-with the times: the music industry
Barbara Clear? Who on earth is Barbara Clear (Klier)? First, she is a world-famous singer in Lower Bavaria. Second, she is coming to Munich to give a concert at Olympiahalle on April 24. Third, she may soon become a beguiling emblem of Munich’s pop-cultural emancipation. The German, who composes and sings all of her songs in English, is 39 years old and comes from a little village just north of Passau. The artist makes her own CDs and distributes them at concerts and over the Internet. She has rented the Olympiahalle for the April 24 concert using only her own money, with no record company and no labeling agency to support her. Clear is convinced that the power of her lyrics, her voice, her guitar and the loyalty of her fans will fill the house. Four thousand tickets had already been sold when this magazine went to press. For the moment at least it appears that Clear has been able to bypass the high gloss trashiness of the music industry. Sixty-five percent of pop is purchased by the teen crowd, fans between the ages of 12 and 17. Many of these fans—“music swappers” may in fact be a better term as less and less money is actually spent on CDs—while away their out-of-school hours indulging in certain ritual activities. The focus of these activities is the home computer. Internet access and the speed thereof are the teenager’s primary concern. Last week, I drew on my ethnographic talents to infiltrate an AOL teen chat room and to establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine their view of the pop music world. According to the mythical thinking of the teens, there was an original musical paradise. While their descriptions of this paradise are understandably vague, they believe it was called Tin Pan Alley, a musical abode where artists, vaudeville impresarios, producers of sheet music and play-along, sing-along fans lived together in harmony. It was the pre-media-conglomerate condition, before the recording industry turned entertainment into hustle and the village into a jungle in which organized savagery, plunder and extortion made the lives of pop artists nasty, brutish and short. Then the computer geeks at Napster came along and created the music sharers in their image. They let the downloading genie out of the bottle and carved out a gap between the kids and the wild creatures in the bush, replacing a neurosis of compensatory CD buying with a compulsion for teens to share every music file they could get their mouse on. The result was a virtual community of altruistic swappers, who believed that music is cheap to make and that the computer is naturally predisposed to redistribute the spoils of the music industry. This belief spread very quickly and in the process the music industry chiefs were stripped of their human appearance and turned into beasts, while the beastly geeks turned into cultural heroes. The music chiefs and their mercenaries had some early successes. They managed to pass the Millennium Copyright Act, close down Napster and kill MP3, but the downloading movement refused to be quashed. Protocols like Gnuttella, Kasaa, morpheous, e-donkey and e-mule rose from the ashes. Over a four-year period the kings of the jungle were reduced to abhorred wimps crying over lost profits. The industry lawyers were in lawyer heaven, dancing with themselves, sending out subpoenas in all directions, criminalizing everyone, fighting futile battles, losing ridiculous cases, lining their pockets with gold. Kids know that sharing files is a way to tame the music industry, but are also aware of the dangers. File-sharing programs screw up PCs by allowing everybody including industry technicians to drop all sorts of viruses, Trojan horses, worms and leech programs on their hard drives. Geeks often have to be called in to clean up systems and instruct the uninitiated in the mysteries of ritualistic washing (spybot), cloaking (PeerGuardian), encrypting and using anonymous file servers and clients. After logging out of the chat room and checking in with a few parents who I know have music swappers as offspring, I made a banal but earth-shattering discovery: when it comes to hating the music industry there is no generation gap. Parents loathe it as much as their children, but for different reasons. From their point of view the industry has reduced popular music to its lowest common denominator, sexing up every teen with the pay-for-all, mindless and, even worse, humorless vulgarity of hip hoppers and ex-mousekteers. If freeloading is bad for the music industry, it must be a good thing. So, they find themselves secretly encouraging their children to download and share as many files as possible. The music industry thinks it can soft land in a new technical environment with a couple of commercial sites as cushions. Wrong: making music and distributing it over the net doesn’t require middlemen. Competition will drive the price of standardized junk music down to where it should be, worthless. The parents are hoping for a return to Eden: the death of the music industry and the rebirth of a mythical paradise where quality and diversity reign and innocent relations between artists and fans are the norm. Those of you who are old and wise know that wishes are there to be disappointed. But in this case hopefully not before April 24.