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Common Musical Sense
An Intellectual Call to
Arms against the Recording Industry, Radio Deregulation, and Media Consolidation
and their Threat to our National Culture and Democracy
by Joshua A. Cohen
A culture cannot forever survive under the unyielding weight of
commerce. Like other forms of art, Music cannot maintain its cultural relevance
and vitality when detained by the fetters of economic efficiency and financial
decision-making. Perhaps if Music were just a form of fleeting entertainment,
its vigor would not be of such consequence and thus its discussion of little
national import. However, throughout history and to this day, Music continues to
be a vital element of communication and an essential tool that people use to
understand themselves, their society and their place in the world. With so
central of a role in self-identity, the dissemination and appreciation of
musical expression is perhaps as important to a vibrant democracy as other forms
of exchanging ideas, such as free speech, protest and public debate. It would be
heretical to suggest that the exchange of ideas should be reserved exclusively
to the realm of private business and marketed as just another commodity.
Likewise, the idea that musical communication should be abandoned to the
vagaries of economic measures of value and the constraints of market
efficiencies, should be equally offensive to American sensibilities. While the
sale of Music certainly has a long history in our country, within the last
decade major developments in media consolidation and deregulation have so
restricted forms of Music dissemination that these changes have come to
represent a major threat to the vibrancy of our civilization itself. Perhaps
nothing short of a revolution in the marketplace will be necessary to help us
take back the Music from the Industry and put it in its rightful place in our
cultural and democratic heritage.
The
Political, Sociological and Psychological Need for Music
There
will be some that will question the importance that I have thus far placed on
Music, so before describing the events that led to the current crisis and
outlining the revolutionary steps needed as a remedy, let us briefly review the
place Music holds in society. Some years ago, the
Perhaps
this professor had never been inspired enough by Music to make a major change in
his life, a political decision or simply an internal resolution on how the world
should be interpreted. Or perhaps, I had been wrong all along. Could it be that
Music was only of political interest prior to the collapse of the
Still
Music does not need to be overtly ideological or a pawn in a wider geopolitical
battle to necessarily have political or sociological import. A fine example in
the Soviet context was the bard Bulat Okudzhava, who came to prominence in
the1950s and 1960s. Okudzhava was originally a poet, who begun accompanying his
poetry recitals with simple melodies and a few guitar chords. Though never
aspiring fame, Okudzhava’s small Musical gatherings and concerts were captured
on tape recorders, whose recent advent in the
For
the most part Okudzhava’s lyrical content did not seem obviously political.
His Music did not question the existence of the Soviet state, its economy or its
forms of repression. And it was not Okudzhava’s precise lyrical content or
even his guitar skills that endeared him to millions, but rather his ability to
capture the spirit of his people. At the time the nation was being barraged with
an official music whose purpose was didactic and overly optimistic. Okudzhava,
on the other hand, tried to explore the true realities of love, war and
homeland, both positive and negative, and thus his Music was able to help the
Soviets understand their true place in the world. As Okudzhava himself explained
“the serious listener forgives the performer’s ineptness in playing and the
not-so-good, perhaps, melody – if there is intonation; if only human fate can
be felt in a song. Only then does it appear as an object of art.” It seems
that this intonation had been totally lost in Soviet music prior to the
emergence of Okudzhava. As Vladimir Frumkin writes in his introduction to the
songbook Bulat Okudzhava 65 Songs, “It seems that in a thoroughly organized
and ideologized society not only are economics, morals, politics and art
degraded, but also speech and song. It is as though people forget how to freely
express themselves. Melody and speech lose their richness and spontaneity, the
tone becomes mechanical and still. It is no longer nourished by living thoughts
and emotions, and struggles to conceal its absence in an exaggerated pathos, or
a saccharine imitation of intimacy.”
Examples
of Music asserting its power in the face of extreme repression can be found in
the
Within
the last century, Music has had no less resonance within our culture and
political landscape. Woody Gutherie, author of “This Land is Your Land” is
one of the preeminent founders of social commentary Music in this country.
Getting his musical start during the Great Depression, Gutherie penned wonderful
Dust Bowl Ballads, championing the plight of migrant workers. When he moved east
he struck a chord with unions and leftist organizations, writing pro-labor and
anti-fascist songs. Of his importance, John Steinbeck wrote “Woody is just
Woody...He sings the songs of a people. And I suspect that he is, in a
way, that people...There is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing
sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for
those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and
fight against oppression. I think we call this the American Spirit."
The
torch of Woody’s songs of political protest was passed forward to other great
American singers, notably Pete Seeger (“If I had a hammer”), who’s work
helped spur the resurgence of the popularity of folk Music in the 1950s and
1960s. His songs of protest and justice helped bring Music to the fore of the
labor, peace, civil rights and then environmental movements. Seeger helped
gather and popularize the song “We Shall Overcome” a variation of two old
Negro spirituals. The song became an anthem of the civil rights movement and its
message of intense optimism and righteousness continues to inspire individuals
of diverse movements who nonetheless share an intensity of conviction in their
beliefs.
Still
we don’t need to look exclusively at overtly political Music to appreciate the
extent to which Music has had our national character. Lyrically, early
rock-n-roll appears to be anything but revolutionary. How could songs about
cars, girls and good times be threatening to the status quo? The first
revolutionary aspect of the advent of rock-n-roll is that it emerged from
African American Rhythm and Blues during a time of racial segregation. Stations
such as the high-powered WLAC in
The
sociological effects of the popularization of rock-n-roll were wide-spread,
though certainly hard to quantify. White youth began encountering blacks and
dancing in the same concert halls when going to see their favorite rock-n-roll
acts, many of whom in the early days, were themselves African Americans.
Certainly these experiences had to inform these youths’ racial attitudes as
they would mature during the time of the civil rights movement. The advent of
rock-n-roll was also accompanied by an increased purchasing power of American
youth, and the increased independence and mobility that the automobile provided.
These factors coupled with the physicality of dance-oriented rock-n-roll only
served to reinforce changes in sexuality, sexual attitudes and gender roles.
Indeed, the history of rock Music, folk rock, psychedelic rock, R&B, disco,
funk, punk, hip-hop and a multitude of other popular genres, is rife with
examples of how the Music developed hand in hand with, and served to reinforce
other social movements and changes in attitude on a wide variety of subjects,
including community, race, gender, drugs, environment, creativity and ethics.
Finally,
moving beyond political and sociological arguments, who among us has not been
influenced at some point in his or her life by a particular song on a personal
level, touched emotionally or emboldened to make a decision or to set off on a
new path in life? As humans are part logical and part emotional beings, Music
often serves to tip the balance in a decision-making process that pits the two
sides of human motivation against each other. Furthermore, Music’s comforting
familiarity can also serve to reinforce traditions and community values, and
thus its role in religious, ethnic and even secular ritual is undeniable.
Throughout history Music has served these purposes, inserting itself into the
fabric of almost all life experiences. Though the desire for musical discovery
is often strong in adolescence as it is a period of intense growth and
self-discovery, evolution in one’s understanding of the world, and the
necessity of new important decisions, is a constant process. As such, one does
not outlive the psychological need for Music; in short, Music’s importance to
our culture in no way diminishes with age.
However,
if this is true, why is it that evidence would suggest that new musical acts
produced by the Recording Industry are intended to appeal primarily to the
teenage/youth markets? Market data released by the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) for the year 2000 shows that consumers between the
ages of 15 and 24 accounted for 25.4% of total record sales. United States
Census estimates for the same year show that those age groups represented just
13.9% of the population. What can explain this difference? Possibly one will
argue that because adolescence is a time of such intense growth, and so central
to the creation of one’s self-identity, that Music is that much more important
in one’s life at that stage. Even if we accept this premise (which itself is
somewhat questionable), if one were to analyze the types of purchases made by
the different age groups, I believe that data would be much more revealing of
the over-exaggerated importance that youth groups have in the sale of new
musical offerings. Though the RIAA does not publish such data, a recent informal
survey of the latest albums attaining Gold and Platinum status, as reported by
Billboard Magazine, indicated that nearly half of those albums contained Music
that had been originally released more than a decade ago. A sampling of the acts
included the Righteous Brothers, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Neil Diamond, Don
McClean, the Who and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Most of those titles were “Best Of”
collections or re-releases of older albums. Given this fact, one cannot help but
believe that a large percentage of the records purchased by older adults is in
fact on older musical acts and songs. This further suggests that a preponderance
of the new musical acts is marketed to the youngest Americans.
Could
it be that older Americans are simply set in their ways and not interested in
listening to new Music? It seems absurd to think that by the age 24 Americans
have been exposed to all the musical and lyrical themes they will need in order
to confront the multitude of life changes and stages that face them in the
future. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that while Music still holds an
important place in the lives of people in their 30s, they have been frustrated
by the lack of new material within the last several years. The rock group
Fitehouse recently conducted a survey of 160 individuals in
While
the RIAA tracks attitudes with respect to the general value of Music, asking
consumers if they view CDs as a good value for the money, those studies do not
query individuals on the perceived value of the offerings themselves. Thus while
the RIAA can track a percentage drop in sales, the reasons for those decreases
are not always evident. The RIAA has taken to blaming file sharing for much of
these losses, but there is little analysis as to the influence of the perceived
poor variety of the offerings. One can imagine developing concepts like those
used in the measure of unemployment; an unemployed person who gives up looking
for employment because there are no perceived viable offerings is considered a
“discouraged worker”. Likewise we can imagine a measure of discouraged
listeners, individuals who have given up purchasing Music because the
offerings are so poor.
I
believe that such measures would show that the current number of discouraged
listeners is at an all time historical high. To test this hypothesis, the
recent Fitehouse survey of Baltimoreans asked individuals 20 years of age and
older how accurate the following statement described them: “The current
offerings of new music or so poor that I am discouraged from even going to the
record store or looking for new acts.” A surprising 26% of all those
interviewed indicated that the statement was either very accurate or accurate.
Another 31% responded that the statements was somewhat accurate, indicating that
the lack of variety of new Music and acts is probably a significant factor in
the recent slump in industry sales. The RIAA should seriously consider its
failure to provide that variety as a causal factor of its recent woes and not
just put the blame on file sharing.
Of
course, were the RIAA to charge a statistician with challenging my above
arguments, they could surely put them into sufficient doubt so as to prove some
other point. However if the RIAA were to go back and look at historic growth
rates in the purchases of new Music and acts, I am confident the results we
prove me correct. Indeed, prior to the advent of rock-n-roll in the 1950s, and
the accompanying surge in teenage buying power, most new Music was purchased by
adults. There is no reason to believe that the older American’s cultural and
psychological need for new Music and new acts has fallen that dramatically since
the 1950s. Rather the conclusion must be that there is nothing new that is
speaking musically to this rather large segment of the population.
The
Origins of Crisis
What
else can explain the implicit rise in the
Discouraged Listener index of Americans 30 years and older? A confluence of
events in the 1990s served to severely restrict the variety of available Music
and its dissemination. For years now, a relatively few companies have accounted
for the bulk of all Music sales in the
If
one looks at the case of Universal Music Group, the degree and speed of recent
consolidation is truly mind-boggling. In 1989 Polygram acquired
By
1999, five major record companies had a de
facto oligopoly over the distribution of Music in the world (accounting for
more than 90% of the music sold on the planet). The Big Five distributors, WEA
(Warner, Elektra, Sire,
The
record industry went through its own wave of consolidation in the late 80s and
early 90s, when new multi billion-dollar empires such as Time-Warner were built
and artist-oriented labels such as Warner Bros. Records were dismantled. A&M
Chairman/CEO [Al] Cafaro says the need to keep short-term label profits high has
never been more intense – an not just because most record companies now answer
to Wall Street: “Thanks to the use of SoundScan by journalists and
broadcasters to quantify who’s hot and who’s not, the industry has developed
a Hollywood blockbuster-type mentality, with an emphasis on who opened big and
what records quickly ‘fail’. But some artists have to develop off the radar
screen. You need space to make certain things happen.”
By
emphasizing short-term hits and abandoning artist development, record companies
are only cannibalizing their own future sales. When CDs emerged as a new format
in the 1980s, many American adults began replacing the vinyl collections of
their favorite artists with the new format. This was a real boost in the arm for
the industry. However, by focusing on short-term hits, who will those in their
20s and 30s be purchasing years from now when format changes or increased
purchasing power inspires them to complete their musical collections with the
missing titles from their youth? The Fitehouse music survey asked participants
the following question: “When you purchase music, are you more likely to buy
CDs of acts that have been around for at least 10 years or those that have
emerged more recently” For those in their 20s, the majority (54%) indicated
that they purchased principally acts that had emerged within the last 10 years,
though a considerable number (46%) indicated that they in fact acquired music of
acts that have been around for at least 10 years. For those in the 30s the
figure for 10-year or older acts is even higher, coming in at 62%. While many
arguments can be made as to what these figures indicate with regard to current
musical variety, it is clear that consumers tend to form allegiances to certain
acts; by emphasizing the short-term buck and not developing artists’ long-term
careers, the Recording Industry is not only neglecting the proclivities and
desires of the listening public, but it is jeopardizing is own future revenue.
The
situation went critical with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Increased deregulation meant that a firm like Clear Channel Communications was
able to go from owning 40 stations to more than 1,200 nationwide (reaching more
than 110 million listeners each week)! With play lists being centrally
programmed, gone are the days when bands or small labels could bring their songs
to local stations in hopes of generating a regional hit. With such concentrated
power to make or break a CD, increased focus has had to go into making sure that
a CD will make it into Clear Channel’s rotation. The business of the
Independent Music Promoter blossomed further. These companies, hired by the
labels to “encourage” radio stations to play their material, help the labels
avoid violating payola (pay-to-play) legislation and allow the labels to
distance themselves from the Independent promoters in cases where their forms of
inducement are found to break those laws. With independent promoter fees upward
of $300,000 to get a song on the air, it is clear that the barriers to access to
our nation’s airwaves are prohibitively high for small labels and independent
bands. This fact, coupled with the requirement that acts go immediately national
(and spend money on in-store promotions, advertisements etc.) further heightens
the costs of producing a profitable act.
So,
precious capital that could have been invested in a wider range of acts is
redirected into a few number of bands with the hopes of making back the
investments with bigger sales of the “anointed few.” In short, microeconomic
decision making coupled with media concentration has resulted in a significant
decrease in the variety of Musical acts and a national homogenization of our
musical culture. The Recording Industry is putting its dollars into an ever
diminishing number of similar-sounding acts and those acts are being rammed down
the throats of American listeners. Furthermore, given the heighten pressure to
produce short-term profits, record companies have put a disproportionate amount
of their capital into teenage/youth acts, as this market is more easily
manipulated through marketing and thus lends itself to the generation of
predictable revenue streams. The result has been the wholesale abandonment of
large segments of the American population and thus the intensification of the discouraged
listener phenomenon among those above the age of 25.
Were Music just a form of entertainment, this would not be a problem.
However, Music is an integral part of our Political, Sociological and
Psychological landscape. As such, what we are living through is nothing short of
a Culture in Crisis. In short, the media companies’ threat to the vibrancy of
our culture has surpassed their usefulness to our capitalist marketplace.
Defending
our Democracy: The Need for Revolution
We
are on the cusp of a revolution in the way music is disseminated, and it is our
responsibility as citizens and stewards of our national culture to see that this
revolution comes to fruition. There is a battle between the old and new guard
going on right now, and it is still not clear which way things may go.
On
one side can be found many professional musicians, unsigned or independent bands
(such as Fitehouse, www.fitehouse.com)
and organizations like The Future of Music Coalition (www.futureofmusic.org),
The Recording Artists Coalition (www.recordingartistscoalition.com),
Free Press (www.mediareform.net),
Americans for Radio Diversity (www.radiodiversity.com),
the American Federation of Musicians (www.afm.org)
and the Boycott the Recording
Industry Association of America website (www.boycott-riaa.com),
to name just a few. On the other side can be found the record companies, their
lobby group -- the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the
media conglomerates. Of course the former group of organizations do differ on
certain issues, nonetheless, more and more they’ve been coming together to
represent the interests of both artists and the listening public and to
counteract the lobbying power of the media conglomerates.
On
We
believe the record demonstrates both the value of existing media ownership rules
and the dangers in permitting widespread consolidation of ownership. We also
believe the FCC has been negligent in listening to important stakeholder groups,
like musicians, recording artists and radio professionals, to ensure their
testimony is on the record. The de facto boycott of field hearings by you and
Commissioners Abernathy and Martin makes us question how interested some
commissioners are in understanding the public’s interest in these matters.
Finally, a refusal to allow Congress and the public to view and debate your
specific proposal would be a tremendous disservice to the American public and
the citizens who depend on these media structures for their livelihoods.
We strongly urge you to give the public a true voice in these policies, which
will forever alter the way citizens receive their news, information and
entertainment.
The
letter skillfully summarizes that what is at stake is the free flow of
information necessary to a vibrant democracy. It is the obligation of all
Americans that love Music, culture, variety and democracy to contact the FCC and
demand an open hearing on the deregulation issue. This is but the first step
needed to save our national culture. After
we have halted the process of further media consolidation, we must then act to
reverse it. The dissemination of Music must be democratized.
Several
positive developments have occurred which hold promise for this process. Firstly
developments in technology, digital recording and the falling prices of
computers have opened up a world of possibilities for bands whose only hope for
recording their music used to be through contracting expensive studio time or
holding out for the rare chance of being discovered and offered a record
contract. So, faced with no local media outlets and an increasingly risk-averse
Recording Industry, bands have been forced to go organic: make and sell the CD
themselves. The advent of the Internet and e-commerce has facilitated this
process. While local acts are still more likely to sell their own CDs at local
performances, the structure is in place for bands to seek some form of national
notoriety and to get their music directly to their listeners, no matter where
there location on the globe. In short, the Recording Industry’s grip on
international distribution has been loosened. While already well-known recording
artist such as Prince have already used this new structure to totally circumvent
traditional record labels, it is only a question of time until smaller acts
develop a way to take advantage of the technology to render the record companies
irrelevant.
Rather
than re-evaluating its role in the economy and understanding what services it
might provide in a quickly changing
marketplace, the Recording Industry has responded to the new economic realities
by filing suit against University students and other individuals in an attempt
to hold on to its reign of mediocrity. The Recording Industry Association of
America has tried to take control of the debate by framing it as a clear-cut
legal and ethical question of copyright infringement. Still, this simplification
of the issue clouds the real issues at hand. To start with, the RIAA has been
trying to convince the public that file sharing is a form of stealing from the
artists. For most artists, however, there is very little money in a major label
record contract. Unbeknownst to many listeners, the costs of recording and
producing a CD and many of the subsequent promotional expenses are actually
charged back to the artists. Artists receive an advanced from the record company
to pay the expenses, but then are responsible for paying those advances back
before they can see any profit from the sales of their recordings. With a
multitude of accounting tricks, many artists will have to sell at least a
million copies before they can even break even. Courtney Love, in her article
“Courtney Love does the math” published in the on-line magazine Salon.com,
likens the process to Sharecropping. Moses Avalon in his book Confessions
of a Record Producer, likens a major label deal to having a credit card with
a 66% interest rate. I would liken it to playing the lottery or a scratch off
game. You will most likely lose. Some very small part of the population wins the
lottery, thus fomenting the myth that it could happen to you.
Certainly
songwriter royalties are more favorably administered than performance royalties,
but the fact of the matter is that file sharing in general hurts a limited
number of very large acts. Many smaller acts see a lot of potential in file
sharing for expanding their fan base and generating revenues in other areas. Of
course, the Recording Industry is the biggest looser and thus wants to convince
the public that we are hurting the artist and by violating copyright law,
de-incentivizing the production of art. To begin with, the current economic
incentives are illusory at best (what band in their right mind would find
Sharecropping or getting a loan from a veritable loan shark as an attractive
incentive). If we really want to incentivize artistic production, and “Promote
the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (as the Constitution posits as the
basis of copyright law) then the current Recording Industry Regime is the real
threat to variety and production, not file sharing.
Here are
the real issues at hand that the RIAA is trying to cloud: Firstly, the forms of
musical distribution have changed and those changes are irrevocable. The
Recording Industry finds itself in a historical position much like the one it
confronted in the 1920s, when free radio represented a threat to its position in
the entertainment marketplace and likewise had the initial effect of reducing
record sales. Of course, while labels initially tried to prevent their artist
from appearing on radio broadcasts, they eventually learned how to use radio to
bolster their sales. Similar fears arose with the advent of recordable cassette
tapes. The fact of the matter is that developments in technology have generally
helped to increase the dissemination of music and thus have been beneficial for
artists and the listening public. Increased dissemination has had positive
economic effects for artists that can make a living off a multitude of sources
such as touring, selling merchandise, publishing books, or even selling CDs or
multimedia packages to collectors that want to get close to the artists and will
not be satisfied with an MP3 file. Similarly, there are many artists who feel
that it is more important to express themselves artistically and to disseminate
their art than to necessarily benefit economically from their efforts (how else
could one explain Musicians continued tendency to sign up for
“Sharecropping” deals). As Pete Seeger expressed in a 1967 interview about
Woody Gutherie (appearing on www.woodygutherie.com)
“When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little
Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small
mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the
bottom of one page appeared the following: ‘This song is Copyrighted in U.S.,
under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught
singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we
don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We
wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.”
Of
course the Recording Industry is quick to remind us that the music business must
be lucrative in order to survive (Perhaps they are more ideologically in step
with the 18th Century British author Samuel Johnson who claimed that
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”). It is clear the even
with the recent changes in technology, there will be money to be made in Music.
If the Recording Industry cannot
find a way to participate in this market, rather than lamenting that its capital
is not being sufficiently rewarded, it should do the proper capitalist thing and
go out of business. If it does take this path, it will have no one to blame but
itself. As Harry Shearer suggest in a recent editorial in the New York Times,
the Industry simply doesn’t understand its market:
Many people over the age of 25
have been moaning for years, correctly, that nobody is putting out records for
them. These people have families, church and community meetings to attend, golf
to play and cooking to do. They have careers and disposable incomes. All this
makes them far more likely to opt for the convenience of stopping by the record
store than trying to figure out how to work Kazaa or Gnutella or any of the
other strangely named avenues of Internet commerce avoidance.
Nonetheless,
perhaps some Music listeners may see the fall of the Recording Industry as a
little overwhelming and thus to be feared. Many have complained that the problem
with the Internet in general is that there is too much information and little
organization or verification to its validity. While Librarians can catalog and
prioritize information in a physical library, making it a safe place to do
research, the Internet is the intellectual equivalent of the Wild West.
Similarly, some may say that while the role of the record company in physical
distribution may become superfluous, they nonetheless have a role to play for
organizing, selecting and filtering the overwhelming supply of mediocre music.
If this is indeed one of their roles, then they have failed us miserably. The
Industry’s continued emphasis on short-term profits and their consequent focus
on a small number of potential mega-hit makers, has proven that they are not
worthy of our respect as competent arbiters of good Music.
If
society still demands that some group make sense of the multitude of offerings
and present the options to the listening public, that group will have to come
from outside of the Recording Industry. One would hope that local media,
alternative papers and free local radio could serve as that initial filter for
scouting talent, however, as we have seen, local radio programming is a thing of
the past. Likewise, local papers face a multitude of pressures to provide
greater access and attention to acts that belong to major labels. In cases where
a local paper belongs to a larger media conglomerate, there may be pressures to
review those acts and CDs which in turn buy advertising space in their papers.
In some cases the pressure may be blatant (though not public, to be sure). In
other cases, the pressure may be more subtle: if a particular act is suddenly
advertised throughout a paper and other local media, writers may be enthralled
by an artificial buzz and thus inclined to review that CD. It is unlikely that
these pressures will wane anytime soon. Still, there is another form of pressure
that we may be able to battle: the predominant myth that acts coming from major
labels are somehow better or more legitimate than those coming from smaller
labels or no labels at all. It will take the discovery of some non-affiliated
talent, but when this happens, there will be much excitement and incentive on
the part of papers to get involved in the process of talent scouting (as a
successful discovery of a hit act will generate accolades for the paper).
Now
let us consider Clear Channel’s recent decision to sever ties with
“Independent Music Promoters,” companies hired by record labels to lobby for
air time (in many cases ‘buying the stations off’ with perks and other forms
of compensation). With this decision, the Recording Industry is deprived of one
of its major tools for guaranteeing hits. I can foresee a future in which
companies like Clear Channel discover that there is good unsigned talent out
there or good talent belonging to labels that could not afford the estimated
$300,000 per song need to hire an Independent Promoter. When they do, they may
begin scouting directly for new songs or start using independent scouting
companies to find that talent. Of course, this process would in no way
compensate for the harm that is done to variety by the great concentration of
ownership that companies like Clear Channel represent, still it would be a
positive change for increased democratization. Ultimately re-regulation of
ownership or a voluntary de-centralization of the play-list decision
making-process would be necessary as well.
However,
given the unlikelihood of the reversal of recent trends in economic decision
making in near future, we will need to seek alternative avenues of music
dissemination other than traditional radio stations. Internet radio, also known
as streaming radio, offers an exciting option for counteracting the process of
media consolidation. It will take some time for this to come to fruition, as a
technology gap certainly exists between segments of our population. Nonetheless,
when televisions first emerged in the
An
Action Plan to Save our Culture
In
conclusion rather than allowing the Recording Industry to frame the debate and
convince us that file sharing is somehow a threat to incentives in the musical
marketplace, we need to step back and look at the larger picture: the threat
that the Recording Industry and media consultation represent to the vibrancy of
our culture. Once we appreciate what the real issues are, we can center our
energies where they need to be focused. To summarize, the current regime is
antiquated and must be overthrown. The initial steps that we must take are the
following:
1. Halt
the continued de-regulation of media ownership of our precious airwaves. Those
airwaves belong to us, the citizens of this country, not to the free market.
They are vital to the free exchange of ideas and the strength of our democracy.
2.
Support advancements in digital media and find ways to use the technology to
benefit the musicians and the listeners. If these developments are not
compatible with our current Recording Industry, let that industry die a peaceful
death.
3.
Develop novel forms of scouting and discovering talent that are more
de-centralized and that do not rely on the myth that the Recording Industry is
somehow uniquely qualified to spot talent and music that will be useful to our
society. This myth is false.
4. Seek
new democratic forms of dissemination and support lifestyle and technological
changes that will ultimately increase musical variety. Expanding the wireless
Internet can serve to replace the airwaves’ monopoly on our ears, hearts and
minds. Only by breaking this monopoly can we increase the exchange of musical
and lyrical ideas that will in turn strengthen our Culture, Society and our
Democracy.
Joshua
A. Cohen has always wanted to be a pamphleteer. He considers it to be one of the
noblest professions to come to us from our American heritage. Josh takes
particular inspiration from Thomas Payne, the author of the original
"Common Sense," who drifted from job to job until he found his life's
purpose in Pamphleteering. While Josh hopes to find the inner peace that Payne
did as a Pamphlet pusher (until he died broke in a NY gutter) , he looks more to
Samuel Adams for his fashions cues (who by the way, was not really a brewer --
he too drifted between jobs).
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