Pandora’s Box

4 Mar

Scott Tennent makes an emotional plea for music fans to ignore leaks over at  Pretty Goes with Pretty. We’ve all seen variations of this argument before. The MPAA even made spots that echoed this sentiment. It’s heartfelt, but hopeless. Countless cliches could be used to describe what’s happened, but I’ll use this one: you can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube.

What lies ahead will be painful, without question, but that doesn’t mean that no good will come of the demise of the record industry. You know all those CDs that are largely being ignored on store shelves these days, while kids snap up Fallout 3? It’s costly waste. Think about the piles of plastic junk that will be lounging for lifetimes in landfills all around the country for a moment and then tell me it won’t be a net positive when CD manufacturing stops.

Most industries force consumers to adjust when a newer, cheaper method of delivering product is discovered. The music industry hasn’t. Instead of seeing an opportunity to shift consumption to a purely digital market once the iPod was released, the music industry continued to produce CDs, even though they are increasingly being ripped to hard drives and discarded anyway.

I saw how long and difficult it was to get consumers to move to DVD while I worked as a video store clerk. It’s tough transition, to be sure, but it did happen. The video industry weaned consumers off of VHS. The music industry has done the same frequently throughout its short history, moving consumers from one format to another, usually to protect its profit margin. Why doesn’t that still hold? They too are living in the past.

Is the music industry’s demise encoded in the CDs DNA? Chris Ott alluded to it in his 2005 Stylus feature, “This Click’s for You.” He might have called it “Death by 44.1kHz.” The changes fomented by the digital revolution were simply too great for the music industry to counter. They underestimated their consumers and now they’re paying a high price for it.

You’ll have to forgive me for seeing karmic retribution in what’s happening in the music business today, but it’s hard not too. Whether they’re ripping off artists or consumers, we’re talking about an industry that commodified art at a handsome profit for generations, only to beg for forgiveness on their deathbed.

Unfortunately for the music industry, the engine of innovation isn’t a spigot that can be turned off. The democratization of technology is a net good for society. More people are toying with ideas that make our lives more convenient through the sheer ease of digital files. It’s a phenomenon affecting many industries today. It will probably kill the newspaper as we know it. It just hit the music industry first.

Tennent’s plea asks us all to put our heads in the sand. No amount of cultural amnesia can fix this problem. Men in black can’t wipe our memories back to a time before Napster’s existence. But I know it’s not that simple-minded. This sentiment is common among critics, most of whom have no stake in the music business selling music. It’s a noble, but ultimately pointless exercise. I think our time as critics is better spent sifting through the ruins of the music industry to uncover the treasures they leave behind.

  • JT, thanks for continuing the conversation here, and thanks to boyhowdy and other commenters for the dialogue.

    I think there are a few issues overlapping here. First, the purpose of my post was strictly a comment on independent music - music that was once based very much around the idea of a community of fans really supporting their artists in a truly altruistic way--letting bands sleep on their floors, talking them up to their friends, playing them on old-school college radio, etc. It's become an antiquated notion, I know, and it's clearly not an environment we can return to.

    I'm not naive enough to think that "the role model approach" is enough to fix things. Still, it irks me when people respond by saying "that's just the way it is now" and go about devaluing artists' work. Sure, when you flip the argument and point to what "people" do now, how "the youth" behave, it seems silly to bother behaving differently. But it's not so difficult to look at one's own actions and determine whether or not one is being helpful to the artists one likes. Leaks are killing the notion of a long-term music career, whether at the major level or the indie level, and people need to recognize their complicity in this problem.
  • J T. Ramsay
    Thanks for weighing in, Scott.

    I think that meeting the consumer where they are right now, instead of where the industry wishes they were would be a good start. What that is exactly isn't clear to me, but I'm not a label executive. I think that consumption habits need to hold sway here. While I agree that we shouldn't celebrate the new leak culture, I don't know if there's anything that can come of the effort we make bemoaning its existence.

    I'm also not committed to careerism in my role as critic. I don't think anyone is guaranteed a career in the music business, going all the way back to its origins as a commercial enterprise. Let me make it clear that I don't think that artists should be paid for their work. I just don't think that we should automatically assume that any artist today would necessarily be able to make a living solely off of recording and performing music. I think if we could look at the guts of a record deal we might come to some new conclusions about where the artist stands in relation to their label, and how it really shakes out for their career prospects.

    I'm going to spend some time addressing where music fits into the entertainment ecosystem as I see it in my role at comcast.net. It's not pretty.
  • J T. Ramsay
    I think you're holding onto a notion of fandom that increasingly doesn't exist within the youth audience. I think finding a way to channel that behavior into something that helps the band make money would be better than simply hoping that those who snag a leak also buy the album, a concert ticket, or a t-shirt.

    The role-modeling approach is too quaint for me to take seriously. That's simply a virtuous (read: naive) way of sticking your head in the sand.
  • I think part of the difference in our positions may be due to how we define "fan", actually.

    For example: while you say that "Animal Collective and Deerhunter fans are actively hacking to get the new music!" I'm not sure that's true. In my mind, a "fan" is someone who cares about the music, and the musicians. Meanwhile, I suspect the folks hacking for leaks do so, regardless of what they CLAIM, because they get a thrill out of that behavior -- one that has little to do with fandom.

    Scott is calling for us to hold fans to a different standard, and, AS bloggers, own our own fandom as role modeling. I think that does mitigate -- though not dissipate, as you say -- the red arrows.

    But we're not talking about "do the red arrows exist"; we're talking about what status do they have. Mitigation also minimizes the impact on the true fan market, as the impression real fans get of legitimacy is going to spring, partially, from saturation of the blogs with the leak. It does make a difference.
  • The plea is basically "dont pay attention to leaks,unless we leak it"

    My point wasn't that it couldn't be done, but that confusion and reluctance on behalf of people who have spent their entire careers selling a THING that you could see and touch and stock store shelves from trying to wrap their minds around selling access to bits. Especially when those bits offer an inferior listening experience, sound-quality wise.
  • I think you've got your straw man out, though it's an important part of the discussion.

    Like Scott, I see nothing wrong with partial leaks, or single song leaks. And I know leaks happen.

    But Scott is merely calling on people like US not to perpetuate those leaks. Especially when they come out three months early, when a band has not been able to build the buzz, or be on tour to promote the work -- that really DOES cut into sales.

    Scott, in other words, isn't asking the industry to change, or the society. He's asking US not to make "big red arrows" that point to the leak, so that the buzz can build more slowly, which sells more records and show tickets, and also supports bands more. And, ultimately, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of music bloggers. After all, we CLAIM to be here FOR the bands -- so to say "here's what supports the bands best", and make a good case for that, is solid, legit, and important.

    To me, that's asking us as bloggers to be more aware about the process we work with, rather than rabid, BECAUSE we love the music and the musicians. That seems valid to me -- after all, if we burn artist sales potential now for the artists we love, we make it that much harder for those artists to make enough to keep touring and recording.

    "Dismissing" that argument by saying that music has changed, on the other hand, isn't corrective, like you think it is. Instead, it misses the argument, because it misconstrues a call for blogger action as a complaint against "fans" and "industry" and "culture". Sorry, man. Put the straw man away, and step up to the community.
  • J T. Ramsay
    I hear what you're saying. I just think it's quaint to believe that not pointing big red arrows at leaks means they'll disappear. This is happening within the fan community, not the media. Animal Collective and Deerhunter fans are actively hacking to get the new music! That's the community we're talking about, right?

    I'm arguing that the process is broken and that we can't go on fooling ourselves that it isn't. What does it even mean to "perpetuate" a leak? They're out there and they circulate beyond anyone's control. I feel that online media need to fill the gap that long-lead publications create. It's a brave new world. It's time we all start living in it.
  • I agree with Jeremy to the extent that it's a lot easier to move around a single song file than it is a whole film or a television show. Broadband penetration in the U.S. reaches only 25% of the population. Our aging infrastructure has given the media companies time to build compelling services.

    The RECORDING industry (not the MUSIC industry as a whole) was caught sleeping, there's no doubt about that. However, labels could not abandon CD's when they still accounted for so much revenue for a format where they did not control the means of production. When the film studios moved from VHS to DVD, there weren't DVD burners shipping in every computer.

    A lot of people inside the business started facing the reality awhile ago. However it is much harder to shift from being in the wholesale product business to a consumer service business than it is from one product format to another.

    As for Tennent's plea, that gets a big yawn. Labels have been leaking records for years and the trail of a leak usually leads back to someone working on the project, not some rogue who swiped a copy.
  • rob
    There is lots to like about the digital age but I miss life before the internet. My local store, Record and Tape Trader's (!) was an escape from my whitebread suburban town. They had a phone book-sized special order catalog from which I scored an out-of-print Wipers cassette. Now my CDs are all ripped to mp3 and sitting in the basement and just about anything can be downloaded in a few minutes from Amazon.
  • J T. Ramsay
    I'm with you, Rob. I loved zipping over -- often without permission -- to waste time and money at places like Young Ones in Kutztown, or at Repo Records on Lancaster Avenue. I used to literally run to Repo between races during winter track meets at Haverford! Music consumers are peculiar in their commodity fetishism like that. Those of us old enough to remember life before the Internet have no expectation of making neat and convenient purchases on a whim, which is why Napster and its kin were like goldmines. I just don't think anyone ever expected that the Internet was anything more than a passing fad, and the music industry is paying the price for it now.
  • This is all true, except that you have to remember that the major change in this iteration of format shifts is the lack of a tangible product, which is the first time ever that that has happened. Cylinders to vinyl to 8 track to cassette to cd to (sacd/dvd-a/blu-ray/dualdisc/minidisc) were all physical things. I think the industry-side pain involved with this paradigm shift is very much connected to old guard people who can't quite get their heads around selling product with no 'there' there.
  • J T. Ramsay
    But that's not true! Many of these very conglomerates are aggressively migrating customers toward digital delivery, just not for music. Think about where the movie and television industries are headed and tell me the same thinking can't be applied to music.
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