A Song A Day

Alternative title: Take profit-seeking out of music, and what do you need to succeed?

Here’s an analogy.

Think of the traditional record industry as a planet. Over time it’s grown bigger and bigger, and pulled all these other satellites (artists, managers, pluggers, promoters, fans, music writers, radio DJs, PR and marketing people) into its gravitational field. And the more satellites that are pulled in, the bigger it’s had to get. And the bigger it gets, the stronger its pull grows.

Gravity, in this analogy, is money. Take the money away, and the satellites spin off in wildly different directions, with nothing pulling them together. The unsigned artist is essentially an explorer in a spaceship, desperately zipping from satellite to satellite on very little fuel, trying to get attention. But the satellites are all over the place, one eye on the big planet (because it still looms massively, even if its pull has waned), the other trying to pay attention to all the little spaceships that keep zipping by – but really they’re just an annoyance.

Eventually the planet will drift away, and will end up a distant, cold blip on the edge of space, like Pluto. And the satellites will have to latch on to the little spaceships, and try and create a gravity-free star system.

But that’s a long time in the future. Despite the gleeful doom-mongering of the net-savvy filesharing generation, that scenario is really 10 to 15 years away. Things are slowly changing, but right now the record labels still rule – because they have this gravitational stranglehold over all the other aspects of music consumption.

Over 50 years, the record industry has established itself as the gatekeeper of popular music. Everyone else – the media, the artists, the fans – still, to some extent, works off this presumption. The traditional press won’t write about ‘unsigned’ bands because – well, they’re unsigned, so they can’t be any good otherwise the gatekeepers would have snapped them up and pushed them down the usual channels.

The established record company can afford the recognised PR company, and will use them as a conduit to the journos on the best magazines (as an ex-music hack, I know how it works, that you give the CD from the familiar PR firm a spin first, and only give cursory attention to the CD from the unknown PR).

The artists struggle to meet the gatekeepers’ approval, and so tailor their music to fit – and we end up with landfill indie like Scouting For Girls.

And the music fan – well, even thinking along wildly idealistic lines about how the internet has changed music consumption, it’s still the case that the vast majority of music fans stick with what they know, and that usually means something they’ve heard on the radio, or read about in the papers, or trust because it’s on a label they recognise. Even hip, net-savvy indie fans follow what Pitchfork tells them – and how is Pitchfork really any different from old media like Rolling Stone?

So take the money away. I don’t mean, make everything free. I mean, take away the money-men and shareholders looking for massive profit, and repopulate the industry with people who want to create great art (that gravity-free star system in the above analogy). Or put it another way: how do we convince the PR people, the radio DJs, the music writers, the marketing execs etc, that if you’re outside the traditional industry paradigm, that doesn’t mean you’re not ‘legitimate’? If you can’t rely on gravity to pull them into your orbit, what can you use?

To go back to the analogy for a second, what we need is some kind of space-station, which connects with all those satellites, can refuel all those little spaceships, and can also acts as a launch pad to the big planet, should you wish to try and cultivate a base on that dying world. Using the space-station, you create a perfect equilibrium between all these elements – a state of anti-gravity if you will, where everything is in balance, and the resources flow from one to the other equally.

So how do we build this space-station?

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