A couple weeks ago, I met a dude here in Berlin that works between here and New York City as some kind of music business professional--an agent, or a lawyer, some such thing. He's been working in the music industry for a couple decades now. So needless to say, once we got to talking, it turned into a pretty interesting conversation (and subsequently, nicely, I've seen him again since and he thanked me for the conversation, so that's good, since it was a rather lengthy argument through which we came to approximately no conclusion). But it is the first time I've ever met, let alone talked to, anyone who actually bemoans the on-going collapse of the music industry.
And though this guy is an industry insider, his claims seemed to genuinely be coming from the perspective of a lover of music. So his sadness at the democratization of music via internet-enabled music sharing and publicizing comes because this new system is not producing music that he thinks is good. Goodness, as I've discussed in the past, is an impossible thing to peg down, but it most boils down to having a justifiable rationale for believing that something is good or not. This is how, for instance, I can still respect Nick even though he likes terrible movies; generally speaking, he can say why he likes a thing, or I can more or less estimate, based on various trends I've witnessed across the past decade, why he thinks what he thinks is good.
So here's our industry insider's problem: like many people his age, he learned/decided what goodness was during the hey-day of 70s album rock, and his idea of goodness involves a band being able to sell out an arena, and greatness involves being not only able to sell out said arena, but also to be able to do that for several consecutive nights. And arena rock is perhaps, a true victim of the internet. Since bands (new bands) don't make that leap to arenas anymore, since they don't get enough fans, since fans, thanks to the internet, have too many choices between too many bands.
The basic argument goes like this: once upon a time, several major record labels had the machinery and infrastructure in place to give a band a chance to record an album, to disperse that album to several million fans over night, and then to put that band on a national or global tour, playing shows in front of tens of thousands of people every night. This system then generated enough capital to fund the putting on of the band's next album-tour extravaganza. Without the money generated by the music industry, bands cannot be as good as they used to be, because they can't afford good equipment, studios, engineers, or even the time to properly record an album and then take it on tour. And the bands that do manage to be good, despite their lack of resources, do not play shows to sold out arenas. If you don't play shows to sold out arenas, you are not great. Thus, we can only, in contemporary times, have nostalgic outings to arenas to see the great bands of yesteryear, as they remind us that once upon a time, there was a time called the 70s, and the 70s were great.
It's a similar argument to one that's also being had amongst book-loving people about what the role of the big publishing houses should be, and to what extent independent and especially self-publishing systems should be trusted and utilized. The music industry, even this outsider would admit, treated most of its acts like machines and commodities. But is this abuse of our popular musicians worth it in order to make the best possible music? Will indie labels and the internet ever produce any arena rockers? Certainly, independent record labels now have the infrastructure in place to nurture and support relatively large and popular acts, but is it at the sacrifice of the epic awesomeness of an arena show? Can the indie methodology continue to scale up? Should it?
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