Introduction
Many fans and indie musicians don't like "Big Music." The reasons are legion: a history of sharp business practices and a perception of poor quality are a couple major ones. Despite its flaws however, we believe Big Music has throughout the years brought us some wonderful music and artists, without whom the world would be a poorer place. As importantly, Big Music (which we also call the "Majors" as in major labels) has fulfilled another important function and that is filtering out a lot of the crap. You may disagree with that, but please at least hear us out.
What's Wrong With Music Today?
No doubt many of you would agree with us that it seems like something is "wrong" with music these days. It doesn't feel like (or sound like) the best music is getting to the market. It seems like music is diffused and unfocused. Compared to past decades, it feels like there is no common, shared identity we have as a country that revolves around our music. (And we think this goes for most of the western countries, whether you live in the US, UK, Australia, etc.)
It also seems like we are "clinging" to a lot of the old music from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Now, maybe that's a function of the baby boom bulge right now and the fact that music supervisors and decision makers at TV and movies are baby boomers too. But, we also think that this clinging phenomenon is a reflection of the lack of a common shared experience and identification with the songs of today. There are few bands or artists of the last few years we can think of that a substantial cross-section of the country knows and loves and there certainly are not the legions of them that there used to be.
Why is there this diffusion surrounding today's artists and their songs? Here's what we think.
Big Music Has Lost Control
Big Music has lost control of it's distribution system (see more on that here). We believe that that is directly traceable to the invention of Napster, the original online "peer-to-peer" (or "P2P") system. (See more on Napster here.) Napster allowed anybody and everybody to easily steal music and they did. By the time the music industry shut them down, the genie was out of the bottle. Napster, while rendered impotent by 2001, was imitated by Grokster and KaZaA and a host of other P2P sites. Then in 2001, "BitTorrent" came along—an even more sophisticated technology for stealing intellectual property online (more on that here).
By the mid "oughts," (say 2005), the deluge started with the old newsgroups turning into well-marketed machines for fast (and even anonymous) illegal downloading. About this time too, we saw the rise of overseas "pirate" websites, mostly in jurisdictions like the former Soviet Union countries, beyond the reach of any law. These sites represent the ultimate in outlaw activity. The P2P sites (including the BitTorrent and usenet sites) hide behind a thin veil of legitimacy as they do have some "legal" files for downloading and as they do say they will "take down" any files, upon request that are on their sites "illegally." These websites and what we call a whole digital pirate ecosystem are living off the lifeblood of those who create intellectual property. (See more on these parasites here and here.)
It's Not Singles Downloading, It's Not The Death of The CD
Many, both in and out of the music industry point to the increase in singles downloading since the advent of iTunes in 2003 as the
- The 1998 "DMCA" which one music industry wag dubbed the "Denying Monetary Compensation Always"1 absolves those who allow online theft to take place over their internet networks (principally "internet service providers" or "ISPs" like Comcast or Cox) from any responsibility for such theft. We think its more apt to call it the "Destroy Music Creators Act" because that us surely what it is doing.
- The splintering of media up into many more "channels." We used to have basically three networks in the US. Now we have hundreds of cable channels. The internet itself represents even a greater plethora of "channels" that people can watch.
