Early in 2008 I was speaking about the incredible developments in the music industry. Out of this discussion I found myself only a few month later teaching a class on music management at Düsseldorf University.
Now I have read how terrible it is that the development of internet file sharing has devastated the music industry. That the public no longer has to pay to have a copy of their favourite music. How the evil music fan has been stealing from the artist pockets. How the great defender of the artist, the royalty collection agencies and of course the record companies have been doing their best to stem the wave of selfish law breaking.
Well I could go on but you know where this is going I think. Clearly there is a whole lot of spin, propaganda and frankly, total crap being written and said. The telling facts are things like on winning thousands from various file-sharers, these agencies and companies promptly gave non of the winnings to those they claimed to represent.
These agencies and companies have take no responsibility for the simple fact that new technologies have come and they have, without any doubt simply made huge indefinable mistakes and like the good old musician who still wants to make it with 90's music in the 21 century, they have simply been left were they belong. In the past.
I love it. I have studied and completed my MBA, Masters of Business Administration specialising in the music business. It has been a great area to do research and study in. Every mistake and failing that can be made has been. Arrogance, greed, bad business practice, laziness and even attempts to reverse the natural development of things are all represented. Even King Canute would have laugh at their stupidity.
Why and how can this happen. Every empire falls and the greedier and more lacking in soul and foundation the empire then the faster it will disappear. Well, this is only approximate, but if we think of the 1880's as the first time that the industry could develop seriously. Columbia, the founding company in EMI was founded in 1888 and was the first company to sell pre-recorded music. The death came in 2000. We are talking 120 years. Not bad for an empire. But time has come.
This has been a peoples revolution. The royalty has been toppled. It may have started with good intentions of delivering music to the world at a fair price where the best artists got the chance to concentrate on developing their art. Stories like Chess records and Muddy Waters or Motown Records with The Miracles and Smokey Robinson. They all got swallowed by the money greedy machine called the major label.
Now as prices increased, quality was replaced by the MacDonald's mass production model of, cheaper and homogeneity began to rule what would be pushed onto the public, the dark clouds began to gather. As the thunder cry for cheaper CD's came and the development of the computer digital music standards like mp3 and mp4, the public was no longer reliant on the CD to capture the magic of music in its shiny digital grooves. They could swap music with each other without ever having met. They could reduce its quality and hence size down to easily transferable packages. And now the killer blow. The internet and the relative anonymity it provides due to the huge amount of traffic. That was the beginning of an end that uiis still drawing itself out. It is the huge stone on the top of the Record Company’s coffin. It is the rolling waves washing away the profits that they had amounted in bank accounts. Profits that they surrounded by accounting methods making it impossible to prove that the artists owned any of it.
Now those profits are nothing but losses. They scream unfairness. Once again they hide behind the claim that the artists are those who have lost the most. They even managed to get some naive major artists to support their claims.
The truth is that the idiom which refers to a playing field is in the process of being levelled has never been more appropriate. There are certainly fewer and lower mountains of power on the field of the music industry. In fact there are some deep pits on the playing field that are filled with executives trying hard to fill in from profits that are not theirs and are still dragging others into it. These pits in fact need to just be closed before they get deeper and drag more into them.
These are the fact as I see them.
* A record/mp3/track is like a poster. It is a marketing tool to show people why they should come and see an artist carry out his craft.
* If you are performing artist then perform is what you should get paid to do
* if you are a recording artist then you should record and get paid to do that at a fair rate, not sit at home and watch money come in for a job you did 10 years ago.
* if you don't like the idea of working for a living then go and join the old record executives in their hole.
There is more opportunity for an artist than ever before. There is more music spread to more people than ever. There is more access to music than ever. We all own more music now than we ever did before. More importantly, there is more chance for a new artist to earn a living without having to give all his money to a second party. He/she can even play their own music to millions without having to ask anyone else's permission