The Play Ethic

Pay and/or/to play? Some gurus on the crisis of the music biz

Rehearsing at the moment for the Hue And Cry tour, so apologies for lighter posting. But as I'm mostly in a music mode at the moment, I thought I'd share some of the sources and pieces that fuel my theory and practice as a music entrepreneur.

Gerd Leonhard is quite rightly gaining pre-eminence as one of the visionaries who can see a new business model for the music business, beyond the current panic about the collapse of copyright. His slogan is 'compensation not control' - meaning, we have to start thinking about licensing the overall usage of music through digital streams, rather than controlling the usage of every piece of music that gets played. Lawrence Lessig makes this point about digitisation in his book Remix which I reviewed recently - literally, every time you play a piece of content on your computer, it makes a 'copy'. So, whither 'copyright' as a means of recompense? Is that really concievable these days, outwith some Orwellian system of total control of all connected machines?

I love Gerd's latest riff, inspired by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, about how the music business should start thinking about its stuff as an 'app' to be downloaded to mobile devices (like Android or the iPhone), with a whole load of services that could be charged for or rented. (The one thing you can say about mobility is that it has built in some expectation of content being paid for). No-one knows how things will settle with digital content in the next few years - as my column for the Guardian said a few weeks ago, there is regulatory-level as well as company-level reforms and innovations being pursued here. But Gerd is a superbly responsive and intelligent guide to the landscape. Here's a great interview with the music blog Rollo and Grady

Another font of useful (and occasionally wild) theorising is Bob Lefsetz (also interviewed recently in Rollo and Grady). Nothing if not passionate, Lefsetz constantly takes the major music business to task for its head-in-the-sand attitude to the digital tsunami that has rushed over them - and (inspiringly for musicians) says that the only safe course amidst the business turmoil of digitisation and networks is for bands to make the most inspiring music they can, for the most committed fans they can find. And then, assume that there's a living to be made, not a fortune. Musicians and bands should grow their presence horizontally and organically through the various fan-and-content networks available, with live performance at the core of the model. This is exactly what we've tried to do with the Hue And Cry Music Club (based on the Ning platform) - and our current near sell-out UK tour is some proof that the model can work.

And finally, from the live events specialist Sarah Farrugia, I recieved note of this interview (again from Rollo And Grady) from marketing guru Seth Godin. Here's the most relevant quote:

Seth: My new book is called Tribes, so I can’t help but use the term “tribe.” I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I define a tribe as a group of people sharing a common culture, a goal, a mission, probably a leader. There are tribes of people – like the ones who go to South by Southwest – who are connected because they want to remake the music industry. There is the tribe of people who follow Bruce Springsteen and will pay unreasonable amounts of money to hear him live and compare playlists. The important distinction here is that music labels used to be in the business of grabbing shelf space, on the radio and in the record store. Now, the music industry needs to realign and be in the business of finding and connecting and leading groups of people who want to follow a musician and connect with the other people who want to do the same.

R&G: I see artists actively pursuing their fans by gathering opt-in mailing lists and offering B-sides and tickets before they go on sale to the general public. I feel like a lot of bands are actively reaching out to their fans.

Seth: Also, the middle geography has disappeared. In the ‘70s or ‘80s you listened to a song because “everyone else” was also listening to it. That’s the definition of pop music. In those days we defined “everyone else” as people in our high school or people who listened to WPLJ. Now, “everyone else” is not defined by where you live or what radio station you listen to. It’s defined by which horizontal or vertical slice of the world you connect yourself with. I might listen to Keller Williams because everyone else in my world includes frustrated Deadheads. We don’t have new Grateful Dead to listen to, so everyone else in my circle is listening to Keller Williams, so he is pop to us. He’s not pop to the kids at the middle school who have never heard of him, right? So you end up with all these silos and niches and lots and lots of ways to look at the world.

What's the Chinese curse - may you live in interesting times? The Chinese have certainly cursed the music business at the moment. And I'm tempted to say, thank Confucious for that. It's at least not boring - and a constant and direct invitation to think through what a "play ethic" might actually mean.

Comment is Free: As banking eats itself... learn from the musicians

This is a column I've just written for the Guardian's Comment Is Free page - light-hearted but with some serious points underneath about how musicians have already adapted to tougher economic times. 

* * *

As the banking system eats itself and every trading week begins with an unhappy Monday, most working pop musicians look on the headlines with a mixture of ennui and schadenfreude. As industries contract and shatter around us, we sit in our thrumming little tour-buses and smile bitterly. Because, truth be told, rock'n'roll got its recession in early.

For example, we know all about sophisticated computers and their algorithms sending financial transactions out of control. Ever since Napster started up ten years ago, and free file-sharing on the internet became the opium of the masses, the music business's business model has been in a long, screaming death-spiral.

How would you cope, Mr Tractor-Maker, if an entire generation had grown up believing that they had the right to pay nothing for your basic commodity? Not any better than we have, I'll bet. We're all used to it now, and are trimming our sails accordingly: the musician's mantra now is "how do we make a living?", rather than "how do we dream of a fortune?" But puh-leeze, don't talk to us about collapsing markets.

And when it comes to pleas for state intervention in private industry, to desperately maintain basic viability? We've been there, done that, got the bootlegged t-shirt.

One of the bizarre spectacles of the music-biz in the last few years has been the procession of spruced-up, dressed-down music svengalis (yes, Fergal Sharkey in a suit) heading towards the offices of MPs, Ministers and European Commissioners. Their plea? Pass some laws so that some musicians can get paid something from all this downloading activity – essentially, a "music poll tax" on internet service providers. 

Hunter S. Thompson once called the music business (only slightly unfairly) “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side”. The idea of funding them like dear Auntie BBC would have the old libertarian pistol fiend combusting in his funeral urn.

And if you're looking for people to make austere lifestyle changes to get through the current slump, we musos are elegantly wasted experts. Everywhere I go, I see musicians realizing that it's not enough just to be a musician anymore. The role-model is more Andy Warhol than Keith Richards. That is, multi-skilled and enterprising about parlaying their 'brand' in various forms of old and new media. Rather than so baked in narcotics that they'd still be around (along with the cockroaches) after the neutron bombs go off.

If you want to do some field-work on this, then visit the foyer of a famous old London rock hotel like The Columbia. Any day, you will see gaggles of pierced, pipe-cleaner libertines tumble spectacularly towards the bar. But the only speed they're looking to instantly mainline when they hit the couch is the free broadband wireless (and the electrical power points).

There they sit, pale faces bathed by the unearthly glow not of crack pipes but of Mac Books. They film each other with mini-camcorders and upload their cavortings to their fan-based social networks, with whom they communicate furiously and fulsomely. If they have their headsets on, they even look like slumming-it commodity traders.

From sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll, as the pop consultant David Jennings puts it, to nets'n'blogs'n'rock'n'roll. If we are entering a new age of responsibility and hard work, as the way-cooler-than-any-rock-star President Obama announced last week, then the average career-conscious musician (or at least those not still sucking at the corporate teat) has already answered the Presidential call.

We're all building websites, touring like crazy, cutting together our own videos, using digital tech to make quality music cheaply, plastering everything from skateboards to babygros with our merchandising logos, and keeping a constant dialogue with fans via all these wonderful social tools.

To continue the Stones references, musicians are having to revise the classic Charlie Watts definition of rock'n'roll: "it's five years of playing, and 20 years of hanging around". Now its more like five years playing, five years typing, five years marketing, five years doing your accounts - with maybe five years left for nervous breakdowns/debauchery/some occasional songwriting.

And if you believe Radio Four's Evan Davis, rock'n'roll is to blame for the financial crash in any case. When David Bowie took a cash advance on the potential future earnings of his back catalogue in 2004, Davis claims he heralded the "securitisation" trend that led banks into the financial rehab-centres they currently occupy.

Indeed, the Thin White Duke provides a fitting epitaph to the current meltdown. "Ashes to ashes, funk to funky/We know RBS is a subsidy junkie/Strung out on heaven's high/Hitting an all-time low". Well, no matter how bad it gets, at least you can always rely on the musician to write an exploitative – sorry, evocative - couplet or two about it. Let's go to work, y'all.

Lily Allen, critical theorist: 'The Fear'

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but I'm thoroughly rocked by Lily Allen's current song and video, 'The Fear':

Life's about film stars and less about mothers
It's all about fast cars and passing each other
But it doesn't matter cause I’m packing plastic
and that's what makes my life so fucking fantastic

And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and it's not my fault it's how I'm programmmed to function
I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror
I'm on the right track yeah I'm on to a winner

I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I’m meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
'Cuz I’m being taken over by The Fear

Now that's a great artist, her radar on full. She's in the midst of her high-consumerist, high-celebrity life, yet able to talk just as clearly about the anxieties and worries that everyone has about living in commodity-drenched, sharply-meritocratic British society. And she does it as a hip, smart, pretty woman. The five-star Observer review gets it absolutely right.

She doubly affects me because, in my other life as a musician, I recently brought out a song (with my brother Greg in Hue And Cry), called Headin' For A Fall (available now!!) which touches all the same topics. But as you'll see from the video below, there's a difference between a carefree twenty-something girl capturing the zeitgeist perfectly, and two careworn forty-somethings agonising sweatily about the near-future. Still, it's nice to be out there signifying at the same time. All power to you, Ms. Allen. 

 

White lies coming out of every mouth around me baby and I
Simply don’t know who to believe
Blue skies are pixellated on a screen above my head
And I wish that it only was a dream

I’m reeling from the Real because it hits me like I’ve run into a wall
Better get me some momentum because otherwise I’m heading for a fall

Big time politicians standing on their favorite stage tonight
Wonder how else they get their kix
Apple pie and motherhood and wireless in the neighbourhood
Oh my, we need a brand new bag of tricks

Instinctively I feel that it’s important to be stylishly appalled
Though lately I do recognise it’s likely that we’re heading for a fall

(For explanation of the lyric, go to the Hue And Cry Music Club)