If your own customers leave you to die like a rolled tourist on a dark street off the Vegas strip — as happened to the music industry in the last decade — there’s no denying your contribution to your demise. Did you seek out an exploitative economic relationship with terms outlandishly favourable to you, like $20 to $40 CDs? Did you flaunt your assumed power as invincibility because you were one of the five music companies that controlled most music by 1999? Did you believe the neon strip you strutted on was the real world and that it would continue to bathe you in protective light after you took a wrong turn? That’s as silly as throwing hundreds of millions of dollars a year at radio payola and mistaking it for the public actually liking your product for more than a week. To wit, the death of the music industry as we knew it was underway long before Napster created one of the first (and, truth be told, worst) file-sharing tools.
There’s nothing as polemical as the above analogy in Greg Kot’s brilliant Ripped, an eye-opening and overwhelmingly positive look at the future of music. Instead Kot relies on an orderly arrangement of facts and actual interviews with musicians and fans who have moved into the post-recorded music industry world. While Kot begins his book with a précis on the old industry’s ignoble decline, he doesn’t dwell there for the simple reason that it doesn’t matter anymore. Most customers, and more and more musicians, have moved onto fairer relationships.
Lest I make it sound like Kot is proffering a coming people’s musical utopia of magical zithers and digital cherubs farting out free melodies, his arguments are instead fascinatingly nuanced and falsifiable. According to Kot, mega-selling artists of yore still stuck on CDs may have been hot for Starbucks exclusive deals to help escape the whims of CEOs, but now that Starbucks has aligned with iTunes, it’s Steve Jobs and outfits like LiveNation that loom as new overlords. Radiohead’s momentous In Rainbows experiment and tour played well, making the band more money than they ever made before, but was, according to Trent Reznor, a promo gimmick more than a viable new model and one he would spectacularly improve on. Young bands lacking the years of major label–engineered audiences that Reznor or Radiohead have, now attempt blog fame. Yet some, like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, disappeared when their sprightly, adenoidal MySpace tracks failed to translate live. Other bands, though, like the Arcade Fire, have survived being buzz stars.
Pitchfork giveth and Pitchfork taketh away, but a return to an emphasis on live performance is the thread throughout Ripped. Either for cult artists like Wilco (“In all my years making records I’ve never made money off of records,” says Jeff Tweedy, speaking for 95 per cent of musicians) or any 20-year-old with half a brain and a full tank of gas in the van. As Kot quotes David Byrne, “Taking music from town to town and playing for people has been around for centuries. It was thriving before we were alive, and it will be around long after we’re dead. It’s an experience that cannot be digitized.”
That realignment in the relationship between fan and band is the revolution Kot hints at in his subtitle. Bands can no longer make music in a social vacuum and launch an album like a retail consumable — as if it’s a new brand of soda aimed at an entire population. Likewise, fans are dropping dollars once spent on overpriced CDs on cover charges and ticket prices. Think of it as a mass getting off of our asses and re-engagement with the social.
That’s not a perfect revolution by any means, and much remains to play out, but it is far better than the conditions even just 10 years ago.