When emotion

The media haven’t helped. Since 1999, there has been an unyielding stream of stories talking about the music industry’s ill health — “Burn, Baby, Burn” (Time, May 20, 2002); “Fight Back or Death Rattle?” (The Economist, March 31, 2004); “iTunes and Lawsuits: The Labels Still Don’t Get It” (Newsweek, May 3, 2004). These stories have given many people the impression that the industry is in a death spiral.

Yet the business has been restructuring itself in insanely positive ways. Here are a few myths about today’s record business:

MYTH NO. 1:: The prevalence of file-trading services and free music on the Internet indicates that recorded music may no longer be an economically viable business.

FACT: Among the only long-term truths we know about downloadable music is that people have such an instinctual desire for it that file trading spread before there was an infrastructure to support it. The major labels have been trotting out p2p file sharing as the rationale for their difficulties for years now, but no one believes it. In April, two business-school professors — Harvard’s Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf from the University of North Carolina — even released a study showing there was no statistical relationship between file sharing and subsequent dips in sales.

Another thing we know is that music is one of a trio of forms that’s expanded quickly across the Web – the others being pornography and games. This raises a question: If free downloading damages the music industry’s ability to make money on music, why doesn’t all the free pornography on the Web have the adult industry up in arms? What’s the difference between rock & roll, pervy movies and Tetris?

The difference is public relations. In a pre-Web world, music was already the most visible (or audible) form of entertainment. When p2p file trading arose, music’s former associations with street parties and boomboxes lost ground to associations with obscure computer programs like BearShare, BitTorrent and Kazaa v2.6.3. Overnight, music went from being a cool, highly visible medium to a type of surreptitious computer file hoarded by tech geeks.

By contrast, pornography went mainstream. Where it was previously the reserve of video-store back rooms, scrambled TV channels and the high shelf at the local magazine shop, now you could check the history tab on a Web browser and learn that your boyfriend, your dad and even your priests enjoyed JPEGs of girl-on-girl action.

This might lead you to believe that porn was growing ubiquitous while music was receding from the public’s imagination, but the truth is more tricky than that. The adult entertainment industry’s effort to go mainstream has been well served by highlighting its Web-borne popularity. It’s lent porn stars like Jenna Jameson the respectability to pen a best-selling autobiography. It gave the porn industry the credibility it needed so that even The New York Times magazine parroted its $10-billion-to-$14-billion-a-year revenue estimates in a 2001 story (later disputed by Forbes). By contrast, the music industry has been well served by making a lot of noise about its struggles, which has allowed it to gain leverage with regulators and legislators, cry wolf during a period of receding sales and prime the pump to make even more money down the line.

MYTH NO. 2: Record sales are down. The situation is only growing worse.

FACT: The music-industry lobby would have you believe that sales are down and sinking – as would the general tenor of the media’s industry coverage. But this just isn’t true. In 2004, record sales plainly seem to be rising. Soundscan has registered 252 million records sold in 2004 to date. Compare this with 235 million sold in the same period of 2003, and that’s an increase of over 26 million units, or 6.35 percent.

The RIAA might argue that this is direct result of the 1,500 lawsuits they’ve brought against file traders since September 2003. There’s some basis for that. In January, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results of a survey that said 17 million fewer Americans admitted to downloading from file-sharing services than did so in a similar poll conducted in 2003. However, it seems unlikely that those former downloaders are responsible for the 26 million additional CD sales we’ve seen in 2004. Most likely the increase in record sales is due to 26 million people wanting new releases by Norah Jones, the Beastie Boys and Prince that weren’t available the year before.

MYTH NO. 3: Musicians no longer need the record industry. The Internet and other new technologies make this a new era of “do it yourself.”

FACT: There are more opportunities than ever for musicians to find a niche in the industry, but “doing it yourself” – through the Internet or any other means – is harder than ever.

Technically, some things have gotten easier for artists over the past decade. Digital recording makes it more possible than ever to produce high-quality recordings on the cheap. The Internet makes it easier than ever to publicize music of any stripe. And judgment-blind yet heavily trafficked outlets like CDBaby.com enable literally anyone to distribute their work.

Unfortunately, all this really means is that now there’s an infrastructure to support everyone’s delusions of stardom. As any episode of American Idol will tell you, there are many people who want to be heard. If all 100,000 of your fellow artists can now make and market records, the main thing that’s been created is a lot more competition and noise. If you analyze things from a businessman’s perspective, it’s hard to see how artists are gaining much from the newfound ability to cut bad records, erect a Web site and put their crap on sale. Does anyone really care about Dan J. Schulte’s new release, Halloween Returns to Haddonfield: The Official Halloween 25th Anniversary Convention soundtrack, available now on CDBaby? Does anyone even know it exists?

Sure, it’s a lot easier nowadays for artists with a fan base to market their wares. Teen-pop has-beens Hanson, crooner Michael Bolton and earnest folkie Natalie Merchant each declined major-label deals in the past year to release their own records. But it’s safe to say these are not the kinds of artists punks were thinking of when they popularized the term “DIY.” It’s an outmoded notion in 2004; a better one is “Who should I associate myself with?”

Community is important to cut through the noise, and like it or not, those communities are often organized around the industry trying to make money off music – record labels, clubs, promoters, magazines et al. While artists know best how to make art, businesspeople know best how to build relationships and gain leverage. So unless you’re an artist with an already robust career or an admiration for the marketing savvy of P. Diddy and Malcolm McLaren, it’s more important than ever to figure out how to interact with the music biz.

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“The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren’t that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music’s annoying, or at the very least they don’t need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.”

– T Bone Burnett

A weekend at sea

I’ve traveled to the southeast coast of England, having booked a weekend stay at the Camber Sands outpost of a cheesy U.K. resort chain called Pontin’s. Several dozen pasty attendants stalk the grounds in blue-and-yellow windbreakers. They look like scurvy-ridden basketball players in warmup suits. There’s something familiar about the Pontin’s logo on their breast pockets. I struggle with déjà vu until I fixate, and realize it’s almost identical to the logo for the Pokémon cartoon. Indeed, the mood of the place feels a bit like the stage set for a live-action Pokémon film, one that might at any moment break out into arty triple-X action. It’s a fetid, dour place, particularly so on the rainy afternoon on which I arrive

The strange thing is, the people around me seem to be enjoying themselves. It’s obvious that no one is visiting for the charms of this seaside town – the fried food, the Technicolor alcohol, a few rounds of miniature golf. Instead they’re here for the second weekend of All Tomorrow’s Parties, a festival of independent music programmed 10 hours a day, for the next three days, on the holiday village’s two large stages. No one frets over the weather, because everyone will forgo the beach in favor of witnessing sets by three dozen of the globe’s most famous cult music acts. The legion of indie-music fans will leave with their record-geek ardor intensified and sickly pallor intact.

The music is a bit like my initial vision of a Pokémon skin flick – underground and mainstream all at once. Day 1, curated by former Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus, features a lineup drawn from today’s college-radio charts – Modest Mouse, the Shins, Fiery Furnaces. It’s notable that indie rock’s most popular bands have accepted Malkmus’ invitation to play this godforsaken place, but even more so is the presence of two bands from the ’80s – Mission of Burma, a wiry Boston post-punk band, and ESG, a primitive funk group from the South Bronx. Both were little celebrated in their prime and have been mostly dormant for 20 years. Both have reunited, their reputations blooming as influences on the strain of obscure pop music currently going through an unprecedented renaissance.

The subsequent day is a maelstrom of noise featuring drum-bass duo Lightning Bolt, indie film star Vincent Gallo, and Angelblood, whose main attraction is a warbling blonde in a full body stocking. It’s capped off by performances from MC Dizzee Rascal – Britain’s answer to 50 Cent – and a shambling pop band known mostly for their name. They’re called Fuck. This may be a bit of programming cleverness, since the final day features Jackie-O Motherfucker — an unreconstructed noise band from upstate New York — opening up for Love With Arthur Lee, a ’60s peer of the Doors.

The weekend feels like a rebuke to cynical rock-star machinations and industry pigeonholes. The audience is ecstatic. The musicians are in good spirits. Many of them, including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, can be seen walking among the audience, paying close attention to their fellow performers

Moore presides over the clamor of the event like a proud papa. His band was responsible for selecting day 2’s lineup. And as a group widely hailed as the godfathers of alternative rock, Sonic Youth is having a moment in the sun. The whole weekend is a series of alternatives.

“This song is called ‘Stones,’” Moore announces from the stage when it’s his band’s turn to play. “It’s about stones — not the Rolling Stones, though we like all those English beat bands from the ’60s.”

“I think they’re still together,” interjects guitarist Lee Ranaldo. The 48-year-old Ranaldo was schoolboy age when many of the classic early rock bands were in their prime.

“Yeah, they have that Tommy Hilfiger sound, and that’s cool,” answers Moore, referring to the oft-lampooned corporate sponsor of tours by David Bowie and the Rolling Stones.

“Cool for them,” spits Ranaldo. He sounds like a man on a mission to destroy corporate rock, and, most surprising, convinced his mission just might succeed.

• The small new future
• 1999: The year the music industry broke
• The great schism
• Healing
• Sales sales sales
• A chalet full of diamonds
• Coda