The End of the Hit?
There’s an article in today’s EG by Michael Dwyer, titled “Bit-pop overload“, talking about the impact of internet marketing and distribution on the music industry. It’s an interesting article in that it avoids adherence to either of the two clichéd mainstream-media takes on the state of the music industry. Most articles that you read on this subject are either wholeheartedly positivist (i.e. the internet has enabled a new generation of artists to bypass the old bottleneck of profit-driven record companies and showcase their music directly to an audience of millions over the web, breaking the old monopolies and making a wider variety of authentically-produced independent music available on demand for a much cheaper price than we’re used to) or negativist (the internet is just a piracy free-for all, an arena for so-called music fans to exploit the system that has filled their CD collections with quality music, demanding product for nothing and in doing so destroying the economy by which it is created). Michael, by contrast, has grasped the fact that the internet can represent a new economy of music in its own right - he refers to the centrality of avenues like MySpace and iTunes for the marketing of online music, as distinct from the more anarchic mechanisms that the positivists might envisage. He also spots the fact that the internet is just as friendly (if not moreso) to cynical spin and dodgy promotion - the example of Sandi Thom shows that music which is marketed on its web-indie credentials (like the song which has unfortunately been welded to my neural jukebox for the last couple of days, I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker* by Sandi Thom, who notionally claimed her fame in a webcast from her basement, but whose “70,000-strong word-of-mouse cyber-audience” was in fact “stacked by a massive corporate spam campaign”) can prove, on closer inspection, to be driven by major-label marketing budgets. It would be nice to think that creative strength could combine with the massive social network of the internet to produce musical success sans cynical marketing techniques, but it seems even where hits are supposedly sourced from the internet, the old hit-makers are often still behind the scenes pulling the strings.
More interestingly, Michael then delves into the nature of the hit song itself, and how MySpace and iTunes might be starting to challenge that idea.
The trend is clear. More artists are selling less records. In the fastest-growing music store on earth, iTunes, it may appear that more artists are selling more downloads. But even there, the preferred music-biz model of a manageable handful of blockbuster artists shaping the sales graph is going rapidly pear-shaped.
In his book The Long Tail, American market analyst Chris Anderson comes to grips with a modern retail environment of unlimited stock, an online digital realm unhampered by physical shelf space.
Here everyone sells a few tracks - dead guys, live ones, old ones, new ones, the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, hell, even Soul Asylum - regardless of what the global entertainment factory is shoving at you.
We’ve been stuck, Anderson writes, “in a hit-driven mindset. We think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits derserve to exist.”
But companies such as iTunes don’t have production costs, Anderson points out, and they’ve “discovered that the ‘misses’ usually make money too. And, because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.”
This differs from the positivist view that I outlined earlier, because it is a model that still includes the middle man (in the form of iTunes, but you could also include MySpace and whatever other conduits are waiting in the wings, Google surely being one of them). Also, the very idea of producing a hit in your basement is an idea that doesn’t belong in a world where the “hit”, as such, is a thing of the past. The pie might be getting bigger and more diverse, on this view, but the slices are also getting smaller. On the one hand, the old monopolies are being broken down, letting more music get in on the action. On the other hand, new monopolies have taken their place, but the new monopolies have a fundamentally different character. The old record companies used to filter out all the wannabes, pick winners and back those winners with funding to produce and distribute hit records. The new players act more as aggregators rather than filters, welcoming everyone into the fold, taking only a small share of each sale, but offering very little in return.
It was always one of my hopes for the internet that media content would become more diverse as individuals gained a greater capacity to pick and choose instead of being forced to suckle on one of a limited number of big-media teats. A corollary of that, and one that I haven’t thought through very thoroughly, is that music is going to be repositioned in our culture. The few major content outlets did more than just get music into people’s houses and cars and workplaces - they also outlined a common cultural agenda around which our societies gathered. A world in which Hey Jude is just another selection on the iPod playlists of those who happen to like it is a world in which such a song cannot become a common unit of cultural currency. Mass media, for better or worse, is a significant part of the way that we relate to each other.
It might be naive to imagine that we’re in the last days of the hit song. Dwyer and Anderson might be right, though - we could be looking at a future where a hit song becomes something like another funny YouTube video, something that emerges from the tag clouds for a week or so to be replaced by the next amusement without having time to work its way into any common cultural memory. Artists might snag a few fans along the way who will download their wallpapers and ringtones and fill MySpace forums with OMGs, but the fans will be geographically diverse and their pencil cases will be unlikely to carry the same carefully-crafted band logos as the rest of their classmates at school (which begs the question: will anyone bother? When I inscribed the Kiss logo on my pencil case in primary school, it wasn’t because I actually liked the band - it just seemed like the thing to do.).
I instinctively like the idea of mass media being broken down into pockets of genuine enthusiasts, and I’m optimistic about the sort of cultural landscape that might result from that, but I have to admit that I have no idea what it will actually look like, and it’s possible that I might find myself nostalgic for the bad old days. As well as changes to music, of course, there will be changes to television and newspapers and movies and magazines and every other kind of media. I think music is providing a test case, because it is particularly download-friendly (as compared with movies and television), and it has a good range of technologies to make digitally-distributed content usable at the consumer end (unlike the print media at this point). Is there going to be an iTunes-like model for purchasing journalism? TV sitcoms are almost there, and I suppose that news and current affairs can’t be far behind. Each type of media will have its own economics that will dictate what kind of online model (if any) can supplant the mass media equivalent. I think it’s going to be an interesting twenty years.
*I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair is the first line. I can’t help wondering whether flowers in the hair were really standard dress for punk rockers. Admittedly, it might have been tough to squeeze “with a dynabolt through my uvula” into her iambic heptameter.
2 Comments
- Francis Xavier Holden replied:
I miss the exciting discovery after a search for good or new music through reading overseas magazines, contact with people and ruffling through music bins and I think we are a bit poorer for that. However thats really nostalgia. After all I leaped to the net and mailing lists years ago to extend my music mind before compression was widespread and swapping tapes via hard mail was the go.
But the main thing I think we have lost with the segmentation and “individualisation” of music is that “common unit of cultural currency” you refer to. A song that seeps into the national conciousness so much that grannies and two year olds recognise it. One that the unhip, the wannabe hip, the almost hip, the hip and the post hip all know. They may not love it, but it enables reproduction, irony, referencing and even rejection.
Somebody has to do a version of “A Few of My Favourite Things” and importantly there has to be some kind of mass “hit” before Coltrane can do his magic, so that nowdays anyone who throws out the tune in the middle of something else can be recognised for their taste and sense of history. Or something like that.
Countdown was an important program for the reason it (within constrained parameters I know) presented a large cross section of “pop” to multi generational audiences.
I don’t know what the last “hit” was in Australia that would be recognised from Birdsville to Brunswick by drunks, rock snobs and aunties. Khe Sahn? Teen Spirit? Throw Your Arms Around Me? Acidently Kelly St? Four Seasons in One Day?
August 7th, 2006 at 2:04 pm. Permalink.
- Dan replied:
so that nowdays anyone who throws out the tune in the middle of something else can be recognised for their taste and sense of history.
(Or for being a smartarse … but let’s leave jazz politics out of this
That’s a good question about the last Australian universal pop hit. I suspect that it would be something used on a TV commercial or as a theme for a TV show … which means, though I shudder to make the suggsetion, that Lift by Shannon Noll might fit the bill, via The Biggest Loser.
August 7th, 2006 at 10:11 pm. Permalink.