The music industry in the 2010s and the example of J*Davey
They are building two new stadiums in my city.
105,000 new seats. This is entirely in line with what The Economist noted recently: For the media industry, the future has got two things in store. Primarily, the extremely popular. Blockbusters and monumental-scale events. Stadium rock is to be even bigger, sky’s the limit. Secondly, the segmented, the niched and obscure. The Internet has a positive effect on markets for those kind of things. But the economic risk that is involved in betting on new acts, the corporations prefer to see being made elsewhere.
Who is supposed to play these monster arenas? Swedish journalist Erika Hallhagen notes that,
obviously concert organizers choose the arena where they can get the most money or sell the most tickets. But there are not many artists or groups who can sell 40,000 tickets a year [in Stockholm]. You can basically count them on the fingers of your hand. Even fewer can attract 65,000. Madonna, Iron Maiden, U2, Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Metallica – maybe Robbie Williams and Justin Timberlake.
The gap between the enormously popular and the extremely narrow – the “Death Valley Problem” – makes for a real-term absence regarding the actual regeneration of the very artists who will perform on these stages!
Quick count. New world-class artists during the 00s: Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas and Rihanna.
No, neither Jay-Z, Justin, Britney nor Coldplay count. They broke through before the new digital landscape for music consumption was here. Another Swedish journalist, Isabelle Ståhl, recently summarized the 00s:
The anxiety-inducing glut of music and film that the Internet is, alongside with TV’s mass production of C-list celebrities, has prevented a new Michael Jackson or a new Depeche Mode. The era of really big stars is over and instead we see a myriad of subcultures that are impossible to track.
Personally, I am often called a “file-sharing researcher” and in that role I am sometimes misunderstood as someone who would defend the media situation before us. But no one can say that file-sharing is truly “good” or “bad”: Like everything, it has positive and negative effects, and is one of many components of a complex media landscape. I have also been active in music production for years, and I know people with close ties to the record industry – and often with hefty doses of distrust towards it. I sympathize with artists who have dreams and ambitions, but who will now have a greatly reduced chance to be promoted by a record company.
One band that exemplifies the very ambivalent stance that many bands are forced to today, at least if you have a social approach to music-making, is the Los Angeles-based group J*Davey, who have combined an extremely uncompromising attitude and high musical ambition with an intense, provoking, yes even lecherous stage presence. On the very last day of the 00s, they released their new EP Boudoir Synema for free on the Net, in connection with their reportedly long-winded negotiations with a major record label. J*Davey are literally on the border between underground and mainstream, they are balancing over that gap. And they have repeatedly spoken out about their ambivalence, their double roles in the music biz, for example in various YouTube videos. They have as much sex appeal as Lady Gaga, and as much underground cred as J Dilla. They are a perfect example.
I emphasize the social attitude towards creating music here, since the anemic laptop music that many Internet activists seem to highlight as “interesting” music is, by means of its production, based on both megalomania and nihilism when compared to music that includes several musicians, singers, studio technicians and so on. Megalomania, since it is based on the illusion that one person alone can master the entire process of music-making. Not even Timbaland or Pharrell are working in that way, they often have lots of people with them in the studio. Nihilism, because it is based on the stale idea that everyone should best remain in their own little niche scene, a stance that is content with the status quo and the accepted way of doing things. Laptoptronica is equally symptomatic of the current situation as Pop Idol or the new multi-capacity arenas ever were.
In 2008, J*Davey released their double CD The Beauty In Distortion/Land of the Lost, an unclassifiable soul-hip-hop electronic new wave-hybrid that threw the rulebook out the window. Here was a band with real musical talent whose sound was still diverse and experimental, and who had lyrics and ideas which connected with real life instead of the art-for-art’s-own-sake that characterizes much other underground hip-hop. The band’s songstress Jack Davey’s voice was challenging; more growling and gruff than the typical female voice, and she rapped as much as she was singing. And not least: Here were two young black Americans who are talking about David Bowie and Devo rather than about bling and street culture. The album was released on an indie label and created some opportunities to tour, which also went hand in hand with a small but devoted fan base. They gave away copies of TBID/LOTL as a mixtape and CDR, they sold it via their MySpace page. Typical underground, typical long tail, typical 00s.
As J*Davey had real talent and loads of crossover appeal, there was always interest from the major record labels. For obvious reasons, they have not been able to express themselves directly in interviews and clips, but the band’s second half Brooke D’Leau has afforded to be pretty cocky in his statements about the industry as a whole:
More people put out stuff now, anyone can put it up there on the net. There’s more shit on the Net, which means the dope shit stands out more.
But the landscape is so flat, and the expectation that you will market yourself is so strong, that no one wants to invest in an artist anymore. Least of all the major companies which have gone on the defensive when they are seeing their sales revenues shrink.
More than anything, Brooke seems to have an almost perverse hate towards A&R executives, as that whole business is based on opinion – and opinion is what everyone has nowadays. The notion of what is good is less autonomous; hipster mags such as Vice Magazine provide an aesthetic that becomes the standard for indie culture in general. Few genuinely different subcultures have time to grow before the spotlight is cast on them. A&R people are, after all, desperate. They are looking for miracles – those unique flashes of creativity that are rare enough to stand out, but familiar enough to sell. Had they been able to create these flashes themselves, they would have done so. But they are forced to rummage around in the dark. The fact that so few people can expect to get a record contract these days allows A&R people to be extremely defensive. Not least since they are probably extremely concerned about their own jobs.
J*Davey have even been associated with a mysterious, anonymous manifesto which scoffs at the record industry of the late 00s:
Record labels are nothing but banks, that give artists high-price loans in exchange for artistic control.
Labels only sign bands nowadays because of their existing fanbase and record sales.
They don’t want to develop the art, they don’t want the artists to express themselves entirely.
What made me want to blog about them was when a friend who’s a long-term fan of them e-mailed me, since Brooke on New Year’s Eve 2009 twittered like a madman, spreading links. The new EP, Boudoir Synema, was up there on Bandcamp and the mp3s were available for free for anyone. Their sound had changed too – it was a lot more conventional. Was this the run-up to their larger, Warner Bros-led deployment?
Funnily enough, it seems like the business model remains the same – regardless if you’re on Warner Bros or Interdependent Media. Give the shit away for free first, then maybe people will like it! My friend was resigned:
It just seems so futile that you have to make an amazing sounding major label-backed album, expend emotional energy, make a few creative sacrifices to please a wider audience… and then give it away for free! Add to that the ‘crazy’ Internet viral stunts you have to deploy to try and draw attention to it. It’s hard to reconcile that with groundbreaking/visionary/progressive art of any kind.
To be able to use the Internet for spreading your stuff is fantastic. But it comes at a price. A lot more of your time will be spent on marketing, less time will be left for making music. It is frightening how much time today’s unestablished artists are spending twittering instead of making music. As an artist, you are the victim of violence; the violence of the market. Formerly, a record deal was in some sense a protection from that violence; you capitalized on your potential future sales success and received, in return, literally a sheltered workshop.
Today, that workshop is exposed; the production process is more transparent when Logic and ProTools are said to make the creative process more democratic (only partially true for us who are familiar with the importance of professional mixing and mastering to the music we’re used to hearing) and we are all aware of the inexorable importance of marketing yourself, the novel dream that anyone can succeed by promoting his/her brand in a clever enough way. This dream has been, mildly put, enhanced by Pop Idol and an impressive range of other talent shows.
Still, there has of course always been a “crisis” of some sort in the record industry.
The 80s saw a similar cynical mainstream climate, where Stock-Aitken-Waterman’s conservative bubblegum pop and the contemporary studio technicians’ normative ideas about drum reverb became almost comically obvious symbols of where the music world was at. At the same time the underground flourished, however with an in-built slowness that does not exist today. Indie grew out of punk, and “alternative rock” became an economically interesting formation largely thanks to the extremely favourable climate for record sales that the 90s saw, when people not only bought new music on CD, but re-purchased their old analog recordings with digitally remastered sound.
Material shifts in technology constantly contribute to the general conditions for music, just like today. Perhaps we will see a similar stabilization in the 2010s, maybe we’ll see a more financially sustainable position for new artists. However, those general conditions will be likely to be based on a wide range of factors, much wider than before. Much harder to overlook and fully control than the traditional idea of selling plastic discs. It will vary regionally, as well as between different age groups and between different styles and genres.
The sad thing would be if this would benefit artists who are better entrepreneurs than musicians. If the prosaic laptop guys would benefit more from the situation than the real visionaries. As Isabelle Ståhl continues:
Media and popular culture has been fragmented and TV is no longer the consoling and safe compensation for a lost community that we once had. We do no longer make friends based on the bands we sympathize with. Instead, an individualistic desire to be unique and make a personal impression has started to grow. When you no longer clearly define yourself according to a taste in music it becomes necessary to resort to other cultural markers.
In other words, music is in many ways no longer as important as a marker of identity. Less important in your life. Should we expect then, that the musicians themselves will have an approach to it that is literally as serious as life and death? How far are you willing to go, as a musician? How big are your dreams? Or are you busy twittering about it?
