Neither Amateurs Nor Pirates Ruined the Music Business

An inordinate amount of time is spent diagnosing the financial ills of the music and film industries. It’s something of a pseudoscience or, at best, lazy studies based on questionable statistical analysis. People look around, having already reached a conclusion, then find evidence that would seem to support their conclusions. Piracy, we are told, is the main culprit. No, piracy is the easy target in a complex stew of factors. It's the most high-impact boogeyman possible, and a good old sleight-of-hand.

I’ve argued elsewhere that in the film business the issue is not piracy but a glut of shit product. In other words, bad movies. Audiences have just as often given up on Hollywood’s formulas as bought into them hook, line, and sinker.One would think that making better, more dynamic movies would be the solution, but that is just not the Hollywood reality.

The comic book adaptation trend, for example, finally showed signs of a downturn this summer. The Wolverine—the nth entry in the X-Men franchise—had an opening weekend of $53,113,752 compared to X-Men Origins: Wolverine's $85,058,003 four years earlier. The Amazing Spider-Man made $752,216,557 worldwide against a $230 million budget (not including promotional expenses), while Spider-Man 3 did $890,871,626 globally on a $258 million budget (again, not including promotional expenses). Perhaps moviegoers just didn't want another Spider-Man entry? Try to convince Hollywood of that.

The nadir for comic book films will probably be summer of 2014. And, except in rare cases (Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, and Nolan's shepherding of Zach Snyder's Man of Steel, come to mind), the constant prequels, sequels, reboots, series, franchising, etc., aren’t helping the film industry either. This year's Star Trek Into Darkness did $465,378,661 of business worldwide, compared to $385,680,446 for Star Trek in 2009. Yes, the sequel made more money, but the original had a $150 million budget, while Into Darkness was budgeted at $190 million; and that isn't even factoring into the total promotional expenses for both movies.

But, that is the film industry. Diagnosing or, at the very least, understanding the music industry’s various problems is a bit more difficult. David Gerard, writing in Rocknerd, argues that the music industry’s fortunes have waned not because of piracy but because amateurism created a market imbalance.

"Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn't piracy — it's competition,” Gerard writes. “There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians.”

Hasty, hasty generalization, Mr. Gerard. True, amateurs with easy access to amazing software (purchased or pirated) abound. They can record a pretty decent track with plenty of buzz potential before actually honing their live performance skills. Before they know it, they’ve suddenly exploded across the music blogosphere. But, is this really the causal agent of the music industry’s downfall?

Gerard makes an interesting observation about convenience culture’s role in modern music’s overall quality, as well as on the industry’s balance sheets; but he's too in love with his own idea.

“A two-hundred-quid laptop with LMMS and I suddenly have better studio equipment than I could have hired for $100/hour thirty years ago,” he writes. “You can do better with a proper engineer in a proper studio, but you don’t have to. And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time.”

Interesting theory, but a misguided one. There is a mulitplexity of reasons for the music industry’s troubles, making it irreducible to amateurs drowning out the professional’s excellence, and their ability to make money on their superior product (how Gerard expects this to be quantified, I do not know). It’s akin to a world in which commercial retail stores (say, Wal-Mart) are failing, with Gerard claiming that even though those mega stores' convenience should trump mom-and-pop shop quality (for healthy industry revenue), the mom-and-pop shops' access to better tools and distribution channels (internet) has created a glut of businesses who are diluting and spoiling the market.

And the fact that music production is cheap and relatively easy does not mean there is no barrier of entry now in the music market. It's still difficult to get people's attention, even with the hyper-active internet.

Something else is wrong with the music industry. It could be piracy, various other competing media and entertainment products, economic health, cheap software, bad taste in music, streaming services, how much money teens and 20-somethings have in their wallets, changes in how people spend their money, and any number of other factors.

My pet theory is that we haven't created the best pipelines for band exposure, whether for amateurs or professionals. The problem is one of noise. What ails the music industry is what ails the internet: too much input that creates a sort of information overload. An indie band can trudge away for several years in the underground using the traditional distribution channels, but find themselves moving impressive units if they appear on Jimmy Fallon or some other culturally significant film or television series. But, Fallon's show is a not a new pipeline. Before him there was the Ed Sullivan Show in the US, and in the UK, Top of the Pops.

The masses mostly have an awareness about the things shown them. They aren't that interested in the pleasures of digging to find cool things. Like any product that wants to succeed on the market, what it offers needs to invade the collective consciousness to varying degrees. Word of mouth can take care of the rest.Sites like Bandcamp and Soundcloud are great, especially with related artists and curated (or algorithmic) recommendations, but one still has to dig.

The trick is to get people to realize that quality music is coming from all sectors. That requires channels that can cut through the noise. I don't have a solution. But I do know that a record label's banner ad on a music site isn't going to attract listeners to a particular band. What I do know as a lifetime fan of many disparate musical genres is that if a band like Arcade Fire or Air can make a living, then many other bands making waves in various undergrounds—with varying degrees of talent, from soundscaping and songwriting to visual presentation—can, too.

Maybe breaking up the radio cartels would do the trick. The radio formatting of Clear Channel probably doesn't get enough blame for the downturn of the music industry's fortunes. It seems to me that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, probably introduced so much homogenized shit music across the radio spectrum that people just grew tired of the music industry's over-packaged, lowest common denominator offerings and tuned out. And only big label acts typically make it on the radio, which is a problem.

What if there were several TV shows or web series dedicated to finding top-notch bands, like a modern day version of Tony Wilson's Granada TV series "So It Goes," or even MTV2 in its prime? Could it work? Who the hell knows, but it probably won't happen on a major network, where suits prefer to make money off easily packaged reality TV shows and pop music programming.

I'm also encouraged by the crowd-sourcing of albums. Sure, there are shit artists trying to raise funds on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. But, if people want to pay for shit, that's fine by me becauseconsuming shit is the American and global way. The cream will rise, though. And maybe some sort of new sales model will arise out of these crowd-funding sites.

But none of this addresses a major point: the people that are truly complaining about the music industry's falling fortunes are the non-creatives behind the business. Artists are still doing what they want to do. It's the suits that are freaking the fuck out—the very people who made money on the backs of people with actual talent. Why else do we hear about this over and over again?

The truth is that the suits are losing control. The artists, on the other hand, are taking control for the first time, and wielding all sorts of new powers (creation, distribution, video production, image, etc.), as are listeners and consumers with how they experience music. The old order is collapsing. A new one is starting to arise. It's a bit like how the rebel filmmakers of the New Hollywood and French New Wave eras replaced the Golden Age Hollywood and cinéma de papa (Dad's cinema), respectively. Both systems were ripe for distintegration, while the others were primed for ascendance.

Musicians are always going to create music, whether there is an industry (in the traditional form) or not. The suits at the tip-hop of the pyramid should try to innovate, because a new order has risen, and the hard truth is that they really just have to deal with it.