Posts Tagged ‘Music Industry’
The Way We Work
Saturday, June 19th, 2010
Whitey – Canned Laughter
Monday, April 12th, 2010
Lord loves a workin' man; don't trust whitey; see a doctor and get rid of it.
Without any significant industry investment in the distinctive, ongoing solo project of Nathan Joseph White, Whitey has broken through to daytime radio, movie, tv and video game soundtracks and fashion runways. Gradually this cult artist from London has gained a home in the shadowy but global ground between high fashion and mainstream entertainment. He maintains a dismissive attitude to the music industry as a whole, performing rarely and interviewing even less often. Clearly relishing and celebrating the outsider ethos of his work, he sings, programs, plays a multitude of instruments but has no formal qualifications and is totally self taught.
His blog over at myspace is a good read if you want to know about the torrid and exploited times of a musician trying to make his way in the “business“. He goes great lengths to explain the symptoms of the patronising stance the corporate music industry has towards the artists they feed off: “The artist is seen as a disposable commodity, easily replaced and transitory – and as such can be used up quickly and casually disposed of like any other cheap replaceable resource.”
It’s good to know that although the music business may be struggling, the human ability to create music is not. By his own admission his albums and singles are now a “flyer” for the live experience, which if accounts are to be believed, can vary from hedonistic affairs in deliberately darkened rooms, with chaotic walls of feedback electronic noise to gentle simple melodies played on tiny bells, acoustic string instruments and toys. He’s played alongside everyone from New Order and Iggy Pop to Soulwax and Peaches, from venues in New York basements to cavernous clubs in Ibiza.
His latest album has been released with no record label support, no press agent, no advertising budget and it has more or less bankrupted him in the process of recording it. So to those who feel inclined (or if you know another music fan who might enjoy The Cramps stalking Gary Numan down a dark alley) don’t hesitate to forward them to his page for details on how to purchase his latest release. You won’t be disappointed, this polished pop warps the light it reflects and leaves quite an impression on the mind. If you have the time, check out his lyrics blog for a fantastic insight into the poetry, emotion and ideology behind Whitey.
Bill Drummond – A History Of Music: Part 19, 4 of 4
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010Here is the fourth and final part of a transcripted lecture Bill Drummond gave on the state of music to BBC Radio 3. You can find parts 1, 2 and 3 here.
The relationship that a listener might have with any piece of recorded music was always the same, be it a middle aged connoisseur listening to Herbert Von Carugen’s recording of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Or a 13 year old girl in 1996 listening to the first Spice Girls album. We built and bought shelves to keep our collections of vinyl and CDs on. We took pride on what these growing collections that we had, invested our money in what it said about us, in the same way that the content of bookshelves did. There was no reason that this should ever stop. By the time the new century was dawning the iPod was being launched along with iTunes and numerous file sharing sites. This changed everything. This was the biggest development in the history of music in the past 100 years. We could now download from the internet with a few clicks from the mouse any piece of music from the entire history of recorded music we thought we might want and plenty more we didn’t want. All of this could be stored on the iPod in our pocket to be listened to whenever, wherever while doing almost whatever. The album as a format was now meaningless.
A graphical representation of a bit-torrent swarm
This thing that we had used to measure and judge the music makers of the last five decades no longer had any real purpose, other than historical. The music that we owned no long said anything about us as we could now own everything without investment from ourselves. The groaning shelves of vinyl and CDs were redundant. Music was just something that made the bus ride to work or the jog round the park more bearable. Something used to fill in the uncomfortable silences or block out the racket of real life. The breadth and depth of meanings that music once contained was fast draining from it. Art, like religion exists to give life meaning. When any art form loses its meaning it no long has any real worth. No long has a function other than something to gather dust in the museum. There are those that have thought of the iPod as little more than the modern equivalent to the wireless set. They are wrong. The wireless unwittingly promoted the sales of records. The iPod does away with ever having to buy music again.
A museum piece
The flip side of all I have just gone on about in the last few minutes means music is now in the process of being liberated from the shackles of the recorded music genre. These forward thinking music makers will not want to make music that can be downloaded off the internet or listened to at any time, any place, while doing almost any thing on a future version of the iPod. They will want to make music that is about time, place and occasion. They will want their music to reach parts of the soul that words and images have always failed to do. Nothing can commune the unknowable like music. But most importantly they will want their music to have meaning beyond sometime to fill in the background while people get on with the drudgery of life.
Bill Drummond – A History Of Music: Part 19, 3 of 4
Monday, December 14th, 2009This is part 3 of Bill Drummond’s critique of the music industry, you can find the first 2 parts here.
Around this time the long player which we later learned to call the album was fast becoming the format that most people listened to recorded music on. On this long player up to forty minutes of music could be contained, on the old 78’s we could only get a few minutes on either side of the disc. Fast forward again, this time mid 60’s. Around about then, two incidents took place that were to symbolise yet another massive shift in our relationship with music. Each of these incidents happened on separate continents and in totally different disciplines of music. One was in Canada the other in England. In 1964 a young Canadian classical pianist who had already made a name for himself in concert halls around the world decided for various reasons to never play as a soloist in concert again, but dedicated himself to making recordings. This pianist was Glen Gould. The vast majority of music he chose to record was music composed in the pre-recorded era. 18 months later, in 1966 a young English beat group who had rapidly become the biggest thing since Stalin, the first beat group to fill sports stadiums – even Elvis did not do that – made the decision to never preform in concert again. The beat group was the Beatles. The difference between Glen Gould and the Beatles was that Glen Gould wanted to record his interpretation of old music that he considered to intimate to be exposed to the concert platform. Whereas the Beatles wanted to create new music that could only ever exist as a recording. For both of them to go out and attempt to play their music live infront of an audience would have compromised the music. Thus make null and void the complete raison d’etre of the art they were making.
Savage young Beatles
There had been pop record producers and avant-garde composers who used the recording studio as their primary musical instrument before. But Glen Gould and the Beatles were the first two major artists to make the decision that what they did as artists was from then on only going to exist as recordings. Before that historic point in the mid-sixties recorded musics prime reason for existing was to promote the live careers of music makers. Recorded music has been made so that the listener could have the illusion that they were actually listening to the musicians playing in their front room. That they were at the concert where it was being performed. But 1966 was, to use the now tired cliche, a tipping point. I was just going to say tipping point but a friend of mine read through this and said, “You can’t use the word tipping point, that’s the ultimate cliche. Anyone talking about American politics now will talk of the tipping point. But I wanted to keep it in”.
From here on in or at least until the end of the 20th century, more and more of the music performed live was only done so to promote recorded music. We now judge the careers of almost all music maker by the albums they have made. Whether it was Herbert von Karajan, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Fela Kuti or whoever the rock and roll sensation of the moment was. Thus all ambitious young music makers aspired to get recording contracts so they could be allowed to make albums. The recording of and the subsequent release of an album gave complete validation to the their ambitions. The whole of the world wide music industry was based on a business model built around the recording and selling of albums. Radio stations, music magazines, concert tours, music videos all existed for one reason, to sell more albums. It was in nobodies interest to question the restrictive elements of the album format to closely, while the business model still worked and we still loved to own them. Very few of us noticed that the physical restrictions of the album format was turning all music into almost exactly the same thing. From wherever the music on these albums came from in the world or whatever tradition be it classical, jazz, world, rock, pop, etc. it all ended up as recorded music. We could walk into a major HMV or Virgin Megastore and choose from upwards of 300,000 albums. Every type of music known to mankind would be represented. Every year there were thousands more of these albums being recorded as our tastes became more refined we stumbled across undiscovered continents of music. How could we ever tire of it all?
But this sense of limitless choice was an illusion. The reason why all this music from every corner of the world, from every musical discipline was becoming the same thing was that it was all brought to us in a roughly identical length, equalised within the same narrow band of frequencies, broadcast through the air to our ears via similar electronic speakers. Close up all this music may have sounded different but take a few steps back and you notice how similar and one-dimensional it all is. The technology that had evolved through the 20th century to record and produce music had morphed it all from just being a convenient and marketable format into one mega all encompassing genre – that of recorded music.
Bill Drummond – A History Of Music: Part 19, 2 of 4
Friday, December 4th, 2009This is part 2 of a 4 part serialisation of an analysis on the current state of not just the music industry but music itself by Bill Drummond of the KLF. It is transcribed from an original radio broadcast on BBC Radio 3. You will find part 1, here.
From around the turn of the century up to the first world war there were three towering composers from the western classical school making their greatest work. These three were Sebelius, Stravinsky and Shoenberg. If you were to read the historical achievements of these three you would learn that they, in completely different ways took apart how music was made and put it back together using scales, sounds and methods never before heard by western ears. On a personal level I have been a great fan of recordings of the music that they composed in those years. The same time as Sebelius, Stravinsky and Shoenberg were being revolutionary geniuses there was an Itlaian tenor who sang no new ground breaking music, but stuck to the tried and tested cannon of popular operatic arias. Unwittingly this singer was far more revolutionary than my three heroes.
He was Enrico Caruso and between 1902 and 1921 when he died at the age of 48 he had made over 260 recordings. These recordings sold in millions around the globe. Caruso was the first superstar of the new century. What Caruso did was change of how vast swathes of the human population related to music. In every continent, people were buying Gramophones and records and listening to them in their homes, in their own homes. This was changing all the rules that music had lived by since whenever music was first created thousands and thousands of years ago. People could listen to their Caruso day and night or at least until the neighbours complained. They could take the Gramophone into any room in the house, they could even take it out into the garden if they had one. For all the revolutionary genius of Sebelius, Stravinsky or Shoenberg they changed nothing. The way their music existed and was communicated to its audience could have been done in 1876. Enrico Carruso left them all standing.
Record breaking new ground
From here on in all forms of music that existed anywhere in the world were helpless to the charms of evolving recording technology. Suddenly any music from any era could be recorded and these recordings could be played whenever the owner of the Gramophone liked. Music that previously would only be heard at coronations or marching into war or on a bandstand in the park or in a Parisian nightclub could be heard wherever. People began to collect records, to have an almost fetish like relationship with the physical objects. All around the developed world our relationship with music was completely and utterly changing. And the vast majority of us thought this was fantastic. From a political point of view, it was total democratisation of the art. We could all hear the greatest performances of the century in our front rooms. No need to be at La Scala or the Bolshoi or a whore-house in New Orleans to hear the greatest music the world had to offer. It did not seem to matter that we could never relate to music again in the way people had done only a few decades earlier.
Workin' on the chain gang
In the 1930s John Lomax the American musicologist and folklorist started to criss-cross the United States with a portable recording machine in the back of his car. Everywhere he went he would record the folk songs being sung by the poor, the imprisoned, the outcast. Music that no one in cultured society would have ever bothered with before. Music that had been here today and gone tomorrow or passed down from generation to generation was captured for eternity on Lomax’s recording device. This music would be collected as treasure for the Library of Congress. Now that people had Gramophones or radios to hear recorded music on nobody needed to create their own folk music any more. The irony was this machine that was responsible for folk musics slow death was going around the country to record it in its death throws. I for one am eternally grateful for Lomax and that he did what he did, even though it marked the end of a line that had gone on for thousands of years. By now the musicians union were becoming fearful that the fast developing recording technology would make working musicians jobless. They were right to be fearful.
More and more people were choosing to listen to professionally performed recorded music, rather than the shoddy and amatuerish live performances of local musicians. Fast forward a couple of decades to the mid 1950’s. A teenager walks into a small recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. He wanted to have himself recorded singing some songs for his mother. This lad had only ever sung in public a few times and even then it was as an amateur. Any aspirations he had to being a professional singer would have been mere daydreams. The owner of the studio heard the boy sing and thought he had something so signed him to a recording contract. I guess, you’ve already guessed that the teenager in question was Elvis Presley arguably the most influential musician of the 20th century. The difference between Carruso and Presley was that Carruso was already a highly regarded opera singer before his voice was recorded. Before Elvis had walked into the Sun Recording Studio he was a nobody with no obvious talent.
To be continued…
Bill Drummond – A History Of Music: Part 19, 1 of 4
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009Here you will find a serialisation of a transcript of a talk which Bill Drummond of 80’s multimedia art project The KLF gave to BBC Radio 3 regarding the music industry. The KLF were a pop sensation throughout the 80’s and early 90’s, but unlike their contemporaries they were deliberately repetitive and derivative in an effort to highlight the ridiculousness of pop music at the time. The talk will be serialised in 4 parts as the whole lot at once would probably be a bit much. The idea of recorded music as “product” is, he thinks, an outdated concept unique to the 20th century that spawned it. The rapid collapse in value of recorded music is, he thinks, A Good Thing. In the future, music can once again become connected with time, place and occasion. And of course with musicians. We give you, A History Of Music: Part 19…
That’s the title of this talk. What parts 1, 2, 3, 7, 11 ,13 or 17 were, or are, is almost irrelevant to this talk. That said, I want to start by reading something which I wrote almost a year ago and is taken from the history of music part 17, this is it: All recorded music that has ever meant anything to you or me or anybody else is speeding its way towards irrelevance. The whole cannon of recorded music that has been stockpiled over the past one-hundred and ten years is going rotten. Rapidly losing any meaning for anybody except historians and those that want to exploit our weakness for nostalgia. The very urge to make recorded music is a redundant and creative dead end, not even an interesting option fit only for the makers of advertising, ring tones and motion picture soundtracks. The sheer ubiquity and availability of recorded music will inspire forward looking music makers to explore different ways of creating music – away from ways which can be captured on a CD, downloaded from the internet and consumed on an MP3 player. The very making of recording music will seem an entirely two-dimensional, 20th century aspiration, for the creative music makers of the next few decades. They will want to make music that celebrates time, place, occasion. They may be those that want to keep the craft of recorded music alive, but we will look upon them as those who work with bygone art-forms – irrelevant in tomorrow’s world.
The kids today have a different perspective
I can’t wait to hear the music that is being made in 100 years from now, these notions keep me awake at night. There is no way that I want to hazard a guess what the music in 10 years time or even 100 years will sound like and mean to us. We will have to wait and hear. Instead I’m going to give a brief skim through the salient turning points as music has evolved over the past 131 years. You might think it a highly subjective skim through. I accept that your parallel history of music might be totally different to mine.
In 1876 to hear music, you had to play an instrument or sing yourself. If not you could listen to other people playing or singing. All music that was written or performed was conceived to be listened to in a specific context. This could be religious songs to fit the religious calender. Or ones marked to celebrate the major milestones in life – birth, marriage, death. Or songs sung in the workplace to make the workload seem lighter and the hours speed by. Or regal music to crown a new monarch. Or marshal music to stir our sense of nationalism in times of war. This can literally be music to march into battle with. Or just music to have a good old knees up on a Saturday night. Remove the context from any of these examples I have given and the music will lose its potency and meaning and become something else altogether.
On a surface level the music stays the same but our relationship changes, it is our relationship with music that defines what music is, not what the composer dreamed up or what the musicians thought they were playing. So that was in 1876 and everything that had gone before. In 1877, the American inventor Thomas Edison invented a device he named the phonograph. It was a wax cylinder and on it he recorded himself reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. His recording was not musical, but that technological development would have more influence on music of the 20th century than anything else that happened in the 19th century, be it the music composed by Beethoven or the music sung by cotton pickers in the slave plantations of ol’ dixie.
Ten years later an American, another American, Emille Berliner took Edison’s idea and ran with it. In 1887 Berliner patented his Gramophone – that is Gramophone with a capital “G”. On this he could play flat circular record things, that he also invented. And on these flat circular records, Berliner was having music recorded, not just himself reciting nursery rhymes. By 1892 he was selling these records and his Gramophones to play them on. This was the moment when music could be contained within a physical object that could be bought and sold. Thus the record industry was born. A small aside that I would like to make here is that within a few months of the first record and Gramophone being sold, the musicians union was formed in Manchester.
To be continued…
Wax cylinder preservation and digitisation project
