THE END OF THE WORLD AS THEY KNOW IT
The end of 2007 will provide plenty of opportunity (and excuse) for music pundits to declare that the past twelve months have proven to be the tipping point for the record biz. Choose your evidence.
Maybe it’s another round of cutting and gutting at major labels. Maybe it’s retail sales following a trajectory that roughly parallels a log flume. Or Madonna abandoning her career-long corporate cloister to cut an exclusive deal with a concert promoter. Or Radiohead freelancing their new album to fans as a pay-what-you-want download. Or labels scrambling to sign new acts to “360 deals” that guarantee the company a cut of touring and marketing (traditionally off-limits to labels). Or artists realizing they can better reach your ears through Starbucks or TV-show soundtracks or ringtones than via corporate radio and record stores.
If the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over but expect different results, there’s a unique kind of kookiness in the record biz. They do the same things they’ve always done, in the face of seismically shifting circumstances, and then panic when they don’t get the same results as they did for the past quarter-century. Their game is ending. As Warner Music Group Chair Edgar Bronfman Jr. recently told investors: “The music industry is growing. The record industry is not growing.” Let’s amend that to say music endures even if labels wither.
Is this a bad thing?
If we chose to exchange music and remunerate artists directly, who’s to say that we aren’t better off with that cottage-industry arrangement, compared to suffering the avarice of major record labels and the indignity of shopping in bland, top-10-fixated record stores staffed by people who were apparently too dim to find employment at Old Navy.
What if the major-label era is the anomaly?
What if, in ridding ourselves of the spectator/spectacle mediation provided by record companies, we are returning to the way things used to be? If artists beam themselves directly into your home via the interwebs, is that so different from entertaining the neighbors on your front porch or in the parlor?
In other words, pay no attention to the technological means that might enable modern music distribution. We may not be stepping into a brave new world so much as rediscovering a really cool old one.
–PAUL CANTIN
YOU CAN’T WALK AWAY FROM THE PRICE YOU PAY
My favorite records didn’t make my top 20. I’ve actually only even heard one of them, but the records that gave me the most to cheer about in 2007 were those released by Radiohead, Paul McCartney and the Eagles.
It’s old news, of course, that the music distribution paradigm most of us grew up with has been in a shambles since Napster. Subsequent innovations for years have just looked like Napster on speed.
Meanwhile, Wilco proved an internet freebie download could still be a top seller, but zillions of bands have been trying to give their music away online for as long as it’s been possible. They get it about the promotion potential. MySpace codified all that, and at the same time hyper-simplified, and hence democratized, the website thing.
Then along comes Radiohead and body-checks the pricing issue by essentially letting the market set the price. Not zero, not $15, not 99 cents per track — but whatever you think it’s worth.
The Eagles and Sir Paul are the alternate-distribution heroes of the baby boomers who aren’t hip, don’t have the time, or simply want records the old-fashioned way. In 2007 they essentially legitimized the single-channel distro that Starbucks pioneered in the last century, eliminating the enormous inefficiency and speculation about how many units to ship to which record stores heaven knows where. That means fewer sales are required to recoup, and those sales can be targeted more efficiently where there’s likely to be a demographic that corresponds more precisely to the artist’s.
–LINDA RAY
OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER
My ballot this year is loaded with men and women old enough to be my parents or even, in the case of the late Porter Wagoner, my grandparents. The average age of my top 5 alone is 67, and I easily could have constructed a credible top 20 by limiting myself entirely to artists eligible for membership in the AARP.
Well, of course, I could. I’m a fortysomething old fart. But the way my list lists senescent is not only a giveaway to my demographic. Judging from the composite results, I’m not too terribly different in my tastes than most of the other old farts, and youngsters too, who tricked out their lists with the sexy and sexagenarian likes of Bettye LaVette and Mavis Staples but still left room for the youthful hyper sincerity (take that, irony!) of the Avett Brothers and Okkervil River.
I like that generational mix. We live in a time, again, when artists who are, uh, mature continue not only to make records, but records that must be taken seriously. As both the performers and audience members of the raised-on-rock Baby Boom generation continue to grey, we should be able to expect this trend to continue, even intensify. Which means there may be a chance yet for tradition-minded genre growth, as well as a likelihood for music that essays the more intense limits and entanglements only available to humans who’ve put a few miles on themselves.
“I don’t mind getting older,” the still almost young Scott Miller opined on a live version of his “Freedom Is A Stranger” this year. “You get smarter when you do.” As the 2007 work of Mavis and Bettye, Fogerty and Porter, Nick and Levon and Bruce (and Mary D. Williams, Marie Knight, and Chuck Brown) prove, you can sing pretty good, too.
–DAVID CANTWELL
