formerly
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080122/18320341.shtml
My comment on:
Mike
Masnick,A Little History Lesson On How The Recording
Industry Works, Techdirt,
Wed, Jan 23rd
2008
https://www.techdirt.com/2008/01/23/a-little-history-lesson-on-how-the-recording-industry-works/
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,2241544,00.html
The technical barriers to entry in the music business are not
really all that compelling. They are no greater than the
barriers which writers have long been overcoming. Nowadays, with
computers, typing is ubiquitous, but it did not use to be.
In L. Sprague De Camp's handbook for science fiction writers,
written in 1975, back in the typewriter era, there is the advice
that a professional writer must learn to type. There is even a
very active tradition, going back a couple of hundred years, of
the author as printer (Benjamin Franklin, Virginia Woolf and the
Hogarth Press, etc.), and the personal website is only the most
recent incarnation. There was a certain type of writer who
not only printed his own work, but went out on the street
and sold books or pamphlets from a satchel slung over his shoulder
(*). The same kind of reasoning applied to music would be that a
serious musician must develop the skills to be his own sound
engineer. If recording equipment is too expensive, then he must
learn enough electrical engineering to build his own equipment.
What it comes down to is that the artist is at too much of a
disadvantage if he has to rely on someone else to finish his work.
Middle class artists routinely learn whatever skills they need and
buy whatever equipment they need. There is the well-known "artists
and lofts" phenomena. A good artist, that is, a painter or a
sculptor, has all the essential aptitudes to be a good carpenter.
Therefore, struggling artists rebuild buildings to work in, so as
to save on rent, and then sell the buildings (or long
leases). Thus they make a living by carpentry if they cannot
do so by art per se. By 1975, audio cassette tapes were coming
into use, and they were soon followed by videocassette
tapes. For a period of time, tapes were the preferred medium for
distribution, and for both kinds of tapes, a typical player was
also a recorder. Read-only CD's did not last very long
before being superseded by laser-written CD's. The same thing
happened with DVD's. The "read-only window" was only about five
years in duration, less than the lag between different kinds of
equipment which were still in use at any given time. The real
issue, of course, is simply the social class basis of popular
music. Being middle class is about being in control of your own
life. Being subproletariet is about being "done unto."
The movie/music industry has about as involved Mafia
connections as any industry except garbage hauling. Popular
entertainment traditionally has a kind of blurred boundary
with prostitution, which is of course a long-recognized
organized crime business. "Showgirl" or "French Actress" was
traditionally a euphemism for a prostitute. The ancestral form of
modern popular entertainment in the nineteenth century was the
music hall. The music hall was itself an innovation, superseding
the traditional streetcorner performer. Every town had a music
hall, and big cities had multiple music halls. The music halls
employed large numbers of performers, but, in order to keep
the costs down, the music halls didn't pay the performers very
much, not really enough to eat regularly. The performers were
expected to make up the difference with a bit of prostitution, or
some other "grift." Performing on the popular stage, as a
singer, actress, or dancer, was an unremunerative occupation which
prostitutes did by way of advertising. This comes across in
the short stories the great French writer Colette wrote from her
own personal experiences backstage, circa 1900. In one episode, a
desperately hungry little ballerina does a B-girl routine
in order to trick a strange man into buying her a ham
sandwich, and escapes before he can claim his quid pro quo.
Jazz music is the great ancestor of nearly all modern
pop music. However, jazz comes from New Orleans. Until 1917,
New Orleans had a legal brothel district, Storeyville, located
where the Iberville Projects were later built. The legal
brothels were all fitted out as nightclubs, with all the
usual trimmings such as restaurants and live orchestras. All
the great jazzmen were employed by such places, and naturally
did various kind of related work, which made them
pimps. The curious thing about "pop" music is that it is an
essentially plebeian art form, appealing to the emotions rather
than the intellect. The pop musician sings his pain, in crude
personal terms. You cannot perform jailhouse rock with full
credibility unless you have been in jail, and most people in jail
are there because they cannot afford bail.
In the United States, mechanically reproduced entertainment, that
is phonograph records, radio, and motion pictures, took off
at the same time as Prohibition (1920-33), the period
during which the sale of alcoholic beverages was banned, and
alcohol was treated as an illegal drug. This meant that a drinking
establishment was axiomatically a criminal business.
Entertainers below the star level, who could not expect people to
make a special trip to hear them, were perforce mob employees.
That meant that the music, movie, and radio businesses had to give
the mob a piece of the action in order to gain access to the
performers the mob owned. Existing music halls tended to be
converted to moviehouses, and there, too, the pre-existing
stakeholders had to be paid off.
The entertainment industry became mob-controlled, because it grew
out of prostitution, which was itself mob-controlled. The mob was
an effect rather than a cause. It grew up to control a cluster of
"reprobated practices." These reprobated practices naturally used
the underclasses, simply according to the logic of slavery.
Symphony orchestras were never mob-controlled, because that kind
of music was not reprobated. Businessmen would pay to have their
daughters taught to play the piano or the violin by someone who
was a member of the symphony. At a higher level, the best
musicians tended to become official composers, with what amounted
to civil service posts. In our secularized age, that works out to
teaching in the music school of a state university.
Pop music is a music of social disintegration. To understand
modern pop music, one must also understand the assembly line
mass-production factory, and the Faustian bargain it made with the
worker. The mass-production factory was an artifact of transition.
In any given locality, barring massive immigration, it only lasted
for a single generation, before moving on somewhere else in search
of cheaper labor. Factory work was so brutally hard that it was
unattractive to anyone who had a skilled occupation or the
education for a middle-class job. Factories recruited peasants,
because hand-cultivation was about the only work worse than
working on an assembly line. The son of a peasant came and
worked on an assembly line, and made good wages, good
enough to buy a house and send his children to school, so that
they could be something other than factory workers or
peasants. Everything has a price, however. The price of wealth was
cultural discontinuity. From the perspective of the children,
their grandfather was an ignorant and wretched peasant.
There might even be a language disconnect, with the
grandfather speaking only the language of the old
country, and the children speaking only English. The children's
father, on the other hand, spent his days doing something
incredibly boring in a factory, which he did not want to talk
about, and which left him in a state of chronic fatigue, prone to
sudden and irrational anger. This left the children deprived of a
sense of identity. They were cultural orphans, ready to be
recruited by someone like Elvis Presley. The mass worship of
someone like Presley or Britney Spears has a certain
sinister family likeness to the mass worship of someone like
Adolph Hitler or Josef Stalin. The child is taught to adulate
someone who does not even know that he exists, and who has
no concern for his welfare. This can only happen when parent-child
relations have gone catastrophically wrong.
To take one example, I had never heard of Britney Spears
until she called herself to my attention by becoming a noisy RIAA
spokesperson. Then, of course, it was necessary to research her a
bit. Examining a few of her lyrics, I noted that these are the
voice of a beggar girl, on the street and dealing with her
boyfriend-pimp in terms of crude power, trying to avoid being
reduced to the condition of a prostitute with her customer. There
is a persistently materialistic strain running through the songs,
preoccupied with the getting of consumer goods. Stars are not
stars because of some unique talent, but because they can
represent themselves as a simulacrum of the audience, while
simultaneously emphasizing how rich they are. The idea is
that the audience can then imagine themselves being rich.. Someone
like Britney Spears has to act out in public at regular intervals
in order to maintain her slum-girl standing, hence the
drugs, drunk driving, and whatnot. Britney Spears' songs are not
the voice of a middle class girl, with mummy and daddy
protectively visible in the background. The condition of
middle-class childhood is to be given everything which it is right
for one to have. Pop music singers are, in other contexts, the
natural prey of the slumlord. The record companies are able to
sign them to iniquitous contracts because they do not have family
lawyers to take advice from. One additional aspect of
underclass culture is that organized crime is ubiquitous.
Businesses which deal with the underclass on a regular basis are
apt to get roped in, on a quid pro quo basis. I found it
exquisitely significant that one of the first victims of the RIAA
lawsuits turned out to be a twelve-year-old girl who lived in a
housing project. No one else would buy into Britney Spears'
debased values. Books, on the other hand, are an essentially
intellectual medium, essentially middle class, and book authors
concede very little to publishers.
One important implication for the recording industry is
this: the assembly line wave has passed through the United
States, and exited again, bound for China. The special conditions
which caused young people who were not slum dwellers to
identify with slum dwellers, and even with pimps and
prostitutes, will fade. Relations between parents and
children will become much more healthy and vital, because they are
no longer arguing across a class barrier, and this will tend
to exclude the RIAA. Children are naturally interested in whatever
it is that their parents do, or whatever their parents like.
Commercial youth culture can only succeed by default.
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(*) Interesting sidenote, the French term for
eighteenth-century contraband writings, "colportage," or
"peddling" as the dictionary would have it, translates literally
as "carrying on the neck. One envisions a shifty character, with
his satchel crosswise over his shoulder, sidling through a market
crowd, selling dirty and/or politically subversive books, while
keeping an eye out for the police.
Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris, The Green Felt Jungle, 1963
An interesting book about the boundary between
the entertainment industry and the mob in Las Vegas.
Robert Phelps, ed., The Collected Stories of Colette, 1984,
Part II, "Backstage at the Music Hall"