. With record sales on the wrong side of the rebalancing of the record industry, those funds are harder to come by, advantaging those with some pre-existing financial capital to support the early stages of their careers.
Not only does this trend seem to be creating duller music, there is a fairness issue at its heart that needs to be acknowledged. There is also a liberty question, but it’s probably not one of freedom of expression. You can say what you want – but will you get the chance to say it? The issue at stake, returning to Isaiah Berlin, is one of positive rather than negative liberty. No one is really being prevented from expressing themselves, but are they being enabled? And is that ability being equally shared?
One positive step would be to implement the recommendations of the Hargreaves Report, which was commissioned by the UK coalition government, to modernise copyright laws for the digital age. The report’s findings managed the remarkable feat of uniting musicians’ unions, the music industry and open rights campaigners, who all supported it. But two years after it was published, it is still sitting on a shelf somewhere in the depths of Whitehall, the government having blinked in the face of opposition from content providers. A similar timidity has been seen over the implementation of the Digital Economy Act, where action on copyright infringement has been delayed by legal challenges from internet providers.
The music industry also has a responsibility to ensure it doesn’t become a closed shop. It was much criticised for its lateness in waking up to the threat posed by illegal downloading, and then its reliance on ineffective legalistic responses. But if streaming is the answer – and it remains to be seen if it is – it should take seriously the concerns of artists and labels at the low royalty rate, and investigate proposals for splitting access to streamed music, with cheap access to established acts’ back catalogues and a higher price for new music.
It isn’t all doom and gloom in the music industry. Independent retailer Rough Trade understood that people were prepared to pay for experiences you couldn’t get on the internet, like knowledgeable staff and a model of the record shop as a cultural hub, and recently expanded, opening a new store in Brooklyn. Digital music sales overtook physical for the first time in 2012; vinyl sales are up and at the annual Record Store Day and Independent Label Market show certain niche markets are able to thrive. The industry needs to use these positive trends as a platform to keep finding ways to go with the grain of technological change and allowing freedom of expression, while at the same time protecting revenues and supporting new artists. One good initiative is the Momentum Music Fund, supported by the Arts Council and Performing Rights Society, which provides development grants of up to £15k ($24,600) to artists.
With politicians of all parties struggling to answer the economic challenges posed by the global financial crash of 2008, the creative industries offer the UK a clear competitive advantage in a globalised market place and an opportunity to create a patriotic and productive high-skill economy. We need to create the right economic and legal framework to ensure opportunities to participate in a thriving and innovative industry are available to all.