The electric guitar has been one stronghold of pre-digital technology which refuses to die.
Just as video killed the radio star, digital killed... Well, what did it kill, exactly?... Some elements of pre-digital music technology are clearly still alive and well, and I'm sure certain occupants of Silicon Valley would be quick to dispute that the music business is dead. But if you're a musician, you might see quite a different picture. A picture in which progressively, and due to a wide array of factors, digital technology has killed and zombified the music business.
I'm going to look at the progression of digital's negative impact, including some of the more obscure factors, which date back to the dawn of the digital age. But I'm starting in the present day, with the obvious...
PIRACY
It doesn’t take an expert to recognise that the Internet has not only massively increased the scale of music piracy, but also partially legitimised it. Huge online corporations have made a fortune appropriating and distributing music either for free or on the cheap. True, the big guns in the music biz have gone after their share of the profits, but they've had to badger for it, and smaller entities usually get a lot less compensation, or miss out altogether. Ultimately, the online world is going to take without asking. Those best equipped to fight back and assert their rights will do so, but an awful lot of artists get screwed over. Some don't even know how much of their content is being distributed without consent.
If they do discover instances of unauthorised distribution, then technically, copyright owners can act to stop it. But in doing so, smaller artists can become virtually invisible, and even if they're okay with that, there are areas of digital redistribution they may not be able to control. Peer to peer sharing can be policed, but it costs time and money, and that’s not something the average small artist would be able to entertain.
Even scouring YouTube or Facebook for every use of a piece of music would take specialist help. And sites like those are additionally protected by legal loopholes like OCILLA (or “Safe Harbour” / “DMCA 512”).
Because the material is being uploaded by third parties, hosting sites with reasonable takedown policies are not held legally responsible for the copyright theft. Therefore, there's no compensation - even if the stolen track gets two million Facebook or YouTube views before the copyright holder finds out. It’s almost like a parent encouraging the kids to shoplift on their behalf, but even if they’re caught, the only consequence is that they have to hand back the goods. Not what you'd call a great deterrent.
The debates will run and run as to how much all this affects music industry profits, but these debates tend to centre around major labels, who will always have the clout, lawyers and negotiators to establish some sort of revenue stream. The smaller fish are hit harder, and across the board, if something is available for free, it WILL equate to lost sales.
THE FREE CULTURE
Worse still, most commercial artists releasing material today must face the fact that the majority of their competitors are deliberately giving away similar music for free. That battle can be fought to an extent, but the collective of all of the above will inevitably hammer profit potential. Digital technology has taken an unthinkable amount of money out of the music business, and shipped it straight across to Silicon Valley.
The Yamaha DX7 Synthesizer arguably kick-started music's digital age, replacing complete bands on some 1980s sessions. But the DX7 was itself replaced by Native Instruments' FM7 computer software, which came on a CD, in a small box.
IN THE BEGINNING
But the consequences of digital technology for the music business did not begin with the rise of the MP3 and Napster. As early as the mid 1980s, digital synthesis abruptly killed off a huge amount of session work. The ability of modestly-priced, first generation digital synths like the Yamaha DX7 to adequately simulate a wide range of real musical instruments, meant that where previously a custom-ordered recording project would require a band, it now only needed one musician with a DX synth and a drum box. Almost instantly, this new recording protocol swept right across the spectrum of TV music, from commercials to theme tunes. Many session players faced an immediate and sharp decline in work.
ONTO THE CATWALK
This, however, was almost a smokescreen for an even bigger change that technology had been effecting. Look back at the bands and musical artists of the 1970s, and with the greatest respect to them all, they certainly didn’t universally look like models. It was possible, and even in some cases probable, that ugly musicians, and ugly singers would prosper.
Now fast forward to the mid 1980s. Do you see the same picture? Definitely not. Gone are the buck-teethed, bog-eyed real ale enthusiasts who look like they’ve been rounded up from a trainspotting convention. It’s wall to wall glamour. Why? Because digital technology increasingly allowed for corrective processing.
Corrective processing gave the industry a choice. They’d always known looks were a massive selling point, but equally, they’d always known they couldn’t sell awful records full of out-of-tune whining and mistakes. If the only person who could make that staggeringly saleable record was a bog-eyed trainspotter, then the bog-eyed trainspotter they would hire. But digital processing could transform sound in ways that analogue recording never could. It could make EVERYONE sound acceptable. That meant the record companies could select based on looks and other factors of popularity, and leave the task of making a saleable record to the producer.
I’m not saying the video age had nothing to do with this rapid evolution towards wall-to-wall glamour – it clearly did. But video age or not, it still couldn’t have happened without the sonic transformations facilitated by digital technology. Therefore, digital technology helped take work away from talented but visually less spactacular artists, and give it to models, who didn’t have anything like as much musical talent. Of course, there will always be attractive people who also have dazzling musical ability, but digital technology helped wipe out the less visually glamorous components, and, inevitably, robbed the wider world of some fantastic musical works in the process.
Incidentally, I believe that it’s not the public who have a problem with visually unspectacular musicians – it’s only the industry. Legendary ‘dinosaur’ bands continue to draw vast crowds at live events, and that’s certainly not down to their looks today, if it ever was. Ultimately, people still want good music, and they always will. I suspect that the average 21+ consumer does not see things the way the record moguls do.
Analogue instruments such as this old Korg CX3 organ had no technological crutches. If you couldn't play in real time, you couldn't use it.
DEPENDENCY
The next wave of damage wreaked by digital technology was a slower blight, which is still biting deeper today. This was the scourge of dependency. The more digital technology is able to do, the more dependent musicians become on digital technology.
In a recent radio interview, engineer and producer Tony Platt (who’s worked for some monster talents in his long and illustrious career) said that today, musicians are less inclined to know how to get a decent sound from their instruments. He was discussing drum miking protocols at the time, and he explained that classic miking techniques from the early days of rock could not generally be used today, because drummers don’t balance their kits, and therefore each drum has to be treated separately – balanced electronically, essentially.
This kind of thing is inevitable. People will be as lazy as technology and progress permit. Musicians expect studios, or computer packages, to do things for them. And you may say that’s fine if the result sounds good, but that’s not really the case. Relying on technology is relying on technologists, and technologists are not, typically, musical creatives. What happens is a type of long-term stagnation. Even at the top end of the industry, artists have built music around samples of older tracks. And let’s face facts: it’s not the contemporary artist’s contribution that sells the record – it’s the sample. They wouldn’t be using them if that were not true.
Samples, third-party beats, factory synth presets sequenced from a digital arpeggiator – it’s all evidence of the way musicians come to rely on the crutches technology provides.
And it stunts creativity. A record based heavily around samples is not a new song. It’s just not. I don’t care if it’s got some different words and it’s overlaid on a more modern beat. It’s not a new song. Take the samples out and what have you got? It varies, but if you’re just left with a few studio effects and someone basically reciting a poem, that’s not a viable musical product in its own right. Virtually no one is going to want that without the samples, and when everyone gets tired of hearing the same samples over and over again, what then? Someone has to create from scratch at some point. Who’s going to do it if no one can be independent from the technologists?
Analogue and digital technology.
SATURATION
One of the most interesting points about music piracy is the way it slowed after the initial surge between the late ‘nineties and the mid ‘noughties. People have attributed the slowing of piracy to different factors. Some say streaming sites (which at least have some semblance of a payment system) have dampened the demand for MP3 downloads. It’s certainly true that YouTube’s close integration into Google search leads vast numbers of surfers to a convenient and often (but not always) authorised stream, rather than a P2P site. Others say that the broadening of Web entertainment in general has reduced demand for standalone music per se. Are people too busy angling for attention on Facebook or Twitter to be downloading MP3s?
But another argument is that there’s now just such a flood of music freely available online, that people no longer value new music as they once did. This is the saturation theory, and it certainly chimes with the article I posted yesterday, about Soundcloud spam. There are literally millions of artists desperate to push their music at anyone who’ll listen. Some will even pay to be heard. In some ways it’s like the blogosphere, where the audience has more value than the creatives.
Of course, those of us who can remember the days before the digital age began, may well be suspicious that the majority of artists saturating the current scene simply would not be there were it not for digital technology. If everyone had to learn a musical instrument, find or form a band, pay for rehearsal time, pay for recording time, and then distribute on old-fashioned media, with all the additional cost that would entail, would this state of saturation exist?
I don’t think it would. Digital technology, and an age in which virtually anyone can sit in front of a computer creating listenable music from samples and easy-to-use creative tools, is popular music’s Biblical flood.
THE FINAL NOTE
I know there are still plenty of very talented artists producing amazing material, and I know some of them are still getting paid. But set the Internet back fifty years. Give the class of 1950 samplers, DAWs, Soundcloud and Twitter, and let a bunch of Web giants organise the reward system. Would the music of the late '50s, the '60s, the '70s and the early '80s still be the hotbed of musical craftsmanship and style innovation that it was? Or would its legacy mainly comprise looped samples of '40s cowboy music and Glenn Miller, with new lyrics blobbed on top?
