Indieoma

Johnny Others asked me to contribute to this debate with some edifying thoughts about the workshops I sometimes do for a good daily rate in impoverished schools in Hastings. I think the idea would have been to make the case that by diversifying into such avenues, it remains possible for cultish, little-known indie musicians to make money – despite the scourge of internet piracy. I said I’d do it- but then I didn’t, I think this is why.


I don’t really subscribe to any part of such a case. I don’t know if it will remain possible to make a living as a non-classically-trained, artistically uncompromised musician.I don’t know at all that expressing yourself to a rhythm can ever be lucrative. I don’t think intellectual property is the same as property and I don’t think stealing something that the victim still possesses post-crime is the same as theft – but I don’t really like being identified as ‘anti-copyright’. Unpaid commercial exploitation of a composition, for example, does deprive a victim and is much easier to call stealing. It is all very grey and defies a labelled position. Most of all though, I don’t really think that internet piracy has anything very much to do with the rapid decline of the music industry.

Let us be clear as to why the music industry was briefly profitable. A small number of companies were able to acquire, by wealth, a few scarce resources. Firstly, the expensive equipment required to record multiple tracks of high-quality audio and mix them together until they sounded nice. Secondly, the spending power to order at a bulk discount lots of plastic circles with data encoded on them as well as to print attractive packaging to house them in. And, lastly access to a large, physical network of shops and printed magazines with which to promote these items for sale.

Because these resources were scarce and expensive they acted as a bottleneck, throttling the amount of recorded music that could be transferred from the vast pool of people capable of making music to the even vaster pool of people wanting to listen to it in their houses. This limit on the quantity of produceable music created another scarce resource: recorded music itself.

You don’t need much training in economics to see how this equalled profit. There was a demand, a supply and, where the two balanced, recorded music found itself with a value – set by the market at about £8-12 per 45 minutes. That was great for musicians like me. If we managed to jump the great barrier to market entry (which we called, with craven, fetishistic lust, ‘getting a record deal’) we could expect a certain return. The cost of bringing a plastic circle to market required a base level of investment to make profitability likely – and when that sort of joint is being carved, no one minds too much if you run off with the scraps.

Of course,the real winners were the people who pretended that the scarce resource being sold was an elusive quasi-mythic quantity that they liked to call talent. Talent is a big deal in a pre-industrial village, but in a global cultural economy? not so much. It is a consequence of our evolution that we are over-impressed by so-called talent, much as our ignorance of probabilities leads us to be impressed when we bump into someone we know on holiday. The record companies, running their bottleneck businesses, were happy to see us fall for our own lack of self-knowledge – we were buying rare talent, not rare technology – it was artists we were paying, not plastic circle manufacturers – and quietly, for every talent who got rich, some no-talent Mr. Jones got richer.

But then, the internet. You can get over-excited about the internet.You can notice how – when you wrote a dissertation once, the very proof of your cleverness, it took you a certain amount of time and effort to find and pull information around yourself to shape your argument and that if anything is identifiable as intelligence that is, and now that same task takes minutes, not days, and surely that means that the free flow of data has made you a magnitude smarter – has, in fact, made everyone with your privileges a magnitude smarter and then you start thinking about Timothy Leary and consciousness uploading and you get very excited indeed. It is at this point that you are open to a charge of geek-fetishism, and graceless as such a charge is, you have to read about the hundreds of people who commented angrily when the unrelated blogpost google had briefly returned as the top result for ‘facebook login’ wouldn’t let them login to facebook and you have to concede a little of the point.

Still, the music market really has been turned upside down by the internet and related technologies. Not by piracy in particular, but rather by the way that it has made the resources that the market was based on abundant, not scarce.

The facilities to make high quality multitrack recordings are vanishingly cheap now – the audio software available free on aviary.com is miles ahead of what they used to make Sgt. Pepper’s, the best multitracking suites you can buy cost no more than a guitar that stays in tune. Plastic circles are not needed to transport data, data requires no medium or manufacturing – this data I am typing now will travel to its consumers through the clear, clean air. I can build a better-stocked and prettier shop than HMV in two hours and open it immediately. I can send a thousand demos to a thousand writers with a hundred thousand readers in five minutes and I can do it all for almost nothing. I have free, abundant access to every resource the music industry was based on right here, with a cold, on a computer smaller than a copy of The Wealth of Nations, in my bed.

As a consequence, the price valuation that emerged from the balance of scarce supply and plentiful demand – that lovely, £8-12 per 45 minutes of music – is not sustainable. iTunes revalued it at £5-8 but that isn’t low enough. As the world catches on, some people will download illegally, others will use last.fm or pandora or surf myspace or install spotify or listen to free demos or music podcasts or CC license albums or free promos. They’ll want about the same amount of music as they always did – demand won’t change too much – but they will further diversify their taste. instead of listening to 450 minutes of music a hundred times, they might listen to 45,000 minutes with little or no repetition.They will value that 45,000 minutes as much as they had before, but now that the resource is abundant their £100 will have to go further and pay for a hundred times as much music. Consequently, the value of the resource will drop. It will drop to the point where a traditional record company will not be able to make money by trading in the scarce data created by a small pool of appointed ‘talent’.

And yes, that probably means that the tiny, tiny fraction of musicians who would have clambered over the hurdle and into the promised land of record-dealdom will not be able to make as much money. If they are rare in outlook or originality or musical ability or attractiveness, they might be able to use the abundant tools of music production to build a reputation that’s worth something more than the market value of the melodies and rhythms they produce and if they do, it will be all the better for them that there isn’t much incentive for the parasites to burrow in and demand their cut. But there may not be any such answer.

It may be that recorded music was a blip. It may be that recorded music is like whaling or airship building or the rare spice trade and is simply doomed by the blameless advance of technology. Perhaps the closest model for the future of recorded music is the sad, funding-dependent, workshop-running, pleading and dwindling subculture that still writes poetry while dreaming of the infamy of Byron. I don’t know.

I know that a lot of the so-called answers are absurd. Suggesting that musicians will make money from gigs, when the disappearing profitability of sub-prime bands is flooding the live music market with bands willing to play more shows to supplement their dwindling sales is like suggesting that banks will make money from selling houses when the number of unpaid sub-prime mortgages is flooding the housing market with cheap houses – and we know how brilliantly that turns out. At least until iphones and free wi-fi are ubiquitous, streaming services like spotify only replace the radio and will only pay out radio publishing level amounts. There is something to be said for special editions and high-quality merchandise – but it will never be a solution on its own or appeal to the swannier of artistes…

It really might be that there’s no good news.

But if that’s the way it’s going, then the tiny, miniscule, statistically-rounded-down-to-zero subsection of society that is made up of musicians who are just over the signed hurdle but not far enough to have a valuable reputation will just have to take it. Punish teenagers for downloading illegally. Change the law so that the ministers can introduce unscrutinised new measures. Rail and write and rage against the dying of the light. It won’t make any difference. Sometimes things fall apart.

We really might lose music as an avenue to a living. This isn’t nothing. If you’re no good at football there aren’t many other ways out of the cul-de-sac that crushes much of Britain’s youth.

But still, we get the internet. We get all the world’s knowledge in our house. And – once we figure out the difference between facebook, the google and a blog – we all get a magnitude smarter. I don’t know about you, fellow cult-y indie musicians, but I think it’s worth it.

Simon Indelicate

Links to the other Digital Rights Bill and Piracy And Pieces Of Eight posts:

Digital Rights Feature Intro

Simon Indelicate – Digital Rights Bill

The Indelicates – Corporate Records Business Model

Stop Disconnection Demo – 24th March 2010

Sharabang Records – Digital Rights Bill as a Record Label

Dan Bull – An Interview – How does a pro-filesharing musician plan to make some cash?

Piracy Feature Intro

Julia Indelicate – Bands And Branding

Chris T-T – The Ballad Of Simon Indelicate’s Christmas Fudge

Simon Indelicate – Fudge Really Has Nothing To Do With It

Matt Stockman – Introducing Sharabang Records – a record label which gives songs aways for free

Ric Rawlins – Pirate Radio And The Internet

Ric Rawlins – Film Review – The Boat That Rocked