The music business during, and post-coronavirus
This is an unusual time for music, as for everything else. Since large gatherings are basically a no-go, concerts and tours have ceased. How much this matters to any particular music fan will vary. If your musical tastes lean towards the pop flavor of the month, with big stage shows and backup dancers and whatnot... um, you know whose blog this is, right? You know I'm a bona fide hipster, right? Like, I look down on the musical tastes of other hipsters for being too "pop." That's how hipster I am.
Anyway, are you old enough to remember the great music industry freak-out over Napster? Napster was the first major file sharing protocol that allowed people to exchange mp3 files of unlistenable audio quality. (See? Hipster.) The music industry decided this was the end of everything. 'Cuz, I guess when I was a kid, going to the library, checking out a record and dubbing it to an audio cassette was totally different. Slower, but, whatever. Anyway, my reaction at the time was somewhat idiosyncratic.
First, I'm that weird person who needs the physical copy, for a couple of reasons. I'm a music collector, and that collection itself matters to me, but in a more practical sense, I need the liner notes! You may notice that I'm an obsessive jazz fan. Here's how you get deep into jazz. You hear a piece you love. The band leader on the album is the trumpet player, but on one track, the piano is amazing. You decide you need to check out that piano player. But, the band varies from track to track. How do you handle this? You need the liner notes. This particular division comes to mind because on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, there are actually two piano players-- Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly. People usually forget about Wynton Kelly. (It is easy to be overshadowed by Bill Evans.) Anyway, for the true, obsessive music fan, liner notes matter, and we need the physical copies to go tracing through everything.
I'm a scholar. Professionally, and I treat my music collation as scholarship. I don't know how to clock out.
So, Napster never really mattered to me individually, just as it never really mattered to a significant portion of hardcore music collectors. Notice, though, that I'm not lecturing you on vinyl. Naked emperor.
But as something of an amateur music historian, my observation was as follows. The business model of a musician making money, and a career through recorded music is an historical anomaly. The profession of the bard, the itinerant musician... this goes way back. To be a musician has historically meant to be a live performer, and even with the introduction of recording technology, the amount of money musicians made through record sessions didn't tend to be very much. Making a career as a musician meant making a career as a touring, performing musician.
By the time we got to the mid-20th century, though, recording studios had developed a business model that allowed them to make a lot of money from recordings, and that allowed a very small number of musicians to make a lot of money from recordings. That changed the business model, and studios started dumping a lot of money into production and advertising, with the idea being that most attempts would be losses, and every once in a while, they recoup their losses with a big hit. Radio, MTV and such served as advertisements for recordings to try to get that big hit, with recorded music being divided between the big money-makers and the losses in the attempt. Sort of like the pharmaceutical industry. Dump a lot of money into R&D, most projects fail, and charge buttloads for the few successes to recoup those losses and get those profit margins high enough to compensate. That's why drug prices are so high, to a large extent.
Anyway, that meant the acts hardest hit by Napster were the big-name album sellers, obviously. But, that business model is historically anomalous. How have musicians historically made a living? Touring and performing. So, my reaction to Napster was basically a "so what?" Kind of like the first track on Kind of Blue. The musicians who made their living touring and performing were rather less affected, and the big stars? Irrelevant to me. Besides, I'll always be a physical album-buyer because I want my liner notes!
And this is where I give credit to a band that I don't actually like. The Grateful Dead. I am not, nor have I ever been a Deadhead. Old joke: what did the Deadhead say when he ran out of drugs? "Wow, these guys suck!" But here's the thing. They always encouraged bootlegging and sharing, because any real fan would just go to more shows anyway. Good attitude, and it served them well, even if I wasn't in their fanbase. Nevertheless, the musicians whose livelihoods were based on live performance were not really as impacted. Bands that followed the tradition of the Dead didn't care about Napster. And like I said, I didn't particularly care.
Coronavirus, though. I was getting to that, in my typically roundabout way.
This is an unusual time to be a music fan. Anyone who wanted to go to a concert right now... sorry. For someone like me, it's actually a surprisingly good time to be a music fan. And by, "now," I mean right now, this week, this month, and not looking far past that. Here's what I mean.
If you are a true hipster, you are aware that they canceled South By Southwest this year. South By Southwest is Austin's annual music festival of hipsterism and pretense, where up-and-coming musicians from across various genres gather to get critic stamps-of-approval and yadda, yadda, yadda. Here's what you might not remember. Once upon a time, there was an "alternative" to South By Southwest. Yeah, "alternative" to South By Southwest. To quote Todd Snider, that's alternative to alternative. Anyway, it was called "Couch By Couchwest." Tagline: Where the beer is cheaper, and the only hipster is you. How perfect was that?
Anyway, being a boring, old fuddy-duddy, I'm more of a coffee and tea type of hipster, but Couch By Couchwest was awesome. Musicians who didn't attend recorded clips and put them up on the web, for your viewing pleasure, from the comfort of your home.
If you are a boring, old fuddy-duddy of a music fan, who remembers Couch By Couchwest... welcome to Couch By Couchwest II: Electric Boogaloo! It's back, baby! And better than ever because nobody can tour! No concerts anywhere, so every musician worth his or her salt is stuck at home, bored stiff, and they're turning on their web-cams. It's... kind of awesome.
OK, yes, people are losing their jobs, and dying, and there is a lot of horrifying stuff happening, but let me have this one good thing. Couch By Couchwest is back, and everyone is in on it! OK, not "everyone." Those pop stars who need autotune and backup dancers and all that irritating stuff... I'm not checking in on them because I don't care, but they can't just pick up a guitar and play something awesome. The musicians I follow? They can. And they are.
Anyone reading a professor's blog is generally an NPR listener, so you probably know Live From Here. Just go on youtube, and see what this has become. Live From Home. Thile has been posting a ton of stuff, getting his buddies to post, and it's Couch By Couchwest!
See? This is me, finding the silver lining in something.
OK, enough of that. This can't last, obviously. I don't really care if pop acts can't perform in arenas, or whatnot. Recording sessions are shut down for a little while, and yes, these people do still record. Thile makes albums, and of course, I buy 'em. Sarah Jarosz, who has been helping out with the Live From Home thing has a new album coming out soon! But here's where things get messy.
Touring. Touring requires venues. The hard-working, hard-touring musicians whose livelihoods depend on performance rather than recordings? The ones to whom file sharing was irrelevant? They don't play arenas, nor even major concert halls. They frequently play bars. I posted a clip of Chris Whitley yesterday, from back in 1998. Once upon a time, Columbia Records tried to turn Whitley into a star, which made no sense, even though I think he was a bloody genius, but circa 1998, he was playing tiny clubs and bars. He remains a legendary figure in some circles but his livelihood depended on his ability to play tiny venues because he really couldn't book a big concert hall.
Tiny venues. The kind that are not just shuttered right now, but likely to go out of business with extended closures. A concert hall can just sit fallow for a while, but bars run on narrow profit margins when they're running at all. Shut them down for a month? Longer? They go out of business, like restaurants. Then where do the musicians play? The ones I care about.
Some are getting creative, trying to set up Patreon accounts so that fans can fund on-line concerts, and such. Good. And eventually, places will open again, but this is going to be a hard slog, not just because the musicians are losing income during this period, but because there will be an organizational problem of setting up performances with venues having closed.
This is bad. Yeah, right now, it's kind of fun for an old fuddy-duddy like me who just digs watching the videos on-line, but just as Napster was not particularly relevant to the touring musician, this is major for the touring musician, and the problems won't end quickly or easily if venues wind up closed. How many will wind up closed? I don't know. This could turn out to be less of a thing, long term, than I am speculating, but my basic point for the day, long and drawn-out as I typically am, is that what is affecting the restaurant business will also affect the live music business for the small acts, and those are the acts that really matter, as far as I'm concerned.
So even if you are like me, and you just want to watch the video clips on-line, pay attention. Couch By Couchwest can't last forever.
Anyway, are you old enough to remember the great music industry freak-out over Napster? Napster was the first major file sharing protocol that allowed people to exchange mp3 files of unlistenable audio quality. (See? Hipster.) The music industry decided this was the end of everything. 'Cuz, I guess when I was a kid, going to the library, checking out a record and dubbing it to an audio cassette was totally different. Slower, but, whatever. Anyway, my reaction at the time was somewhat idiosyncratic.
First, I'm that weird person who needs the physical copy, for a couple of reasons. I'm a music collector, and that collection itself matters to me, but in a more practical sense, I need the liner notes! You may notice that I'm an obsessive jazz fan. Here's how you get deep into jazz. You hear a piece you love. The band leader on the album is the trumpet player, but on one track, the piano is amazing. You decide you need to check out that piano player. But, the band varies from track to track. How do you handle this? You need the liner notes. This particular division comes to mind because on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, there are actually two piano players-- Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly. People usually forget about Wynton Kelly. (It is easy to be overshadowed by Bill Evans.) Anyway, for the true, obsessive music fan, liner notes matter, and we need the physical copies to go tracing through everything.
I'm a scholar. Professionally, and I treat my music collation as scholarship. I don't know how to clock out.
So, Napster never really mattered to me individually, just as it never really mattered to a significant portion of hardcore music collectors. Notice, though, that I'm not lecturing you on vinyl. Naked emperor.
But as something of an amateur music historian, my observation was as follows. The business model of a musician making money, and a career through recorded music is an historical anomaly. The profession of the bard, the itinerant musician... this goes way back. To be a musician has historically meant to be a live performer, and even with the introduction of recording technology, the amount of money musicians made through record sessions didn't tend to be very much. Making a career as a musician meant making a career as a touring, performing musician.
By the time we got to the mid-20th century, though, recording studios had developed a business model that allowed them to make a lot of money from recordings, and that allowed a very small number of musicians to make a lot of money from recordings. That changed the business model, and studios started dumping a lot of money into production and advertising, with the idea being that most attempts would be losses, and every once in a while, they recoup their losses with a big hit. Radio, MTV and such served as advertisements for recordings to try to get that big hit, with recorded music being divided between the big money-makers and the losses in the attempt. Sort of like the pharmaceutical industry. Dump a lot of money into R&D, most projects fail, and charge buttloads for the few successes to recoup those losses and get those profit margins high enough to compensate. That's why drug prices are so high, to a large extent.
Anyway, that meant the acts hardest hit by Napster were the big-name album sellers, obviously. But, that business model is historically anomalous. How have musicians historically made a living? Touring and performing. So, my reaction to Napster was basically a "so what?" Kind of like the first track on Kind of Blue. The musicians who made their living touring and performing were rather less affected, and the big stars? Irrelevant to me. Besides, I'll always be a physical album-buyer because I want my liner notes!
And this is where I give credit to a band that I don't actually like. The Grateful Dead. I am not, nor have I ever been a Deadhead. Old joke: what did the Deadhead say when he ran out of drugs? "Wow, these guys suck!" But here's the thing. They always encouraged bootlegging and sharing, because any real fan would just go to more shows anyway. Good attitude, and it served them well, even if I wasn't in their fanbase. Nevertheless, the musicians whose livelihoods were based on live performance were not really as impacted. Bands that followed the tradition of the Dead didn't care about Napster. And like I said, I didn't particularly care.
Coronavirus, though. I was getting to that, in my typically roundabout way.
This is an unusual time to be a music fan. Anyone who wanted to go to a concert right now... sorry. For someone like me, it's actually a surprisingly good time to be a music fan. And by, "now," I mean right now, this week, this month, and not looking far past that. Here's what I mean.
If you are a true hipster, you are aware that they canceled South By Southwest this year. South By Southwest is Austin's annual music festival of hipsterism and pretense, where up-and-coming musicians from across various genres gather to get critic stamps-of-approval and yadda, yadda, yadda. Here's what you might not remember. Once upon a time, there was an "alternative" to South By Southwest. Yeah, "alternative" to South By Southwest. To quote Todd Snider, that's alternative to alternative. Anyway, it was called "Couch By Couchwest." Tagline: Where the beer is cheaper, and the only hipster is you. How perfect was that?
Anyway, being a boring, old fuddy-duddy, I'm more of a coffee and tea type of hipster, but Couch By Couchwest was awesome. Musicians who didn't attend recorded clips and put them up on the web, for your viewing pleasure, from the comfort of your home.
If you are a boring, old fuddy-duddy of a music fan, who remembers Couch By Couchwest... welcome to Couch By Couchwest II: Electric Boogaloo! It's back, baby! And better than ever because nobody can tour! No concerts anywhere, so every musician worth his or her salt is stuck at home, bored stiff, and they're turning on their web-cams. It's... kind of awesome.
OK, yes, people are losing their jobs, and dying, and there is a lot of horrifying stuff happening, but let me have this one good thing. Couch By Couchwest is back, and everyone is in on it! OK, not "everyone." Those pop stars who need autotune and backup dancers and all that irritating stuff... I'm not checking in on them because I don't care, but they can't just pick up a guitar and play something awesome. The musicians I follow? They can. And they are.
Anyone reading a professor's blog is generally an NPR listener, so you probably know Live From Here. Just go on youtube, and see what this has become. Live From Home. Thile has been posting a ton of stuff, getting his buddies to post, and it's Couch By Couchwest!
See? This is me, finding the silver lining in something.
OK, enough of that. This can't last, obviously. I don't really care if pop acts can't perform in arenas, or whatnot. Recording sessions are shut down for a little while, and yes, these people do still record. Thile makes albums, and of course, I buy 'em. Sarah Jarosz, who has been helping out with the Live From Home thing has a new album coming out soon! But here's where things get messy.
Touring. Touring requires venues. The hard-working, hard-touring musicians whose livelihoods depend on performance rather than recordings? The ones to whom file sharing was irrelevant? They don't play arenas, nor even major concert halls. They frequently play bars. I posted a clip of Chris Whitley yesterday, from back in 1998. Once upon a time, Columbia Records tried to turn Whitley into a star, which made no sense, even though I think he was a bloody genius, but circa 1998, he was playing tiny clubs and bars. He remains a legendary figure in some circles but his livelihood depended on his ability to play tiny venues because he really couldn't book a big concert hall.
Tiny venues. The kind that are not just shuttered right now, but likely to go out of business with extended closures. A concert hall can just sit fallow for a while, but bars run on narrow profit margins when they're running at all. Shut them down for a month? Longer? They go out of business, like restaurants. Then where do the musicians play? The ones I care about.
Some are getting creative, trying to set up Patreon accounts so that fans can fund on-line concerts, and such. Good. And eventually, places will open again, but this is going to be a hard slog, not just because the musicians are losing income during this period, but because there will be an organizational problem of setting up performances with venues having closed.
This is bad. Yeah, right now, it's kind of fun for an old fuddy-duddy like me who just digs watching the videos on-line, but just as Napster was not particularly relevant to the touring musician, this is major for the touring musician, and the problems won't end quickly or easily if venues wind up closed. How many will wind up closed? I don't know. This could turn out to be less of a thing, long term, than I am speculating, but my basic point for the day, long and drawn-out as I typically am, is that what is affecting the restaurant business will also affect the live music business for the small acts, and those are the acts that really matter, as far as I'm concerned.
So even if you are like me, and you just want to watch the video clips on-line, pay attention. Couch By Couchwest can't last forever.
Comments
Post a Comment