from the Guardian UK:
The sullying of our songs
Pop music lovers should fear for the future as a desperate industry turns into glorified advertising John Harris
The Guardian, Tuesday 16 December 2008
Twenty-eight years ago, those west London desperadoes the Clash released an exhausting triple album called Sandinista!. It included Hitsville UK, a tribute to a new breed of cottage industry record labels which blithely bypassed the fact that the Clash were signed to CBS and mapped out a new, non-corporate utopia. In the world to come, they claimed, there would be "no expense accounts, or lunch discounts, or hyping up the charts" - nor any need for "slimy deals with smarmy eels".
Rather belatedly, some of this slightly fifth-form ideal is being realised as the mainstream music business faces a recession that caps a run of nightmares stretching back to the early noughties. The once-infallible British firm EMI, now owned by the private equity outfit Terra Firma, last year suffered losses of £757m. Earlier this year, the multinational Warner Music's share price fell to 28% of its value three years previously, and in August, the German media conglomerate BMG announced the end of its four year-old joint operation with Sony, and sold the latter its 50% stake.
What is killing the industry is a vertical drop in the value of music. At the younger end of the age range, illicit downloading has created a generation who expect music for nothing. Even among people who might still pay £10 for a CD, the same unstoppable forces look triumphant, thanks to such factors as newspaper and magazine giveaways and the bulk-buying of supermarkets. The upshot: Amazon's new download service is offering hit albums for just £3, which, among record-buyers of a certain age, might prompt a Proustian rush. As I recall, that was the going rate for bargain-bin albums circa 1980.
Now, if you cleave to the idea that major record labels have always been parasitic and piratical outfits and deserve their demise, have a look at an interview with Damon Albarn - in charge of a reunited Blur - in this month's issue of the Word. He remains contracted to EMI but loathes its reinvention as a stripped-down and thus far unsuccessful cash cow. "EMI was an interesting mix of art and commerce, a really amazing one, actually, and they're not any more," he says. And the logic of his argument applies to the fate of the industry writ large. Squeezed budgets mean that the people genuinely in it for the music are being cast aside - and, to paraphrase Orwell, the most likely vision of the future is a grinning Simon Cowell, stamping on anything of quality, for ever. .........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/16/musicindustry-popandrock
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