At the NY Times, musician Elizabeth Nelson reviews a documentary, co-produced by Eminem, that hails the original online music pirates as the heroes of a wonderful revolution. Nelson is unconvinced, and offers these two possible takes:
The story they want to tell, in an emphatically triumphalist tone, is that the early pirates were David and the music industry was Goliath. But then the industry realized that David was actually pretty cool: All turned out well, and music was solved forever.
I may be speaking as a working musician here, but from my perspective — the perspective, I think, of almost any nonmogul with a stake in the industry — this is an obviously insane interpretation of events. The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. There are the Spotify playlists peppered with songs generated by fake artists that Spotify owns the rights to, allowing the company to recapture its own royalty payments. And at the same time, there is the fact that nearly every space where consumers could once interact with music unsupervised by corporate gatekeepers — record stores, mail order, merch tables — has been put on life support.
I have long considered online music piracy to be the just comeuppance of an industry that refused either to sell the public what they wanted or price what they were selling anywhere near what people wanted to pay. Back in 1990, if you heard a song on the radio by an artist who intrigued you, the only thing you could do was to go out and pay $18 for a cd that, as often as not, had only one good song, the one you had already heard. I did this at least ten times, and I resented it. I remember reading critics at the time who said that people were begging for singles, not albums, but the industry mostly refused to sell them and when they did they charged $5-7. I understood that downloading was theft, but, again, I had zero sympathy for anyone in the music industry.
I think the amount of money non-famous artists used to make from album sales is often exaggerated these days. Other than the biggest stars, only cranky hermits could really earn a living just off sales. Touring was always how musicians made it, and it still is. Live music is bigger than ever before. Many musicians regard their appearances on Spotify more as free ads for their live shows than as a meaningful revenue stream.
As for corporate sameness, well, that is pretty much the top lament of our cultural era. My experience, however, has been completely different. Thanks to YouTube I have discovered more new music over the past five years than any comparable period of my life. Viz., all the Nordic Ambient music I have discovered, artists like Waldruna and Sigur Ros. How would I have discovered this music in 1990? How would I have stumbled onto Eivor, singing in Faroese? I can't imagine. As I recall, the way it worked was that you had to have a friend who was a music obsessive who spent 20 percent of his income on obscure albums he ordered from catalogs. Absent such a friend who happened to be plugged in, you were out of luck. (Whatever Elizabeth Nelson thinks, a record store was absolutely not a space where you could interact with music without corporate gatekeepers.)
It is true that the algorithms of YouTube and Spotify are mostly useless, to a degree that baffles me; given all the money there to be made by a service that really made good recommendations, why can't anyone make it work? But only a small amount of reading and exploration is enough to find some names of artists and bands who sound interesting, and rather than having to plunk down $18 to find out what they sound like you can just pop online and listen.
From my perspective, this is the greatest era ever to be a lover of music.
Complete agreement. I'm a massive fan of music that would have been effectively impossible to find in the 90s - lots of foreign music, lots of obscure vintage music, lots of weird experimental music, etc.
ReplyDeleteSo many things I adore, I never in a million years would have come across on the radio. Perhaps I might have found a few things in certain kinds of record stores (if any existed anywhere near I lived growing up), but likely only with tremendous effort and the help of the sort of obsessives you note, none of which I have ever met or known.
Even things that are not that old or obscure! I recently became a great fan of Thomas Dolby's music - the guy who everyone knows for the only single of his they play on the radio, She Blinded Me With Science, which is completely unlike all the rest of his music, and the fact that it's the only one anyone is familiar with is absolutely criminal. It's one of a handful of songs he was compelled to write specifically for the record companies and radio play, and it sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of his work. And it ironically probably torpedoed any chances he had of finding mainstream success in America back in the day - people listened to that single and thought, "Eh, this is fine, but I don't love it", and wrote his music off completely.
But the record executives have always dictated their own whims and desires to artists - The Who famously only wrote Pinball Wizard because they were pressured to by the label, and despite their hating the song and resenting its existence, it's the one song from that album that got massive airplay and became instantly recognizable.
I would agree as well. In this era it's much easier to find good music one would likely never have heard of otherwise. I will also say I've found a lot of that music through the You Tube algorithm. I'm completely lost as to what's supposed to be so bad about it.
ReplyDeleteThe YouTube algorithm is useful; I have also gotten new music from it. But the hit rate is low; no more than one in ten of the things it suggests are pleasing to me, and it doesn't, I don't know, open up new worlds of music I knew nothing about. Another way the internet fails to meet the dreams I had about it in the 1990s.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I'd say most of what gets recommended to me by You Tube's algorithm looks interesting, and much of what I try is pleasing. Sometimes I wish it was a little less effective, since human life is finite.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to Youtube's algorithm, I have an unusual situation. I run script-blocking plugins for my browsers, along with using various methods to anonymize my data and prevent sites like Youtube from being able to keep tabs on the things I watch there.
ReplyDeleteEffectively, every time I visit Youtube, it's like the website thinks I'm a completely new visitor, and so it can't recommend me anything based on anything other than the things I watch during that particular visit.
And that makes the recommendations actually work pretty well. Instead of trying to show me things based on years worth of records of all the incredibly varied things I've watched over time, it only has an extremely limited data pool to work with, and thus its recommendations tend to more genuinely relevant to whatever I'm looking at during that session.
"Oh, you're listening to Liam Clancy? Here are some of his songs you've not listened to." (Oh! I didn't even know he DID a version of that song! Nice!)
"Oh, you're listening to Liam Clancy? Here are some collaborations he did with Tommy Makem". (Excellent! I've heard lots of Clancy, but not much Makem!)
"Oh, you're listening to Liam Clancy? Here are other musicians in the folk genre of that era". (Nice! I've never even heard of these bands before!)
...as opposed to...
"Oh, you're listening to Liam Clancy? Well, you also have recently listened to French Synthwave, Mongolian Throat Singing, Spanish Guitar, and the collected works of They Might Be Giants, so by our calculations, you're going to LOVE this Aurelio Voltaire guy and his weird hipster music!" (Uhh... thanks?)