This is a website set up by MIPI “an organisation that provides investigative and intellectual property rights enforcement” along with the support of the major music labels & local industry body ARIA. It’s basically a video based on the old shtick where the artists all line up to cry poor about how music piracy is hurting them.
Included are Aussie acts like The Veronicas, who made a $AU 1.7 million profit last year & Human Nature with $AU 1.9 million for their trouble. These numbers come via the BRW Top 50 Entertainers list (subscription needed).
Even more mind-melting is the fact that this will be available on DVD free to high schools and available as a BitTorrent download! (BitTorrent is one place where you can access pirated music on the net.) From The Age newspaper article:
“The documentary is not yet part of a structured anti-piracy program in schools, but Heindl said it was formatted to fit neatly into existing units, such as the “Music for Free?” English unit created this year by the Commonwealth Department of Education, which examines the ethics of file sharing.”
I’m amazed that the artists are willing to line themselves up to peddle this tired crap - but then again if you’ve ever listened to some of these records, you’d know that many of these artists have made a career from recording their toilet activities and setting it to a dope beat with the help of a hot producer. To understand why this is just so much rubbish and how a free DVD of some confused artists won’t do anything to help, come with me now as we zoom out to take a bigger look at what is going on.
Music happened before there was an industry and it will happen after. Music is a timeless human expression that changes and occurs constantly. The ‘industry’ is new to music in this timescale and has sought to exploit a gap between artist and (a new) audience opened by technology. It did/does this in two ways:
Firstly, technology emerged (c.1888) that meant that a recording could be made of a musical performance. New technology is always expensive and subsequently this meant that very few people had the opportunity to record. Over time, many myths have been and continue to be built up about the recording process - most of them bogus. Most music business people have little understanding of this technology, so subsequently they subscribe to these myths (ie. an expensive recording studio is a better recording studio). These myths are handy when artists take them on, as require the continued participation of the music business to finance something that the artist can rarely do themselves.
Secondly, yet more technologies allowed these recordings to be reproduced, distributed and sold to many more people than before. Things like vinyl presses, trucks & trains, radio stations and so on were expensive and the music industry has paid for and subsequently controlled many aspects of the technology/money gap between artist and audience. The music industry belives that it created, paid for and therefore owns this audience - even if they used artists and their work as the front to do so. It’s important to note here that while they may have created an audience they did not create the audience. The audience is a cultural phenomenon. In music, an audience starts with the individual who creates a piece and goes out into the world.
As technology has moved on and closed this gap of its own volition, the music industry failed to see what was happening and is now broken. If some people did see this happening, there was little or nothing that could be done to stop it. Recording technology is cheap and prolific and is a massive industry in its own right. With more access to information (largely via the internet) recording myths are being debunked or becoming so outrageous that they are irrelevant. The recording industry lost this aspect of control about 20 years ago and was the beginning of the end for it. The internet has subsequently filled the distribution, marketing and sales gap once controlled by a few large companies. Without a gap to exploit, there can be and will be no music industry in the centrally controlled mass-market fashion we’ve become accustomed to.
This means that someday soon The Veronicas will be out there in the big wide world with just themselves, their music, some recording gear and a computer - just like the majority of people who make music today. All this film shows is a sad display of artists coming to terms with the fact that the industry they chose to be a part of is broken and without it, making a buck out of music will continue to require them to work hard with most likely, less reward.
So now we have some perspective - here’s a quick list of items for consideration for the crew of the SS. Australian Music Biz as their ship disappears under the waves, never to be see again:
- Music will still get made, sold and enjoyed even if ARIA and all the major labels collapsed overnight.
- The day after this happens the members of general public who have yet to ween themselves off commercial radio will realize that there is more music out there than ever before covering more styles, sounds, moods and ideas than you’ll ever have time for.
- With their feed tube removed, radio stations may have to return to employing DJ’s who know & care about music. This would also mean that it will be easier for more bands to have access to more ears.
- Music will be purchased directly (or more directly) from the artists, so while they may not sell as much, they’ll make the same, or maybe more money - as this article by Steve Albini demonstrates and also as recent releases by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails indicate.
- Performing will return as essential to any music career. Industry-made studio-built bands will get less attention without a show or a publicity machine.
- Less cash and public prominence will lower the risk of artists developing fevered egos and becoming culturally disconnected and irrelevant. Bono and Sting will return to their true place in the world as “a couple of guys from those two bands”.
- With less money recording will be stripped back to it’s essentials (a good recording of a good performance) as no one will be able to afford spending excessive time in the studio polishing turds.
Please big music industry, go someplace quiet and die to let the rest of us get on with making music for each other. We don’t need you anymore and we’re sorry you didn’t realise that you couldn’t own music. It’s a shame to have to watch you pass away without dignity - but this is the fate suffered by many a cheat. It’s not nice to think about all the artists you exploited and the ill fate that many suffered but we’ll recycle what’s left of you (and your market) to make something new. We promise to think of you when we play our copies Back In Black that we downloaded on our computers and remember the times when people “made records like that”.
