SUPPLY ON-DEMAND
Money talks, but does it sing? The Motor Tom assume an unpopular position in a world that has de-/re-valued the master recording.
by Tom d’Motor
or the purpose of this essay, let’s assume there are only three categories of industry: professions, businesses and crafts. A profession is something for which a person studies almost exclusively for the purpose of cultivating a set of skills that other people will likely pay to utilize. A lawyer gets paid upon his ability to wield his/her knowledge of the law and a basketball player gets paid to demonstrate his/her abilities on the court. A business is an entity built for the purpose of exploiting the needs or desires of others. People like shopping but they don’t like getting off the couch, so we built Spamazon dot com. People need to drink water and they’re naturally full of shit, so we built FartWater. A craft is a set of skills honed by a purpose who is simply compelled by the activity itself. One cannot draw a straight line from crafter to customer because the primary target and consumer of a craft is one’s self. (See: “In Defense of Ms. Hill” by Talib Kweli Greene in Cuepoint.)I’m a musician because I can’t help it. If other folks decide they like my creations enough so I never have to do anything else on Dog’s Clean Earth I will die happy. If it pleases you, my likely-non-existant reader, I’d like to deconstruct why a straight line cannot (never mind should not) be drawn from eureka to cha-ching in such an industry.
Tidal launched this week with a two-pronged pitch: music will sound better and artists will get paid more fairly. The first premise is a nice one, albeit a somewhat irrelevant one in an earbud culture. The second? Well, the second premise is precisely why I’m writing. As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine succinctly put it “the goal is to get artist properly paid.” Such is a cause that has been championed by musical artists for the past decade and a half. The big question is, though, what constitutes fair pay for an artist? A bottle of water, as the market has determined, is worth around $0.003/mL in the United States. Pinpointing what the market has decided John Lennon’s “Imagine” is worth is difficult. Even if I were a masterful researcher, and I am anything but, I don’t think I’d be able to unearth a market value for “Imagine.” Same goes for YG 4Hunnid’s “Do It To Ya,” Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to Party,” Ray Charles’ “Georgia On My Mind,” etc. etc. You get the point. Water is water (pretty much) but a song…?
t’s at this juncture that I’d like to sum up the history of the music industry, which began in earnest in the 1950's. Before then, while recording technologies and radio existed, monetization, the bread and butter of any industry, was as yet unborn. By the time WWII had ended and the world yearned for Bill Haley and Elvis, the literal record business emerged with stacks and stacks of vinyl products in hand. Those products made their way around the world and the Baby Boomers entered a land flush with wonderful musical sounds. Many of those wonderful sounds made their way across the Atlantic where kids like John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon and Rod Argent were eager to receive them, nay inhale them. The 1960's and 1970's bore the manifest marks of early globalization, and it was good. Artistic influence and cultural exchange pollinated and blossomed as never before. As MTV and CDs came to be as the 80's swept in, the craft of music-making had spawned a generation of people who figured out how to monetize the fruits of artistic efforts with tremendous efficiency and success. By the 90's most any kid with skinny arms and long hair was being given Scrooge McDuck quantities of cash in exchange for the prospect of their music’s broad cultural acceptance. And things got bad. The only thing that is black and white is that nothing is black and white, but many if not most would argue that the several years preceding the Millennium were a particular low point for artistic expression and, simultaneously, a wonderful time to be a purveyor of musical goods.
Then came Napster.
And the bubble burst.
Certain factions sought — and indeed continue to seek — how to maintain the bloat of CD culture. Other factions breathed with relief as songs need not be 3 minutes and 40 seconds any longer; cursing was alright; and songs could be weird again and still be accepted. (The Beatles were weird, if you didn’t know.) The internet ended pop stardom as it had come to be recognized and provided most any link in the musical chain — Alt. Folk, Post-Punk, Industrial, et al. — a space (a niche) of its own.
Now, fifteen years after, the factions remain. American Idol showed how superstardom could be made in a Petri dish and so the hangers-on, the ones caught in the bubble, continue to think up ways to monetize and sustain a semblance of industry. Though weaker than before the faction continues to gross very large amounts and wield a significant portion of control. The music-makers who run in this circle make some nice pieces of work from time to time, but such is not their goal. Theirs are the pursuits of the first two orders we’ve previously classified: those of the professional and of the business. That’s fine and it has its place and its place is sometimes handsomely rewarded with wealth and fame. It is, however, in contrast to the aims of the craftsman or the artist, which in turn renders the fruits of the work inherently different.
The next time you hear someone say “I am an artist and I deserve to be paid fairly for my work,” you can call shenanigans. Tell them Nick Schupak gave you license. As for The Motor Tom? We’ll put our songs on Spotify and iTunes and, hell, Tidal if we can. Some of them are already there. We’re going to take the album we recently finished to record labels in the hopes that someone likes it enough to market it better than we could on our own. And in the likely event that the industrialists decline participation, we’ll trust that they know the industry better than we do and hold no grudge. In the unlikely event that a label supports us and we see a monetary return, we’ll be pretty grateful for the free beers we bought with the proceeds; and we’ll be eternally grateful for anyone who grows a smile as a result of taking pleasure in the sounds we’ve recorded. All the while, we’ll do our bread winning by methods other than playing music; and make the time to do what we can’t help but do, for ourselves, and for that invisible master that commands us thus.
