When the Music Industry’s Cries Fall on Deaf Ears
After years of Taking Advantage of Consumers, Record Labels Must Reap What They Sowed
Last week, I listened to a cut from Santigold’s new album named 99 cents, a commentary on the value (or lack thereof) that we as consumers place on music today.
Santigold, as NPR’s All Songs Considered explained, is feeling the strain of achieving greater success without receiving much income from her most valuable asset — her music.
Her argument is not a new one, as artists and record labels have been critical of the monetary value being placed on their creations, as streaming services such as Spotify and iTunes have formed a marketplace that gives away their investments of blood, sweat and tears for what they claim to be a small financial return.
While there is validity to these arguments, my empathy draws a hard line at head-nodding acknowledgement, because while my brain wants to immediately blurt out, “I don’t care!” what I’m really trying to say is that all of the vitriol being spewed to and fro by musicians is pointed in the wrong direction.
If there is blame to go around, it needs to be squarely directed from whence you came — the music industry.
In 1997, after pinching every penny I had from working brutally hot summers in front of 500 degree ovens at my dad’s pizzeria, I finally splurged on a heavenly, black and silver six-CD carousel stereo.
Whatever few dollars I had left needed to go to the music, my one true escape from the infinite doldrums otherwise known as Central New Jersey, which would populate my massive disc player.
So off I went to the Middlesex Mall so that I could attack the Sam Goody music store with the vigor of what I assume to be a kid in a candy store, because I wasn’t a huge fan of chocolate and to me, nothing in the world would have caused me as much bliss as my soon-to-be purchases of Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill, Blues Traveler’s Four and Blink 182's Dude Ranch.
The grand total for those three albums: approximately $70 after tax, with the shame I would feel recalling this memory today at no additional charge.
Today’s version of myself cringes at the thought of paying so much for those albums, not because it was those albums or it wasn’t worth it to me in retrospect, but because I’ve come to realize that I was being played, duped and used by the whole music industry, from the distributors, to the labels and even by the artists. But I submitted to my expensive fate, because for a lower-middle class teen in suburbia, there was no other way to escape my life for a few hours through music than to pay, handsomely, for it.
On the one hand, I’ve rationalized the purchases to the idea that I was a purist who loved the idea of walking into that grimy, gray carpeted music store, the smell of plastic CD casing wafting in the stale air, and slowly sifting through the alphabetical list of $18 albums to select a few that would soon be mine.
But the reality is that I wasn’t a victim of love, the crime was that I was being used by the record industry, which had no problem charging me inflated prices for music that cost a fraction to produce, with plenty of profits to go around for themselves and the artists that created it.
And it all came at the expense of me and hundreds of thousands of others.
Despite not taking a single business class in college, it wouldn’t take an MBA to realize that the economics related to the advent of music download and streaming services such as Napster and Bearshare were not in the music industry’s favor.
It was this sort of vigilante, poetic justice right before my eyes. After handing over thousands of dollars for music for years, there it was, free and at my fingertips, so why would I ever say no? Who was I harming? Well, evidently a lot of people. So many, in fact, that repeat offenders that downloaded far more than my lousy college Internet connection could muster were getting prosecuted by record labels.
I could just imagine myself announcing my crimes to the judge, “Yes, Your Honor I confess! It was I that downloaded the new 311 album, along with b-sides from Matchbook Romance and The Early November. You may now put me away forever.”
Serious crimes of alt-rock passions aside, a serious shift in the way we consumed music was happening before my eyes, and it appeared that the music industry was struggling to keep up.
Prices for music dropped precipitously, and the music stores that I treated as second homes, particularly the independent ones such as The Wall in New Jersey, where all I could afford was a two track cassette tape of Third Eyed Blind’s Semi-Charmed Life single (full and radio edits included!), were closing down.
I take no joy in thinking about the vestiges of my youth swept away in a wave of digital downloads, but can’t help but think that we all should have seen this coming.
Worse yet, I didn’t have to wait very long for my own digital revolution to shake my views on life.
In 2006, I sat in a newsroom that was falling apart.
Ad revenue was dropping steeply, and even as an aspiring journalist, having your byline on a piece of newsprint felt less important when you saw your Pulitzer Prize-winning friends being forced into early retirements or taking buyouts to offset the losses. All the while, readers who had happily paid for the news before the rise of the Internet sang a familiar chorus of indifferent shrugs, taking zero issue with the idea that they should be informed for free.
Suffice it to say, the digital economics caught up to the newspaper industry, with only a few of the key players that were caught up in the evolution still standing today. The game done changed, as Cutty in The Wire put it so well.
My own life changed for that matter, as the medium for the art I wanted to create didn’t exist in the form I grew stubbornly comfortable with, so I had to (childishly and begrudgingly) adjust.
After their own digital awakening, the music industry is making their own adjustments. Music is cheaper, yes, but you can argue it’s also more accessible to groups of potential consumers that weren’t even possible before.
Better yet, selling enough albums to be at the top of the Billboard charts just seems as its less of the measuring stick of success than it used to be, and now as an adult, I am happily paying a premium to see my favorite artists live and up close, which I am hoping is a better return on investment for the artists in the long run.
Even as someone who has been accused of being overly compassionate at times, I still find it difficult to feel any remorse for downloading music at the expense of the record labels and artists who had taken so much from me.
And while I agree that no one could have anticipated the landscape changing in such monumental way and at the cost of people’s livelihoods, the writing was on my beloved The Wall — they should have known that taking advantage of consumers for such a long time was unsustainable.
So if instead of complaining about the state of the music industry, record labels and artists owned up to the fact that they’re now paying for their past sins against pre-digital victims such as myself, it would be worth far more than 99 cents to me, the artists they represent and countless others.
