Quality | 2008.12.26
John Harris: The sullying of our songs
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.
Moreover, let no one think that as the corporate behemoths fall, the Clash\'s predictions are coming true, and newly energised independent labels are on the march. Far from it: last week, the independent distribution company Pinnacle, once responsible for servicing records by such attractions as Morrissey, the Libertines and the Strokes, went bust, leaving no end of so-called indie labels in the lurch.
So what happens now? The cliched version of the music industry\'s future revolves around new "360-degree" deals whereby big companies take a cut not just from sales but songwriting royalties, concert receipts and merchandise. There are two drawbacks: first, that while your Madonnas and your U2s might be OK, relative musical minnows will surrender to a new kind of indentured creativity; and second, that as recession bites the uncertainty of whether money from tickets and T-shirts will compensate for the plunge in music revenues.
So, one option is to offer up music as a vehicle for advertising; to not just license pre-existing songs for commercials or get tours and festivals sponsored, but put the message right at the heart of things. Such rappers as 50 Cent - a master, according to some insiders, of offsetting falling sales by "leveraging his own brand" - and Busta Rhymes have already embraced product placement (respectively for Reebok and Courvoisier cognac). You could sniff much the same idea in a watershed British deal that materialised in May, when Groove Armada - responsible for the luxuriant music that accompanies M&S food ads - announced they would "record and release exclusive new tracks with Bacardi over the course of the next year".
Now, no one should over-romanticise popular music\'s purity, nor ignore the fact that, thus far, the profit motive has served it very well. But if turbo sponsorship and endless giveaways are the future, any music lover should feel deeply uneasy. After all, turning music into glorified advertising surely besmirches its creator\'s motives, let alone the quality of the records, and surrendering to the idea that songs should be dished out for free will hopelessly sully their magic.
On this last score, the most affecting portrait of the future can be found not in the work of any Clash-esque rabble rousers but a 2001 song by the melancholic American singer-songwriter Gillian Welch. It\'s called Everything Is Free, and its words are a lament not for the corporations but hapless musicians. "Everything is free now," she sings. "That\'s what they say/Everything I ever loved/I\'m going to give it away." In retrospect, its vision was right on the money: something once precious rendered not just cheap, but pretty much worthless.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/16/musicindustry-popandrock
