Interesting article from way back on 2/27 over at the music issue blog. It has a very dry title, Archive of Macedonian Music. What drew my attention was the brief discussion of music archiving. The internet has called forth a mind-boggling informal effort to serve up personal archives. Where this is really earth-shaking is when recordings that have been hidden away in darkness, again see the light of day. At the same time, dedicated specialists finally have a forum where their efforts might earn some recognition.
This presents a fascinating paradox: this cornucopia has helped lower archival standards, and, at the same time, the wasteful attitudes of the past have been mitigated to some extent. To say the internet and its free-wheeling and free-archiving constitutes the world’s biggest record store, (or, for that matter, library,) doesn’t describe the actual status of the various collections come to be based on the net. Many of which are labors of love, even if these various outlets for what used to be, for example, the impossibly rare, reside in the wild west.
This, overall, has grievously harmed the old record business. Yet, at the same time, all the archiving and sharing has built resources the old vertical record business never had any interest in constructing. Obviously, the argument based in one-to-one lost sales is bogus, but the declining sales numbers speak for themselves. At the same time the actual reach promoted by networked interest and archival fanaticism obtains a different order of magnitude. This is a scale of enthusiasm the old record business never could even dream about. In fact, it was unthinkable a record could sell 1,000 copies and yet be heard by 10,000 (or 100,000) people.
Staff Benda Bilili from Congo. ‘Staff Benda Bilili’ means look beyond appearances–an apt title for my brief listing of some of my favorite new music from last year.
Every new year between 1974 and 1986 I prepared a listing of the previous year’s best jazz records. I used my evaluation to merchandise records at the store and support broadcast on the radio. At the time, it seemed my sense of the previous year had to be credible for the simple reason that I was in a good position to mightily sample the year’s jazz releases. The record companies were generous in recognizing my dual role. My base sample was large, usually numbering several hundred records.
This comes to mind because this year I have for the first time since then gone to the considerable trouble to assess listening highlights for the past year. The biggest challenge was going back to figure out what actually came out last year. Then, armed with a raw list, in January I mined for recordings I had missed and was interested in.
Between the fan blogs and forums, and, the old line critics, I apprised myself of other critical views. Just a few steps in this direction had me reflecting on how much the critical culture around music has come to–paradoxically–accept and deny the ramification of the internet in its year-end recaps. In a follow-up post, or two, I’ll delve into this. It’s suffices to suggest that the old style critical culture has not grasped how prolix the wider musical culture has become. On the other side, the smart musical mobs do not grasp, and likely have no good reason to grasp, what were the precedents to today’s iTunes and share-ism.
One way the old and new school may be bridged is to consider the consequence of share-ism: as music sales have imploded, exposure has increased. This means that the critic is no longer positioned as a gatekeeper by their main advantage, that the critic can sample more music than the dedicated fan. Where this really is evident is in the new school muso’s ability to deeply ’sample’ on the margins. This comes about because the unit cost of exposure has plummeted. This is in contrast to the old line critic who seems to still be wed to taking stock of what gets pushed their way. Whereas the informal and amateur culture is advantaged more by pulling music into their orbits. Think about it!
Meanwhile, my own list simply reflects what I really enjoyed. I make no other claim. Some of the music below represent long standing guilty pleasures. *marks one recording in each broad genre that I’d tell you to leap into first. I’ll be highlighting individual recordings in the future.
*Asleep At the wheel – Asleep & Willie country-folk
Levon Helm – Electric Dirt country-folk
Michael Hurley – Ida Con Snock country-folk
Buddy & Julie Miller – Love Snuck Up country-folk
Lhasa De Sela – Lhasa country-folk
*Celer – Breeze of Roses electronic
Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions electronic
Burkhard Beins – Structural Drift electronic
Stephen R. Smith – Cities In Decline electronic
Monolake – Silence electronic
*Abdullah Ibrahim – Bombella improv
Sun Ra – In Detroit improv
Pierre Dørge & New Jungle Orchestra – Whispering Elephants improv
Keith Jarrett – Testament improv
Louis Moholo-Moholo – Sibanye: Duets with Marilyn Crispell improv
Martial Solal – Live at the Village Vanguard: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love improv
Cyro Baptista & Banquet of the Senses – Infinito improv
Wadada Leo Smith & Jack DeJohnette – America improv
Bill Dixon – Tapestries for Small Orchestra improv
Kenny Barron – Minor Blues improv
David S. Ware – Shakti improv
Gretchen Parlatro – in a Dream improv
*Or the Whale – s/t pop
Neil Young – Live Archive v.1 pop
J.D. Souther – If the World Is You pop
Ry Cooder – I, Flathead pop
The Band of Heathens – One Foot in the Ether pop
*Allen Toussaint – Bright Mississippi R&b
Los Cenzontles – American Horizon r&b
Buckwheat Zydeco – Lay Your Burden Down r&b
*Staff Benda Bilili- Tres Fort , Tres Fort world
Lucas Santanna – Sem Nostalgia world
Orchestre National de Barbès – Alik world
va – Brazilika world
Tinariwen – Imidiwan:Companions world
Oumou Sangare – Seya world
Amadou & Mariam – Welcome to Mali world
Culture Music Club – Shime world
(139 recordings I enjoyed from last year – below the fold)
“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”
“Kyle Bylin is Associate Editor of the highly influential music industry blog Hypebot, which is read daily by more than 10,000 music industry professionals.”
Nowadays, Digital Natives discard and consume popular music repetitively through file-sharing not only for reasons of fashion but because as fans they take it for granted that the Major Labels and a growing underbelly of independent musicians together will produce a continuous flow of new music. But, as we learn to appreciate the idea that the values of the world they inh[a]bit and the technologies they surround themselves with have had a profound effect on who they are, we can begin to understand that the social ecology of music culture that took decades or more to develop offline, isn’t just going to reappear online.
If you read the rest of the article, you’ll learn it’s implication is that the audience and music indutsry might come to realize what are their future mutual interests and then forge something massively neat under the ‘altered’ conditions.
Poppycock. Kyle is crying in his beer, I’m afraid. Whether music fans take anything for granted, or not, is besides the point. The music culture is whatever it is in the current moment. In actuality, today it’s a panoply of sub-cultures that self organize around whatever are the fragmentary interests of groups.
Salvation for the Recording Industry lies in their ability to offer services that are more in step with the emerging social norms of Digital Natives.
The ‘Recording Industry’ will always be around, but it’s going to keep shrinking and shrinking. It’s not worth saving, and forward-looking artists eventually will pay it little attention.
Thems the beans. If you want to evaluate musical culture, you leave the territory of the shriveled-up pipe dream of massive success and depart also from the shattered territory of the once monolithic recording industry.
“It’s a long shot, sure,” Eric Harvey of Pitchfork writes, “but at a time when so much of the structure that holds together music culture has disappeared, fans could take the initiative to create a new one.”
They’re already doing this. The various micro-cultures being created are neither industry or artist friendly. They’re not lucrative for either industry or artist. There’s an economic paradigm implicit in this development, but its much more aligned with behavioral operations than exchange value.
Free won. Under that single condition, any time trying to revive the music industry is time completely wasted.
Charles M. Blow, on one hand, could be viewed as late to the record industry implosion party, (or RIIP,) in gaining some exposure on the NYT’s editorial page. Swan Songs? July 31.2009 On the other hand, he makes some killing points.
I.
The problem is that if people can get the music they want for free, why would they ever buy it, or even steal it? They won’t. According to a March study by the NPD Group, a market research group for the entertainment industry, 13- to 17-year-olds “acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007.” CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent.
II.
This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.
III.
A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.
(My comments) Behavioral economics would suggest that the high time/effort investment in downloading, whether as a paying customer or freeloader, favors only those downloaders who appraise that the investment has a positive payoff. Freeloading is not very efficient, but, it does have the upside of quantit. In fact this would figure into a positive behavioral model—even if the end result is acquiring more music than one could ever hope to listen to. (Ha! Visit my basement.) This also favors fanatical listeners, always a tiny slice of for-a-price music consumption.
The move to access rather than acquisition constitutes a different behavioral model altogether because, obviously, access-on-demand means the consumer is matching their listening time precisely to, as it were, turning the web radio on. There really is no business model for this from the record industry’s point of view.
But, it’s easier to shut down for the time being. The record industry could vanquish iMeem and Pandora and Grooveshark and all the others open access DIY podcasting services. Except then crowd sourced casting would really erupt, especially if people served tunes back ‘up’ into the network. Instead of menus of streams, you’d literally have crowd sourced clouds. This will eventually happen anyway. My guess is we will go through some heavy handed industry quashing of the DIY services, so it will swing back to acquisition for a while before the transition to crowd and cloud.
None of this matters much in the broad sweep of things. The record business, both tangible and digital, is just about finished.
80% from less than 1% of all available songs? Sounds familiar. But, the actual consumption when you include freeloading, is probably many times the size of the paying market. I don’t know the metrics, but it is safe to say the amount of music being listened to has never been greater than in today’s environment.
Side note: I’m still a customer of eMusic. This is after they jacked up (for me – 150%) the per track cost at the level of the monthly subscription, and, also let the other shoe drop by ending the ability to count your monthly downloads as single tracks against your monthly quota irrespective of how many tracks were on an album. (So, a six track album can count 12 credits.) Does that sound complicated? It is. eMusic’s principle innovation was to make the downloading model really complicated.
This is stupid on their part, but it’s understandable as a short term money-making bridge to eMusic’s going belly up. An objective eMusic seems hellbent on realizing. But, eMusic is almost completely in their own universe of stupid in an industry that has redefined the term stupid.
Still, I am a happy customer. eMusic remains a tertiary source of interesting music.
A little background: I joined eMusic in 2000 at the tail end of their unlimited mp3 tracks for $14.99 orgy. I knew that was too good to last. Heck it was insane. But, over 9 years, they’ve grandfathered my monthly package at every price increase bump in the road. The end result is I’ve paid $1,400 for 6000 or so tracks, the equivalent of 700+ albums, and paid about $2 per album. How good is that? It’s great and almost insane.
Over that time, eMusic has been a trendsetter on the low-margin mp3 boulevard, you know the street that runs smack dab through the middle of the town called, Absolutely Free Music. As a user you made your deal: cheap music and lousy bit rates but with no DRM, and, eMusic’s inventory of small indy labels was heaven sent. If you the user was a muso and fan of the margins of various genres. Count me in.
A few years ago eMusic was sold to an investment firm. A price hike followed. But, eMusic kept doing their thing, offering non-major label tracks (and full albums,) at a great price. On June 1st they changed their own landscape. Taking my own customer commitment as an example, my monthly package will remain $11.99, but my download will decrease to 30 from 50. This works out to a 16 penny per track increase, to a 40% increase. Bummer. Read about it. Fury.
However, unlike the many hundreds of suddenly disgruntled customers, I’m not sent into apoplexy. I get their pain, yet, I never thought eMusic was going to forever hold itself to the match with the projection thrust on their brand. This projection was that eMusic was akin to the ol’ hippie indy or specialist record shop. When the investment company bought eMusic, I figured the bloom scattered from my own more modest illusion.
I don’t envy any business and business model which seeks to peddle at a profit tracks from recordings amidst the scourge or paradise of the world’s biggest ever free record store. Interestingly, the Guardian’s report on eMusic’s new pricing asserts that eMusic has something like 400,000 customers. Alright: basic plan is $11.99, call it $12 x 12 months, equals $144 per customer, times 400,000 = $57,000,000 per year.
Is that a lot of sales? In the scheme of the current record business, it’s at the upper end of the middle of the drastically consolidated music industry. After all, Apple’s iTunes is selling around 60,000,000 tracks per month, and doing $3+ billion worth of annual business. $57 million is equivalent to having a chain of 30 bricks-and-mortar stores doing $2 million each on a yearly basis. But, perhaps eMusic’s sales are half that. *
eMusic gets a tiny slice of the pie. Just as it is, was, for the Rounders and Telarcs, etceteras of the old hard goods music biz world, living on a business model focused on the thin slice of (no-doubt,) fanatic customers for indy produced music, consigns one’s business concern to a thin slice. And, there isn’t any way around this brute fact.
eMusic was driven to revamp their business model because new partner Sony is going to add 2 year old catalogue to their offerings. Not to eMusic’s credit, they showcased to their loyal customers news of the gigantic price increase in the clothing of benefit presumed to derive from adding the pathetic Sony legacy catalogue. This was equally disingenuous, and, patronizing. Uproarious.
By all accounts, eMusic CEO Danny Stein is one of the most arrogant people in the music biz, this in an industry where little napoleans have always been a dime-a-dozen. So, he didn’t help his brand here, with ludicrous rhetoric found in his slapping announcement:
The addition of these bold-face names [Sony] doesn’t change our mission. eMusic will always be an alternative to mass market digital music stores — a deeper, richer music shopping experience. more of the good stuff 17dots blog
It won’t be the last time the hard core fan gets crapped on. (Twas ever thus.) Nevertheless, it seems fairly, if not bluntly, obvious, that eMusic is heading in a necessary direction, given that they cannot grow their pie much, maybe can’t grow at all, if they remain a hip outlet casting a net to the margins, and doing this for even 40 cents per indy track.
Whereas, by undercutting their immensely larger competition, especially doing so overseas, in peddling Sony catalogue, it might be possible to double their user base in due course. If this is close to the mark, then the price increase locks in new customers at a more profitable price point, does the same for older customers, and, probably insulates eMusic from too much attrition in the short term.
But all eMusic can really do is pump up their tiny market slice of digital downloads from, say 3% to 6%. This is not an enviable market position.
Actually, eMusic, iTunes, all the others are–over the mid-term–trying to establish some traction against a truly for-free market space. I have no real idea, but my guess is that for every track somebody pays for, 10 more free ones find a home. Also, I’ll bet that most music fans who have sustained their enthusiasm for collecting music for more than ten years, are likely very resourceful at driving their own marginal acquisition costs down, down, down.
Still, I understand how pissed off the world of the music fanatic is at the world of bean-counting investors. This is true whether it’s eMusic or iTunes. What isn’t true of eMusic is that it ever was really like some hipster’s hole-in-the-wall room of vinyl bins. There used to be, and, to an almost laughably inconsequential sense, still are attempts to make a love-the-music-first business model actually work. But, after 30+ years of observing such things, love-the-music-first is always the canary in the coal mine.
Virgin is closing its US megastores. It could be said the megastores and big boxes are riding down the mainstream record biz’s steep down slope. You know, the one the industry mistakenly helped fashion.
The author remembering walking into the Oxford Street, UK, Virgin Megastore in the 80’s,
“I can still feel the special frisson of entering what appeared to be a music-lover’s paradise: an enormous space pulsating with music and light, packed with miles of aisles of cool vinyl.”
My memory is visiting the Tower Records Annex in NYC in the late 80s. At that time the gathering wave of CD sales made NY a vinyl shopper’s heaven. Likewise with the Central Square used record stores in Cambridge, Mass. Back at my desk in the rear of the record department, I’d pore over cut out catalogues from One Way and Scorpio.
Here in Cleveland, over the last few years, Borders Books and Music has degraded its music departments to the point where it is hardly worth a trip. The best local indy, My Generation closed 5 years ago. Record Revolution, an indy I first walked into in 1967, hollowed itself out over 15 years. Cleveland today is not in any way a record town. Once one of the great ones, today that reputation has perished.
But if I say to myself ‘good riddance’ to great music browsing, it’s partly informed by my spending 11 years on the front lines while managing an indy record store in Middlebury, Vermont. My tenure there ran from the dawn of the disco and punk era to the flowering of the compact disc era, 1976-1986.
Yet the writing was on the wall for the indy record shop by 1981. After several years of deep discounting of the top hits–starting in NYC and spreading from there–after the holiday season of 1979, the major labels turned the small store’s spigots off in the aftermath of the labels’s being buried in post-holiday returns. (Thank you, Rovert Stigwood!) Polygram led the way in imposing account minimums and this in turn forced indies into the arms of one stops and their 10% higher prices, if they wanted to stock the high turning hits and major label catalogue. Although my store was somewhat immune from competitive pressures, when another indy arrived a block down the street in 1984 and implemented pricing to undercut my own store, there was not much I could do except race with my competitor to the bottom.
Hundreds of indies and many regional chains went out of business in the first part of the 80’s as the majors doubled up on their bets on a big pipeline ending in the deeply discounted end caps of the big chains and new fangled big box general merchandisers and the cynical loss-leading big city shysters.
The way I look at it today, 8 years after I departed from a failing Cleveland area regional chain after a 5 year stint, this history is the proper context for how the major labels completely mishandled the rise of the web. Certainly as early as 1997, there was no substantial indy base for the majors to work with ever again. It’s nowadays maximally ironic that what the web realized was the world’s biggest free and compellingly diverse and sticky and deep record store. How righteous that the indy aesthetic thrives on the music forums and mp3 blogs.
Between 1976 and 1986 I generated yearly Best Of lists of favorite music. I won’t be doing this now, although I hope to highlight a few startling musical encounters. The problem is that I’ve become desensitized to when a recording actually comes out. This is the result of wandering around the greatest free record store, the internet, a shop for which rigid annual temporal distinctions have become, for me, meaningless. In turn thinking about this had inspired me to think about the damn record business, a form of reflection I try not to indulge.
In December I bought a ton of music. I think most of it was fairly new, but upon closer examination it was just new to me. Some of those records evoked startling listening experiences too. Those experiences would count on a best listening experiences of 2008 list too.
As for the record business, I’ll work up at least one post on what I’m seeing now. I’ve recently read a handful of interesting articles about the current biz.
However, nothing I’ve investigated changes the basic set of principles that inform my views. It’s simple, the principles are focused on how musicians can better understand the actuality of their cultural and economic environment, and then design productive means to respond to reality. As always, the trick is in getting musicians to go beyond dim, fantasy-infused prejudices which fuel their cynicism and ignorance, and move to depth of understanding. Usually this requires substantial letting go of prejudices and surface comprehension.
Luckily for me and probably for musicians, my principles exist today outside of any practical application. I’m out of the biz for six or so years. The one thing I’ll note is that the youngest generation of entrepreneurial musicians, say those under 30, have a leg up because their own cohort is the first group largely liberated from being the subject of the old, now dying, record business. And fans in the same cohort are different too, for they’re the generation that, for the most part, doesn’t hold a solitary recording in their hands. Call them the playlist generation.
I’ll have more to write on this soon.
It would be easy to summon up the musical highlights for 2008 even if many don’t carry the ‘2008′ tag. For example, the family of Thelonious Monk approved the release of a CD, Transformer, documenting Monk working through themes in the form of sketches. It may have come out in 2008, but these recordings from 1957-1963 are obviously timeless. I reacquainted myself with the New Orleans singer, Bobby Charles after purchasing Last Train to Memphis, from 2004. And, I played catch up with one my favorites, Stan Tracey, picking up half a dozen records from the last ten years. This turned December into Stan the Man month, agreat way to end 2008.
Over the next few months I’ll visit some of the highlights. Tracey and Charles will get their moment, as will Sussan Deyhim, the Iranian-born singer and syncretist, and others.
