The state of the UK’s pop music industry
There are few clearer demonstrations of pop’s transatlantic divide than the contrast between British and American award ceremonies. While the Grammys and the MTV VMAs bask in brazen plunge-pools of unapologetic glitz, the Brit Awards – whose 2009 renewal takes place this Tuesday – is most safely viewed as a comedy of social anxiety. From Jarvis Cocker’s bottom-wiggling assault on Michael Jackson’s messianic pretensions, to Joss Stone’s newly acquired American accent; the events for which this annual ritual is remembered generally involve someone who has got a bit above themselves being brought down a peg or two. The run-up to this year’s Brits involves a more generalised sense of Schadenfreude, with the retail downturn hitting UK record companies especially hard, and the government seemingly reluctant to do anything concrete about the illegal downloading that threatens their very survival. So are there any causes for optimism in the 2009 pop marketplace, and, if so, might the British music business still have something to offer a public which persists in branding it “the Man”?
EDITOR’S CHOICE
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Pop sensation Robbie Williams and veteran singer Tom Jones perform at the Brit Awards on February 8, 1998 at Alexandra Palace in London
On the evidence of last month’s Brit Awards Launch Party, the prognosis isn’t good. Every aspect of this televised scene-setting exercise suggested that the real fun was to be had elsewhere. The location was the Roundhouse in north London, the now clinically refurbished home of the 1960s counter-culture. And the first of a trio of hopefuls to perform was Gabriela Cilmi – a notional rival to Beyoncé and Pink in the Best International Female category, despite being British-based with one big hit behind her but no immediate prospect of any more.
Next up came the first of two appearances by Scouting for Girls – thrice-nominated poster-boys of the genre cruelly but fairly dubbed Landfill Indie. In terms of raw animal magnetism, their lead singer Roy Stride was (and is) Shakin’ Stevens to Gary Barlow’s Elvis. After sequin-bespattered host Fearne Cotton dished out dead-eyed congratulations to Florence and the Machine, the Critics Choice award-winners’ eponymous front-woman threw flowers into the crowd in the self-conscious manner of a Stars in Their Eyes contestant pretending to be Morrissey.
For that portion of the audience which comprised wannabes from the Brits School (the Kids From Fame-style performing arts academy whose apparent stranglehold over the domestic pop scene – Kate Nash, Amy Winehouse and Adele all went there – was gently satirised at last year’s Brits by Arctic Monkeys lead-singer Alex Turner, a defiant non-alumnus), this was clearly the highlight of the evening. A short speech by Brits committee and Sony UK chairman Ged Doherty sought to give the executives’ morale an equivalent boost, enthusing with no apparent discomfort about “an incredible year for British music”.
It’s true that with artists of domestic origin responsible for four of the five top-selling albums in no fewer than 34 countries last year (a performance reflected in the stellar showing of Robert Plant, Estelle, Coldplay et al at last week’s Grammys), British pop is better placed to cope with the economic meltdown than any of its global rivals. But Doherty’s brave assertions about “getting to grips with getting more music than ever into the hands of our consumers” showed a measure of linguistic leakage.
The UK music industry’s big problem at the moment is getting to grips with the fact that more music than ever is getting into the hands of its consumers without them actually having to pay for it. A recent report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry suggested that of the download transactions which are now the world’s default mechanism for the distribution of new music, 19 out of 20 are illegal. This is not quite the same as giving away 95 per cent of its product for free – anyone who thinks it is should ask themselves how much of the music they’ve acquired by this means they would have bought if required to – but it is hardly the most functional of business models either.
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Five great British record labels: The vinyl countdown
Island
In the same way that the celebrated American imprint Columbia was somehow the ideal home for both Bob Dylan and Miles Davis, west London-based Island Records – founded half a century ago this year by Chris Blackwell – provided a launchpad for both Bob Marley and U2. It also unravelled a vital strand of late 1960s/early 1970s rock, stretching from Nick Drake to Roxy Music.
Factory
With two feature films and a couple of documentaries already in the can, people who do not live within earshot of Old Trafford are entitled to feel that perhaps Tony Wilson and Peter Saville’s snappily-designed Mancunian cottage-industry has now been sufficiently mythologised. But the wealth of diverse and surprising material on the recently released Factory Boxed Set suggests otherwise.
Two-Tone
This short-lived joint venture between Jerry Dammers and London-based Chrysalis Records was perhaps the ultimate example of the record label as aesthetic template, characterised by its eye-catching black-and-white graphics, trademark ska- revival sound and fearlessly contemporary lyrics. Two-Tone’s crop-headed roster of bands – The Specials, The Beat, The Selecter and (briefly) Madness – seemed to embody the best possibilities of a multicultural Britain at the exact historic moment (1979-81) that the ideals of tolerance and togetherness were subject to the most intense pressure.
Warp
Thanks to the pioneering work of The Human League and Cabaret Voltaire, Sheffield’s tradition as a hotspot for British electronic music was already well- established even before Warp’s debut release in 1989. But this doughty South Yorkshire independent turned a local speciality into a global by-word. And having somehow survived the tragic loss of co-founder Rob Mitchell (who died in 2001), a perilous relocation to London, and a seemingly suicidal move into film and video production with its standards and reputation intact, Warp can move into its third decade with a real digital swagger.
Ever since the advent of the first commercially available Phonograph, the Victrola, in 1906, the delivery systems by which music comes into our lives have been in transition. There are clear echoes of the late 1930s pitched battles between 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and 33 rpm vinyl formats in the current struggle for supremacy between different mobile phone package deals (from Nokia’s Comes With Music – which offers access to a vast library of sound for what is essentially a concealed subscription charge – to We 7, Peter Gabriel’s ad-funded model). And the furore about illegal downloading often calls to mind the disastrous “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaigns of the cassette age.
Many people believe the demise of the music business would usher in a golden age of unmediated creativity, but this view reflects gross ignorance of the progress of pop history. Try to imagine Chicago blues without Leonard Chess, rock ‘n’ roll without Sam Phillips’ Sun records, the Beatles without Brian Epstein, soul without Berry Gordy, Led Zeppelin without Peter Grant, punk without Malcolm McLaren. It’s not just that the music would have been different – it wouldn’t have existed in anything like the form that we remember and love it.
Laurence Bell, whose Domino label is one of those striving to sustain that tradition of enlightened entrepreneurship, identifies the major record labels’ failure to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the 2000 court case involving US illegal file-sharing pioneer Napster as the key moment in their declining fortunes.
“At that point,” Bell says, “Napster was the most famous musical brand name in the world, and it was just a teenager in a room. He [Napster founder Shawn Fanning] would have happily taken, say, £10m, for his business, and if the big boys of the music industry hadn’t been too busy fighting each other, they could have got together and used it as a way to monetise downloading then, instead of waiting another five years or so for iTunes to get going.” As a result, while revenues are now finally starting to come in from digital sales, they’re several years shy of where they’d need to be to cover losses from a vertiginously declining physical retail sector.
The gloomy tidings of recent months – the collapse of the distributor Pinnacle and retail chains Zavvi and Woolworths – have given the Kensington-based offices of the four remaining major record companies (EMI, Warners, Universal and Sony) the poignant air of polar bears huddled on a shrinking ice-floe. But there have also been signs that the remnants of the British music industry might be starting to get their act together.
The new Kensington High Street home that Ged Doherty’s Sony moved into in August – its spacious offices brightened up by a life-sized suit of armour and replica horse – feels like the kind of place people might actually want to work in.
“We’re in the entertainment business, now, not the music industry, that’s our strapline,” insists Doherty, who started out promoting early AC/DC gigs while at college in Sheffield, before “coming over to the dark side” (his words) to become a record executive in the early 1990s.
“The thing that’s not changed,” Doherty continues, “is the artists and the fans. The thing that has changed is everything in the middle. Record companies can no longer take anything for granted: we’ve got to earn our place at the table ... But there are 5m bands on MySpace now, so how on earth is any consumer supposed to find their way through that lot without a bit of help?”
Paul Morley (writer and presenter of an upcoming Radio 2 series on the history of record labels) agrees that – in creative terms at least – the impact of new media has been overestimated. “The problem with what has been described as ‘the storage cloud’ is that it’s full of millions of demos, whereas record labels know how to take a demo and turn it into something magical ... And people tend to overestimate how innovative things that happen over the internet are – MySpace is simply a fan-club, Facebook is simply a youth club and Twitter is simply a postcard: nothing new has actually happened.”
Newly appointed Virgin boss Shabs Jobanputra takes a still more long-term view. “The record business as we understand it is maybe 50 or 60 years old,” he argues, “but people have been going to gigs since the Stone Age.” Having successfully muscled in on the profitable live bookings circuit, Jobanputra is now determined to redefine the record companies’ role as paymaster to the music business. “For years we’ve been the suckers in the playground, our heads in our hands, paying for everything, while every other part of the industry – live, merchandising, publishing, use of music on TV – grows at our expense”.
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Justin Timberlake performs with Kylie Minogue in 2003 at the Brit Awards
“One way of showing how the business has changed”, explains Ged Doherty, back at Sony HQ, “is if you look at the first Justin Timberlake album. We released the album, three or four singles and, I think, a DVD: that’s five pieces of product. When the second one came out in 2006, our US company put out 182 – 42 of them physical, the rest digital. I can’t tell you exactly what the income streams are, but some would be fractions of a penny.”
US Wired editor Chris Anderson’s concept of the “Long Tail” (essentially, the view that “the future of business is selling less of more”) is frequently cited to argue for the viability of a diverse back catalogue. But for the music industry it seems more validly applied to the fragmentation of the commercial centre. What made the Brits Launch Party such an unbearable experience was that it didn’t really exist as an actual event, more as a selection of pre-packaged fragments to be parcelled off to a plethora of rival outlets. “A bit for TV, a bit for the papers, a bit for the artists, and a bit for the internet – that’s how it is nowadays,” Doherty observes, sagely.
The main Brit awards ceremony on Tuesday can be expected to generate a little more star wattage, especially with U2 opening the show. Coincidentally, Bono and co’s home town of Dublin was the location of one recent event that might put a smile on the beleaguered face of the UK music industry. On January 28, in a suit brought by the four major record companies, the Irish High Court ruled that Eircom (the leading Irish internet service provider) must institute a “three strikes and you’re out” policy of disconnecting illegal downloaders. Its ruling established a precedent – that ISPs have at least a share in the responsibility for the uses to which their services are put – that British authorities have so far been reluctant to accept.
The nebulous-looking proposal for a Digital Rights Protection Agency in the government’s Digital Britain report seemed to confirm its reluctance to intervene on the music industry’s behalf. And intellectual property minister David Lammy’s recent analogy between illegal downloading and a hotel guest “taking a bar of soap” did little to reverse this impression (“a better equation”, says Doherty, “would be staying at the hotel, eating a lavish meal, drinking the entire contents of the minibar, and then leaving without paying the bill”).
In recent months, however, there have been signs of a new readiness on the part of the ISPs to negotiate some kind of compromise. It would probably be a mistake to ascribe this turnaround to any great moral awakening (as one trenchant insider puts it, “The only reason they’ve come to the table is that any minute now their systems are going to be totally overloaded with games and movies, and, if they can’t sort out a legitimate business model, they’re ****ed”).
But something is going to have to be done if Britain’s film, publishing and computer game sectors aren’t going to follow its record companies into the digital abyss. And if the nation’s other creative communities can learn fast enough from the music business’s experience, it’s just possible that they – as well as it – may yet live to fight another day.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/be93695c-f95f-11dd-90c1-000077b07658.html
А у меня в Москве только русские каналы 
