The Proposition: Cull the Middlemen

The music industry is in desperate need of a cull.

We have arrived at a point where there are surely at least as many Wikipedia-educated pop svengalis for every aspiring schmuck with a chorus.

When did music become so convoluted? When did getting a tune from a musician to their audience become such a labyrinthine process?

With so many middle men taking a cut, prices are high and returns to the artists are horribly low. The maths don't lie. Consider the fact that, from the 99p charged per song on iTunes, often as little as 11p goes to the band, the rest dissipated through a mesh of middlemen. Thus, when the industry campaigns against piracy, supposedly selflessly defending the intellectual property of its artists, in reality they are really motivated out of self interest. Try reading it as “Hey! WE'LL do the ripping off, NOT YOU!”

For instance, an individual of modest musical renown looking to earn minimum wage (that's just one person, not a full band) would have to be streamed almost 5.5 MILLION times per month via Spotify. To make that same paltry wage through individual song sales on iTunes it would require up to 16,500 purchases in the same space of time. Meanwhile Apple takes those profits and invents an iPod the size of a fucking surfboard that only the Saudi Royal Family can afford.

Major record labels are as culpable as anyone for the current situation, both through action and inaction. Take their enduring army of lackeys and their unshakeable adherence to a bureaucratic mountain of checked boxes (video producers, publicists, image consultants) which, for example, saw Dandy Warhols half a million dollars in the hole before their first single even emerged, thanks to a thoroughly naff video created at the insistence of Capitol.

Steve Albini summed this up nicely in his interview for the film DIY or DIE, pointing out that publicists are the perfect example. It’s a common misconception that they generate money but they actually only generate publicity which, in many cases, never translates into actual money, at least not for the musician. He also observed that, if anything, the more a band is shoved under your nose the more you can grow to hate them, especially when their material doesn't live up to the huge amount of money invested in their publicity. Yet the majors stick with this system.

On the other hand, the big labels' baffling inability to source acts from amidst the abundance of talent on offer has driven numerous aspiring, pro-active young go-getters into the hands of internet shysters.

Case in point, MySpace's recent descent into farce can perhaps be traced, in part, to it buckling like the bridge at the end of Temple of Doom, under the weight of this ever-multiplying army of PR agencies. Whilst it still stood proudly atop Mt. Social Network, its clients' inboxes were flooded daily by the unfiltered gibberish of half-baked moguls. Promote your site. Get more friends. Help us help you. Get heard by more fat guys in suits. Maybe get your music into the spam folder of a dude who knows a dude who once suggested a song for an especially rapey episode of Hollyoaks.

If there's one thing the internet should have facilitated, it is musicians being able to eliminate these middlemen and sell directly to the public, whereas MySpace and its myriad green-eyed remoras were practically trying to run a minibus from the practice rooms to Polydor HQ. Fittingly, now it convulses, wide-eyed and gasping, on the bottom of the boat, waiting to be mercifully clubbed over the head and eventually devoured by Facebook. You brought us Lily Allen, MySpace, and that's what you bloody get.

Even at a local level, the number of spare parts drifting around the musical landscape is astonishing, as are the many ways in which they attempt to part musicians from their earnings. Take industry music papers. What are they actually for? Music Award ceremonies that require a payment to submit material for consideration, with no guarantee it will make final cut of nominees. In what other avenue of life would that be viable? Or sponsored seminars: lessons on professionally marketing your band which are little more than exercises in grooming – the equivalent of Pepsi-branded school stationery – PR and A&R wrapped into one. Actually maybe that could just be collated into one handy acronym: PARP... Like a big fart. A huge dirty marketing fart right into the eager young faces of our musical youth.

Ultimately it’s not a popular reality amidst the record “buying” public or the majors, but musicians also have bills to pay, families to raise and filthy habits to finance (perhaps more so than most others).  

So it is that, as our nation's universities and colleges prepare once more to expunge their annual murky load into the musical realm, those practicing musicians amongst you could be forgiven for wishing you'd spent all those lonely teenage nights learning how to speak Chinese rather than practicing guitar.