The bilious stew of the music business at the turn of the millennium – and hope for deliverance (II)

One music commentator explains; I run into people every day who would love to sell a gazillion records. The hip-hop artists still have an audience they can tap, and, for the time being, enough of a monolith to mass market. And there will always be pop stars who, for whatever reason, incite enough excitement to become mass merchandise. But others have started to become more realistic about the times. With little that can be considered monolithic in music any more, music becomes difficult for the behemoths to market. I think the fact that only 32 albums went platinum in 2005 points to that. With radio cutting back on the amount of music it plays, narrowcasting, and programming to a lower and lower common denominator, less gets heard via that traditional avenue of musical promotion.

I visualize the current landscape as a large, sticky funnel – anything of substance sticks to the inside walls, leaving only the thinnest, slickest stuff to find its way out, sometimes taking with it the odd, occasional glob of something substantial that just happens to work its way through. The rest of it doesn’t come out through the narrow end of the funnel. To get to it, you need a spoon.

The situation the record business finds itself in is not without precedent. Media columnist Michael Wolff sees parallels between the contemporary state of the record business and the earlier days of the book publishing business. In the 1930s, young, creative communicators aspired to write the great American novel; now they aspire to record the next great international-hit album. Wolff pointed to a time when Hemmingway was Kurt Cobain (right down to the shotgun), John Steinbeck was Bruce Springsteen (and now Bruce is returning the favor – more than one person has referred to him as Steinbeck with a guitar), and Norman Mailer was Eminem (language, boys, language). “They made lots of money, they lived large (and self-medicated). They were the generational voice.”

Rock stars, Wolff wrote, once would only be happy if they sold hundreds of thousands or millions of records, but as in the book business, those days are waning. “Soon you’ll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units – that will be your bread and butter. You’ll sweat every sale and dollar… it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.”

As we’ve seen, a lot of this has already begun to happen. As early as the 1990s, baby boomers bought more CDs than their kids, the graying population forming the record business’s key clientele, whether catered or not. The low margins have made record retail as it has existed for half a century almost untenable today. Consolidation has affected nearly every aspect of the business, from retail to radio to the record companies themselves. If only 0.35 percent of all records sell more than 100,000 units and 96 percent sell less than a thousand copies, the day is swiftly coming when an artist will be happy with a CD that sells 30,000 copies, especially on an independent label.

The vertical integration of the record business has been breaking down for years, but the business would seem to have become aware of the rust and wear on the chain only as the links started to fall apart. The process was gradual and subtle, but eventually the chain has to break.

The main links, the symbiosis between the radio business and the record business, continue to break down. Radio getting free content in exchange for giving that content free promotion had become a public canard by the late 1950s. Nothing is free. The music business has paid for play since long before the days of payola, perhaps even before the days of the song plugger. The business’s own organ, the RIAA, hinted at this when it tried to justify the cost of a CD:

Marketing and promotion costs [are] perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include… promotion to get the songs played on the radio – that didn’t just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive.