Money

Pink Floyd have won their long-standing lawsuit against EMI, part of which was a complaint that they had an agreement with EMI not to sell incomplete albums. This has been pitched as a triumph for artistic integrity and has lead to some postulate that Pink Floyd may withdraw their songs from iTunes or insist that their albums are sold in their entirety only. Both of these observations are likely to be poppycock.

To argue that this legal victory is a triumph for artistic integrity, is to remain locked in the old model of music dominated by the record labels. That model dictated that artists produced 45-60 minutes of music that the labels could sell as a commodity unit called an LP (later a CD). All LPs/CDs from new acts cost roughly the same, with only a little price-flexibility for the most popular artists – a reason for viewing the recording labels complaints about iTunes uniform pricing strategy with suspicion.

This commoditisation meant that artists were essentially paid the same for 45 minutes of good music as they were for 15 minutes of good music and 30 minutes of garbage. Incentives being what they are, it is not surprising that most musicians supply the latter (in fact 15 minutes is probably overly generous!). The primary reason why CD sales have fallen so far, and continue to fall, is that people are less prepared to pay for garbage in order to get the music they like – and online sales of individual tracks has made it possible to do exactly that. Previously, your only way of buying a single track was the expensive CD single, which has now appeared to have morphed into the EP. Thankfully, Steve Jobs mostly stuck to his guns on pricing, thus killing the CD single.

iTunes and the other online stores have now changed the game drastically. The Record labels and, if the truth be known, most musicians do not appreciate this. It is no longer necessary for bands to produce 45 minutes of music before they can sell it. Musicians who only have a one-hit-wonder in them will no longer be obliged to subject the world to a pile of indifferent music. They may still do so, but at least they now have a choice. It may be that those musicians, once they are no longer under pressure to produce a certain quantity of music, will be able to produce far better pieces, less often.

It is also no longer necessary to use a record label to promote your music. Currently most musicians who become well-known on the internet (typically by distributing their works for free) eventually sign on to record labels, rather than going the next step (which is to use their internet leverage to promote themselves and start charging people). This is not to imply that the labels are not useful for promoting musicians, but why take the retrograde step of going with a record label when you have already done all the hard promotion work?

The other thing that online music also provides is an outlet for hobbyist musicians. There is a wealth of free music available from these musicians (obviously of variable quality) but there is no reason why the better hobby musicians should not place their better works on iTunes themselves. Eventually, their hobby might pay enough to go professional, but in any case the opportunity is now there.

This sort of opportunity should not be lightly dismissed. The opening up of the music industry to hobbyists adds a wealth of talent (and non-talent) to the music world, providing us with the possibility of discovering new talents who would not have otherwise taken the plunge into the financially dangerous world of professional music.

Admittedly, the iTunes model makes it difficult to produce “concept albums”, where each track is meant to be played in a particular order and the whole piece needs to be played together. But there are easy ways around that. Simply making the entire album a single track being the easiest. iTunes automatically makes any track longer than 10 minutes an “album only” track, stopping individual purchase. However, I suspect Pink Floyd do not really care about this issue, using it only as leverage against EMI. They have produced a number of compilation albums and allowed their “concept” music to be used as backgrounds to many, many commercials and documentaries (especially the track “Money”). In fact, I would guess their sentiments might be expressed by this line from that famous song:

“Money, It’s a hit. Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit”

 

Indeed.

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