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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.
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