News -- With or Without the Recording Industry

Once upon a time, before there was such a thing as a recording industry, before there was even such a thing as recordings, there was just music. People made music to pass the time, to enhance their experience of life. People made music because, as any music lover will tell you, at some fundamental level, music is life.

Music also served other functions than that of pure entertainment. Before there were newspapers, radios, televisions, or the Internet--traveling bards brought news of the outside world to villages on horseback, reading from scrolls or relying on their memories. Traveling bards didn't just carry news--they told stories, and represented the oral tradition. Bards often created melodies to accompany their stories, which somehow made the stories easier to remember. The bardic tradition, as you know, gave rise to the folk song. In some (though increasingly few) cultures, music still serves this function alone: to enhance the experience of life. Music that comes from the muse, not from the promise of money or fame.

But with the invention of physical recordings and radio in the 20th century, the role of music began to change. It took money to run radio stations, and to press vinyl into long-playing records. But the people who controlled these distribution mechanisms also discovered that they could make a lot of money. A lot of labels--and a few artists--got rich and famous, which led millions of others to try and make money from the business.

There's nothing wrong with making money from music, but it does have an unfortunate side effect: We've arrived at a point where most of the music we hear is handed to us by the recording industry, and that industry treats music exclusively as a business. Record stores and music-biz execs refer to the music they sell simply as "product." Are there people out there making music exclusively for the love of it? Of course there are. And do you get to hear them on the radio very often? Not really. And who are the stars sitting at the very top, making the most money and serving as role models for the state of modern creativity? All too often, they're artists who have been fabricated and placed there by industry executives.

Amazing people making amazing music are all around us. And yet we constantly find "artists" like the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, Ricky Martin, and Brittney Spears topping the charts. These artists are not at the top because they're the most creative, or because they make the most beautiful, rockin', soulful, inspired music. They're there because their sex appeal can be exploited to generate obscenely huge revenue streams.

Now, imagine for a moment what would happen if you just removed the record industry from the loop entirely. What would happen if creative artists didn't need to rent expensive studio time to lay down tracks? What if CD factories weren't necessary? What if artists didn't need distribution chains to get their music into stores? What would happen if stars rose to the top purely on the strength of their talent, and if we music fans and consumers, rather than "the biz," put them there?

I'm guessing here (and I may be a hopeless idealist) that great music would bubble to the top on its own merits. That we listeners would cast about for the next great thing, and that when we found it, we would tell our friends, and they'd tell their friends, and before long, the charts would be topped by artists who were only in it for the music to begin with.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think music and money are mutually exclusive. Far from it. I believe artists should be supported by culture, and that culture should be supported by society. I also believe that the MP3 revolution might--just might--get us there, or at least part of the way there. For the first time in history, creative artists and musicians can potentially be heard by anyone on the planet with Web access, and those artists don't need any part of the recording industry to make it happen.

Of course, there are problems with this MP3 vision. The biggest one is multiplicity. The radio (and its fin-de-siecle equivalent, MTV) gives us fifty or one hundred songs a month to think about. Without their selectivity, we would have literally millions of artists to wade through. The industry does us a favor by culling out a few artists we can digest during rush hour traffic. But bubbling would occur without radio's help, there's no doubt.

For proof of concept, look no further than MP3.com, where this model is in effect right now. Listeners "vote" for their favorite songs by downloading them. The more downloads an artist gets, the more likely he or she is to be featured on MP3.com's front page. And lo and behold, actual "stars" are beginning to emerge from the soup of MP3.com's massive and growing collection. Stars that were created by popular vote, without ever signing a contract with the recording industry. Stars who never had to consider whether they should sign over creative control to a producer, or agree to give a huge percentage of their earnings to an agent.

I'm not suggesting the recording industry is ever going to go away. But MP3.com proves that file-based digital music distribution holds the potential to radically restructure the way we select the music we're going to hear, and ultimately, the way we choose our stars.

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