Lies, Damned Lies and the Rude Health of Pubs and Records

William Burroughs once claimed that the purpose of science was to make people aware of what they already know and the purpose of religion to stop people from being aware of what they already know. In recent times, this latter role may have been overtaken by statistics. Stats travel well on the web, they are small compact, aerodynamic, fit snugly into tweets and headlines and they have a certain punctive, so there force to them, that makes them seem convincing, even when they blatantly contradict what seems to be staring you in the face.

So, in this Observer article about the mooted extension of the smoking ban to cars and parks, the penultimate paragraph states what appears to be a paradox: the Office of National Statistics claims a a 3% in people going to pubs (incidentally, I had a look on the Office of National Statistics website and couldn't find this particular report - but I did find a report stating a 2.5% drop in the output of the hotel and restaurant trade, of which, "The largest contribution to the decrease was public houses and clubs."), yet Simon Clark of the lobby group Forest claims, "The evidence is staring people in the face. Thousands of pubs have closed since the ban was introduced." Now, Forest is a front group for the tobacco industry with little to no grassroots support, but his contention is not entirely without ground. As this Times Business article shows, with some 2,400 pubs closing between the summers of 2008 and 2009 alone, "local pubs serving small communities" have been the worst hit, while major chains like Greene King see their profits rise.

Is this not precisely analogous to the commonly repeated canard by members of the file-sharing lobby that piracy cannot possibly be bad for record sales when last year reported a rise in singles sales and the biggest selling single of all time? All around us we see record shops closing down, record labels folding, distributors collapsing, but we can merrily blind ourselves to this obvious reality because a small handful of major label mega-stars posted a record year (and the market - and its stats - is of course always the final guarantor of truth).

A few hurriedly written and barely structured thoughts on file sharing.

It would seem that arch-debunker of the dubious use of statistics, Ben Goldacre, has himself become the victim of a rather dubious use of statistics, for in Goldacre's recent twitter posting (in reference to an article in The Guardian), "Home taping didn't kill music: Pirates buy more tunes" the second clause does not necessarily follow from the first. The people who buy the most records have never made up the lion's share of the music industry's income. The vast majority of record sales have always gone to people who might only buy a handful of records a year because that is the vast majority of people. Most people are not obsessed with finding the latest band and the hottest new tune - those that are have probably been sharing music with other people in one way or another for years and p2p file-sharing probably makes very little difference to them. In fact, the people who download 'the most,' whether legally or illegally are not themselves a statistically significant group. The problem arises when the idea that music can, or indeed should, be free reaches a mass audience, those people who do not necessarily have the emotional investment in music that makes them want to do right by artists and buy a physical copy or a paid for download of the things they really like.

Another myth about file-sharing that needs exploding is that it will only harm the very rich and that for smaller artists the greater exposure that it brings will inevitably lead to more revenue. In fact, as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails proved rather amply, file-sharing will not harm the rich one bit. The old major record labels will survive, flourish even, no problem, because file-sharing has allowed them to make the 360 deal (whereby every aspect of a band's revenue, from touring to merch to publishing is not only controlled by but also shared with the label) the new standard deal; and the super-rich rock stars will survive, no problem. For total amateurs who have never had any thought to earn a living from their music, it could also be a good thing, conceivably. The real victims will be those working musicians and songwriters who are just about making a living out of what they do. First off, greater exposure - from where exactly? Take a look at Hype Machine's list of "most blogged artists" on any given day and you will recognise all the names - why? Because the same artists that are "most blogged" are, for the most part, also the most famous for other reasons, the most broadcast, the biggest selling, and the most written about in the old-fashioned print press. All of the current most blogged bands are bands with big record deals and something to plug coming out very soon. Greater exposure on the internet comes about largely in the same way as it does off the internet - for the most part through the intervention of pluggers and press agents. Oh, and "word of mouth" (word of mouth is itself a somewhat mythical concept, a little digging will generally teach you that anyone labelled a 'word of mouth success' has in fact been the subject of a clever bit of stealth marketing). Yes, it is possible to get your song on an mp3 blog without the aid of lots of money, just as it is possible to get in the NME or on Radio 1 without the aid of lots of money, but it's a lot harder, and a lot less likely - particularly to get on the most popular blogs. How do people find music on file-sharing networks? Well, they type in the name of the artist they are looking for and up it pops. See, they have to know the name of the artist already, and how will they know that name? Well the same way they will have always know the name of bands they like - they heard it on the radio, or in the music press, or at a gig, or perhaps on a blog. Secondly - increased revenue: Where will this revenue come from? Now that songwriters are apparently not allowed to make any money from publishing (thanks for that everyone who supported YouTube against PRS) because having your song played on YouTube is "promotion" and you apparently shouldn't get paid for that. Instead you are supposed to earn your money through playing live. Unfortunately most live promoters also regard playing gigs as "promotion" and therefore something they do not need to trifle with paying bands for. In fact, touring is the most expensive thing a band can do. Anyone can make a record if they want to. Go on tour and you need to take time off work, you need to pay all sorts of travel expenses, you will probably need to hire some sort of van, you will need to find places to sleep, and, if you want to sound any good, you will probably have to hire a sound guy to travel with you. All these things make touring a loss-making enterprise for practically everyone - except, once again, the super-rich rock stars like Radiohead who can get away with charging silly money for gig tickets and have powerful agents to make sure they get a good deal out of promoters. So, where will this "inevitable" increased revenue come from? Well, advertising, maybe, but once again the vast majority of sync money, whether for ads or for TV or movies, also goes to the biggest names - and anyway, wasn't that called selling out until rather recently? Should we really be so blase about the fact that perhaps the only way for musicians to make any money in the future may be by simply becoming an adjunct to the advertising industry?

What's perhaps most worrying about the language used by the Swedish Model is, on the one hand, this insistence on being "modern" - "We are modern you know" they say, and as Raymond Williams put it forty years ago, this, precisely, is "the ideology of the never-ending present." Their entire statement is laced with a certain there-is-no-alternative totalitarianism, file-sharing is here to stay and you better like it or lump it, which British readers will recognise from the speeches of Mrs Thatcher. This kinds of language merely precludes any real debate from happening - just as Thatcher's words stampeded through public discourse the very economic model that has caused the current world recession. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the internet, Web 2.0, whatever, is not a revolution, it does not represent a paradigm shift. Rather, like Nazism and Thatcherism before it, Web 2.0 is a pseudo-event par excellence and your loyalty has already been bought up for the price of a few poor quality mp3s.

"The secret of life is honesty and fair-dealing - if you can fake that you've got it made"

It is easy to be shocked by the stupidity and lack of understanding shown by much of the commentary on the current dispute between YouTube and PRS for Music over licence fees paid for music videos, but the problem lies in the way the situation has been framed, and by the way Google (YouTube's parent company) has been allowed, practically unquestioned, to set the terms of the debate. In the press release issued by YouTube at the time of their unilateral and entirely unprompted decision to remove 'premium content' music videos from their U.K site in the middle of ongoing negotiations with PRS, as well as in the first Guardian article to report on this P.R. statement, the issue is presented as a clash between, on the one hand, the 'old' exploitative music industry, and, on the other, the brave new world of Web 2.0, offering direct unmediated access between 'artists' and 'fans'. It is essential in these circumstances to problematise each of the terms in this debate - 'the music industry', 'artists', 'fans', and what might be seen as the increasingly invisible mediator between the three, the internet and the various hardware and software companies that have come to colonise its virtual highways - but first of all this opposition between 'the music industry' and 'web 2.0' must be dismissed as false, and perniciously so.

There can be no opposition between the internet's principal software developers and the major multinational record companies, they are joined by ties of common ownership (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, for instance, owns both MySpace and several recording and music publishing interests; Time-Warner-AOL owns, of course, both AOL and the Warner Music Group, as well as holding considerable shares - to the tune of $1 billion - in Google, not to mention the fact that the present CEO of AOL is former sales director of Google) and have frequently colluded in deals, tied by non-disclosure agreements, to share their profits, to the exclusion, by and large, of any actual music producers. The move on the part of YouTube to present the debate in these terms then, lacking any positive content in reality, must be seen as purely tactical - a somewhat specious attempt on the part of a massive global corporation, with annual advertising revenue to the tune of $16.4 billion (in 2007) and close financial and personnel ties to an even bigger corporate behemoth (Time-Warner), to present itself as 'the little guy'.

Part of the problem lies with this idea of 'the music industry' and the ease with which it can be manipulated. There is a perception that there is this thing called 'the music industry' which intervenes in, and distorts, the relationship between two mythical entities called 'artists' (a term which elevates music's producers to the romantic status of geniuses starving in garrets, outside the social, and beyond the dirt and cynicism of circulation) and 'fans' (a term which reduces music's consumers to the hysteric victims of Beatlemania, blindly following the Pied Piper to their doom). Although there is of course a grain of truth in this, it is certainly no more true than it is of the fashion industry, the potato industry, the furniture industry, the software industry, or the telecommunications industry. The music industry is, in this respect at least, no different from any other under the capitalist mode of production - except for this romantic ideological spin which sees producers as 'artists' who are today inevitably compromised by their financial dealings and were at some mythical point in the past somehow unconstrained by such concerns. The debate must then be reframed in terms of a conflict between, on the one hand, the global corporations which control BOTH the production and distribution of recorded music offline AND the web applications used to distribute music online, and on the other hand, music's consumers and producers (with PRS - a not-for-profit organisation that collects licensing revenue from businesses and distributes it amongst songwriters, without the intervention of any kind of record label, and with a membership of which over 90% earns, in royalties, less than £5,000 a year - very clearly on the side of the producers and consumers).

The notion that the World Wide Web (or perhaps 'Web 2.0') offers the chance of unmediated, direct access between producers and consumers is, similarly, a myth that requires exploding. All web applications like MySpace, YouTube, etc. do is exchange one form of corporate mediation - that offered by a record company - for another - that offered by a telecommunications/software company. Yes, it is possible for a band to buy their own domain name, webhosting, and all the rest of it, set up their own website and distribute their music directly online - but scarcely more so than thirty years ago, when a band could, and frequently did, press their own records, print their own artwork, and take them direct to shops (like Rough Trade) and sell them at gigs. And the simple fact is that the network of websites and applications that have come to be brought under the umbrella term 'Web 2.0' does not increase the possibilities of this happening, but has, in fact, decreased them, as bands increasingly don't bother with their own websites, and audiences scarcely bother looking for them, when they get all they want for free on MySpace. If the idea of a 'bad' major record label is one which gives producers little control over their labour power and what happens to the products thereof, and pays them little or no reward for their work, then MySpace and YouTube and so forth should be seen as the 'bad' mediators par excellence.

There is, however, a third party in this debate, and that is the role played by the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, from Bit Torrent to Pirate Bay. Although the people who set up these networks will undoubtedly overlap with the previously defined group of music consumers, and music producers have a tendency, seeing the file-sharing networks as a thorn in the side of 'the music business' and thinking in terms of 'my enemy's enemy must be my friend', to regard them with a kind of affectionate leniency, peer-to-peer software, no matter how good the intentions of its designers may be, has had three almost immediate material consequences, none of which are unambiguously positive. First of, file-sharing has helped sustain the growing feeling that music, as though it were some sort of naturally occurring resource like water or oxygen, should be free to all (thus inviting the question of whether there is room in society for any 'professional musicians' at all, and, if so, where their income is supposed to come from); secondly, the existence of file-sharing has in fact increased the leverage and bargaining power that major record labes have over their acts, and the more the media talks of a crisis, the more the major labels can give musicians the impression that any kind of deal is something of a miracle at the moment and that they should therefore immediately accept the most restrictive and financially unrewarding contracts, with the sharp rise in the "360 deal" (where labels control a stake, not just in a band's record sales but also in their merchandise sales, publishing rights, live revenue, and so forth) just one of the more prevalent and immediate consequences of this; thirdly, file-sharing networks have contributed greatly to a massive change in listening habits, due to the free and immediate availability of practically all the music ever recorded. Though some may wish to celebrate this last point as a marvel of the modern age, it comes with something of a mummy's curse attached, for it would seem that the more music there is available for us to consume, the less we really listen.

As a child, I would save up my pocket money to buy an album on cassette perhaps every three or four weeks and then listen to that tape over and over again until I knew it inside out. This kind of dedicated listening is, by now, practically unheard of, not to mention the fact that, with the ever-decreasing sound quality of music formats (from vinyl to tape to CD to minidisc to mp3 to mobile phone...), whenever we listen to music today, we are literally listening to less of it, i.e. to a greatly reduced band of that music's frequencies. So, though I am not necessily advocating the criminalisation of file-sharing networks and the people who use them, I still have a problem with their typical self-presentation as global Robin Hoods, robbing from the rich 'music industry' for the good of all. And when Limewire, for instance, is owned by a man, Mark Gorton, who also owns a hedge fund and a stock brokerage, and Bit Torrent has corporate partnerships with such companies as Fox, Warner Brothers and Paramount, one should maybe pause for thought before assigning them any oppositional position, or liberatory potential, whatsoever.