Guardian Super-Friends Team-Up presents: Ian Smith Port and Cody Benjamin Nabours weighing in on the future of a record industry gasping its last breaths under the collective strain of illegal file-sharing.
CN: Do you think there will be a successful effort to restore music buying to the way it used to be, back when we would pay exorbitant amounts for music, because we couldn’t get it any other way?
ISP: No, I don’t. I don’t think that will ever happen. The longer and longer things go on, there is this growing generation of music consumers who are unfamiliar with the way the system used to be, and will never ever go back to that, no matter what.
CN: We’ll always have to have peer-to-peer file-sharing; people need to share information. We live in an age where we connect ourselves to a larger web of individuals; we can’t deny them their private right to trade information. People will always steal. And they can’t be stopped.
ISP: Whether or not it’s stealing, the people that do it don’t consider it to be abnormal or deviant behavior. That’s how they understand they’re supposed to do it. It’s what they’ve done. More and more people are going to think like that. Certainly our generation, where we had a long period of paying for music — now if I want to hear a pop song, I don’t go buy a fucking record, I just download it. It’s not always successful, but most of the time I can get what I want.
CN: At some point in the future, it won’t even be “stealing” anymore.
ISP: They don’t think of it as stealing, and they’re the big consumers of music.
CN: If the recording industry thrives on people purchasing music, how will they survive? You can’t just have the musician pass music directly to the consumer.
ISP: I think there will still be a recording industry; I don’t think that downloading will actually kill the recording industry. But it will downsize it for sure. It won’t go away. There has to be some sort of institution there that fulfills this role of paying for studio time, distributing and advertising — being the medium between the artist and the commercial world.
CN: Large record companies could try to cash in by producing more artists that will appeal to the widest audience, but the more popular a single artist or a single song is, the easier it will be to find and download, since there will be more people to get it from. Eventually, the idea of the “superstar” will be eroded, because that one artist will be heavily downloaded, and less commercially viable for his or her record company. I read something a long time ago, at the start of the downloading fiasco, that proposed the recording industry could be “saved” by the following: looking for lots of good new artists and selling their albums for cheap. After say, three albums, instead of selling for $5 to $8, they sell for $10 to $12. If they develop a fan base, the fans will pay the slightly higher price for the album; if not, they will disappear, leaving more room on the shelves for a multitude of new artists. The recording industry must make sacrifices — instead of swimming in goddamn gold pools; why can’t they live a normal life like the rest of us?
ISP: Marketing and broadcasting is so cheap and easy now that you don’t have to have an artist that appeals to millions of people to justify spending enough money to get them nationally known. To do that, you have to get a good review on the right Web site, or a mention in the right magazine. Successful record companies do that. Indie labels like Dischord sell all their CDs for $10. They go out and find crazy shit, they take a risk and put out a record that a lot of people wouldn’t put out. Sometimes they sell a lot of it, and the artists, like Bright Eyes and Saddle Creek, which were totally weird and off the map five years ago, become huge. The mainstream record companies, if they want to survive, have to readjust their models from this idea of selling billions of records and spending lots of money on tours, fancy recording and marketing, because they can’t make enough money on record sales to do it anymore.
CN: If there are fewer moneymaking opportunities, it will attract people that are interested in finding and distributing new music, not people who are only interested in money. They just need to make enough to live comfortably. We need people in the job who are interested in the job, not the money, and they will do it better.
ISP: Is the public still going to demand a traditional superstar? Is there a contradiction in that the public demands it, but won’t spend enough money to support it?
CN: It doesn’t have to be as gigantic as it is now, but there will be a redistribution of wealth — the superstars won’t be as obscenely rich, and hopefully there will be much more innovative new music on the opposite end.
Passerby: This sounds like a Keynesian music model. It’s a music welfare state.
ISP: The problem is that there will always be someone who will give the people what they want. People won’t consume what they should consume. That’s what we have now.
CN: But if giving the people what they want results in a more popular product, it will be more adversely affected by downloading, since it will be easier to get. If record companies cared less about giving the people what they want, and cared more about putting out lots of interesting music, wouldn’t that be better?
ISP: That’s how indie labels do it. The guy that runs the label likes something, so he signs it.
CN: The superstar will die. As “stealing” music becomes more and more prevalent, they will try to stop it, but they can’t. They don’t want to adapt, but they will be forced to. Let’s make a stand for once. Let’s not let the corporations tread over us. We have them by the balls. We have the masses on their computers. Instead of a wave of people in the streets, it’s a wave of people in their bedrooms. They aren’t going to stop us. They can try suing us, but there will be more and more and more of us. And they have to improve. If they change, it’s going to be better anyways. There will be more and better artists to choose from. It’s better than the 10 videos on rotation on MTV. Labels survive by selling CDs for $8 to $10 and offering a good variety of artists, not by just hyping the album with lots of money, payola to the radio, magazines and television — that they probably own anyway.
ISP: I’m going to go get some ice cream.
CN: Me, too.
