I was reading Hank Williams blog about the music business here. Its an interesting page & Hank suggests that traditionally record labels act in a very fiscal sense, much like banks…..
Hank says “there are precious few artist that are anything close to successful (i.e. at minimum able to sustain themselves from just their artistry) without having had a label deal.”
Responses include the accurate and sharp:
“...this is because there are many artists who are not really artists… and they fail in ‘engaging’ their audience.They are romantic lifestylers whose communicative ability is too poor to even reveal that they have nothing much to communicate, other than their self-deluded visions of artistic significance. Their self-awareness is too meagre to allow them to see that their art is inspired by their inner emptiness…..
Given the masses of drivel that the creatively mute pump out, the real challenge is identifying the ‘real artists’ … the artists who perceive the world in a different way, and have the ability to communicate that and engage/enlighten their audience.”
And,
“In a related vein, a research aricle recently published by HBS found that the “long tail” phenom is a steeper curve – meaning the disparity between big artists and developing acts is even greater. All the choice creates too much noise in the system for most people – so even more just default to the hits.”
Plus,
“I think one of our biggest problems has been losing this relationship where record sales determined air play over the past couple decades.The funding model worked because it was a real meritocracy where cream could rise to the top. Nobody being able to afford cattle anymore puts a pretty big damper on the future for cream.”
This is what I have to say about THE COST ACCOUNTANT BLUES:
What`s happening here ? Too often people equate financial success with artistic merit. You either do what you love or you are wasting your time whether you get paid or not. What`s fascinating is doing what you want musically, when you want with no smallprint, no middleman, no obligations, no genre limitations, no debt, no big flash production &cetera….I think it`s called freedom but freedom/expression is not concomitant with quality. The unsigned bands want to be signed, the signed bands want to be unsigned – you have to laugh…And even the great and good sometimes miss the boat. Exactly how does Jandek pay the bills ?
Yes, there seems an awful lot of (money) great production skill invested into polishing artists – producers are the intelligent, skilled, elite here. We`ve all heard fantastic records from bands who can`t really even play – that`s production. But we also hear great records from highly talented artists of genuine capability.
Some artists get it all right somehow and none of it is as easy as anybody thinks.
And yes, the industry gives us some material that might be considered overly crass – but no-one forces you to listen to it. Supply and demand or Hype and Advertising – these are diminishing factors perhaps. Is the affordability of technology + cheap global publishing inversely proportional to a musical meritocracy ? Sounds like a specious contradiction to me. Okay we have a hyperconnected world with an almost infinitesimal multitude of choices and no discernible quality control. Is that not an improvement on the old fashioned paternal linear model where you tended to buy from a chart, or to put it more transparently, an oligarchy.
Maybe music shouldn`t be ceaselessly commoditised ? Record companies need to enter the “new conversation” that is occurring globally, but the nature of traditional companies themselves is now very much under threat. (Perhaps we are beyond No Logo and moved on into a realm of utter mistrust, or connectivity [?] means that we just don`t need or rely upon those dark satanic corporate mills any more ?).But then again, surely the cream will still always rise to the top. Will it become the place of the (formerly known as) “record companies” in these perilous future-times to begin to have to find and produce the most exciting, challenging and BEST new work ? Maybe not, find it yourself, IF YOU CAN, and pay less for it – sounds okay to me. But I know that Highway 61 Revisited cannot be recorded and produced in anyone`s bedroom, not even Bob`s.
So fundamentally nothing sounds as good as something that has been well produced – I take a terrible recording of a two dollar guitar with a weak vocal on a dodgy old-cassette to my producer. He plugs in a mic` gives me a decent plank to strum and 1 hour later we`ve got some very high quality audio, hooks, lines, he`s got the skills to pay the bills etcetera….
This model works: I go and get my inspiration, write, record low-fi, go back home, refine, compress, alter, play-around with my ideas, lyrically, musically, sonically etcetera but I cant get that magic production quality out of it without his input. Similarly he needs my song, chords, idea, hooks, lyrics, riffs etcetera to really get cooking. You find a producer who digs your material – you are onto a winner. He lives in a shiny, clean, hi-tech, capital city, with vast screens, bigger machines and chrome plated dreams – I spent the last 3 years living a loose, disorganised hobo-esque itinerant lifestyle on floors, besides rivers, in vans, on the road, drifting around a long way from home…you get the picture. I want to write songs with a sense of urgency, lyricism but also a sense of place / historicism, songs of time and place, narrative, and experience – you cant really do that withoutgetting out there, you have to experience something.
Can a company still survive delivering superior quality product amid a sea of mediocrity ? Hope so – because it makes a change from concentrating upon the bottom line + creating closed cyclic channels. As an aside; Radiohead cut the ropes/walked the plank and surely their label had previously aided their growth. That the label published a “best of” in some tawdry tit for tat retaliation simply proves that human nature doesn`t change even when the world does. People want money. People are deluded. People are greedy. People get lucky. Some people dont. Lets face facts: we live in an era of Bob Dylan coffee mugs and other kitsch – does Bob control this tawdry marketing of gewgaws? Surely not ? Does Bob care ? Who cares. No-one cares. Life is expensive, cheap and short – mortgages are long and stultifying. IS it nostalgia that suggests stars were real stars in days of yore and that nowadays they have been simmered, reduced, garnished and served vacuously up as mass market commoditised Pop Idol media fodder and being often, therefore, irrelevant crapola?
