Here is a rather lengthy, but good article from Newsweek on what pop music and greed has done to the music biz.
Eddie
Julie Scelfo and John Horn
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
The generally dismal quality of America’s massmarketed pop music is an esthetic national emergency. And last week’s Masque of the Red Death extravaganza at the Staples Center couldn’t disguise the dire portents. Teen-pop cash cow Britney Spears, apparently ineligible for any 2001 nominations, showed up to present an award and to remind arty types what actually pays the bills. Insiders from Nashville’s hard-hit labels watched in silent disbelief as hunk du jour Tim McGraw got skunked for male country vocal. The winner? Again, the white-haired Stanley, for “O Death,” his a cappella plea to the grim reaper to “spare me over till another year.” (A few VPs and A&R honchos must’ve had the same thought.) But the worst portent was simply that so many people decided not to bother watching the Grammys at all. The telecast got its lowest ratings in six years, and its 21 percent drop from last year reflects all too clearly the drop in record sales. So what can the industry learn from “O Brother”? Probably nothing. For one thing, authenticity can’t be cloned without turning it into “authenticity,” and smart listeners can hear quotation marks a mile away. For another, record executives must be among the slowest learners on the planet. Only 5 percent of major-label releases make a profit; a big company needs to sell 500,000 copies of a CD just to break even. Hmm: could any of this have to do with dumb decisions? Virgin Records bought Mariah Carey for $80 million in 2001, only to give her an extra $28 million last month to go away. Meanwhile, Sheryl Crow and Don Henley have felt compelled to found the new Recording Artists’ Coalition, an organization of high-profile performers hoping to protect musicians from their own labels. No wonder Michael Nathanson, a media analyst specializing in the music business at the finanical firm of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., advises his clients not to invest in the recording industry. “I never thought it would get this bad this fast,” Nathanson says, “but it has.”
The record companies have responded to the rise of digital technology with similar adroitness. The CD is cheaper to produce than the LP, but they thought you wouldn’t find that out, so they priced it higher. Then consumers discovered you could copy, download and swap digitized information with no generational loss. When the cows were already out of the barn, record companies came up with their own online schemes, but these were much more limited and harder to use than Napster and other free file-sharing sites. And now you can go to Audiogalaxy.com and download whole CD box sets (including booklets and cover art) free of charge in the form of Zip files.
At last week’s ceremonies, Grammy president Michael Greene was both cheered and booed for an onstage rant against digital file-sharing. In a way, you had to sympathize with the guy: it’s a lose-lose situation. Last year blank CDs outsold prerecorded ones. Two out of five music consumers own a CD burner. About the same number say they downloaded rather than paid for most of the music they listened to last year. And young people—the industry’s most coveted demographic—spend much more time on the computer than at Tower Records. “My 14-year-old cousin has never bought a CD in his life,” says Moby, whose 1999 “Play” has sold more than 8 million legal copies. “Most younger people see music as being free. For them, it’s always been free. The implications for the music business are staggering.”
Over the past 10 years, that business has become scarily monolithic. Just five corporations (chart) now control more than 80 percent of the $14.3 billion-a-year industry. They own the record labels, the radio stations and music-TV networks that play the records, and often the print and broadcast media and the online services that publicize and disseminate them. And, paradoxically, some also make the gizmos that let you pirate them. If your “local” top 40 radio station (which may now play only 25 songs) isn’t owned by Clear Channel (which has nearly 1,200 stations in the United States), it’s probably owned by Viacom (a mere 186, but it also owns MTV, which owns the hearts and minds of millions of teenagers).
Such stations, as identical as Gap stores and McDonald’s franchises, exist not to turn you on to cool new music, but to keep you from turning them off before the commercials; that’s why the stuff they play is so robotic and formulaic. “It’s like a spiral,” says Peter Edge (no relation to U2’s The), the A&R executive who signed Alicia Keys. “It starts with corporate pressure for labels to have more results because they’re owned by bodies that want to keep squeezing more profit.” So. Corporate HQ demands you sell large numbers of records. You do that by putting out music predictable enough for radio and MTV. This music, promoted by endless, ubiquitous airplay, outsells the competition. And soon there’s nothing within earshot except what Edge calls “McMusic”—such mass-marketed, replaceable confections as ‘NSync and O-Town, or such calculatedly “alternative” outfits as the hack rap-rock of Linkin Park.
Or at least that’s the current model. And it may still work for a while with customers too undiscriminating or unenterprising to ferret out more demanding and rewarding music with the help of public and college radio stations, music journalists, remote corners of the Internet—or, like, you know, friends? But one subtext of this year’s Grammys was the backlash against McMusic even among the people whose salaries it pays: not just Stanley and “O Brother,” but such smart, individualistic and sometimes spiky artists as OutKast (rap album), Lucinda Williams (female rock vocalist), Dolly Parton (female country vocalist), Bob Dylan (contemporary folk album) and India.Arie (seven nominations). And 2001 saw some other surprise breakthroughs and cult successes: the neo-soul singer Angie Stone, the experimental British band Coldplay or the refreshing rap-electronica group Gorillaz. “I’m not in the ‘music sucks zone’,” Edge says. “I think there are a lot of really good artists around. I just think people don’t dig very deep.”
Listening to such artists isn’t just about the music: it’s the smart people’s secret handshake. “You hear it all the time coming out of the mouths of record executives,” says Mos Def, the rapper whose solo debut small-label album went gold last year, no thanks to radio and MTV. ” ‘People are stupid, people are stupid.’ And people are not. In fact, they’re smarter than they’ve ever been because they have more access to information, more places to get music. They’re making up their own minds about what they like, as opposed to what they’re told to like. And now the labels are paying for that disrespect. They’re finding people are not as tolerant of their bulls—t.”
Nobody’s saying that popular music needs to be as mountain-pure as Ralph Stanley, or as arty as Bjork. “The marriage of art and commerce, when it’s well done, makes for great music,” says Moby. “Whether it’s Gershwin, the Doors or Public Enemy. Right now, things are out of whack in both directions. It’s either willfully obscure or willfully commercial. As much as I love Radiohead, I wish they had a couple of hit singles on their last album so I could hear them on the radio instead of O-Town.” And Danny Goldberg, former CEO of Mercury Records Group and champion of Nirvana and the Beastie Boys (and, apparently, a reader of Shelley), sees hope in the industry’s current hard times. “Look, everything changes,” he says. “Ozymandias crumbled. But times of crisis sometimes provide the best art. For people who want a quick return on their investment, it’s not the greatest thing. But for people who care about culture, it can only have a silver lining.” H. L. Mencken said nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. But the music industry seems to be doing its damnedest to prove him wrong. It could be a beautiful thing.
[This message has been edited by Bsharp (edited 03-04-2002).]
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