Is The Internet Killing Music?

posted: 25 October 2007 Damien Morris

Remember, it is always about the money. The fuss which greeted Radiohead's In Rainbows album was about the money, rather than the band's choice to avoid the traditional means of record companies and music shops.

A spectacular publicity coup was generated by the simple device of leaving purchasers to decide upon their financial investment in the music.

How much did you pay? What was the average price? Should all music be free? These are questions the recorded music industry does not want you to ask. Although capitalism and the free market should in theory encourage these questions, for 40 to 50 years, music has had a price tag, and it has been expensive - judging the value of artistic endeavour to be anywhere from five to 50 times the cost of marketing, distribution and manufacture.

Why did Radiohead make this move? Well, in the last six months, the reality - that even televised talent shows and energetic shilling for mobile phone companies will not prop up the collapsing recorded music industry - has bit. And, as a result, acts like Prince, Nine Inch Nails and the Charlatans have decided to give away the music that people are so wary of paying for. Out of contract acts such as Jamiroquai and Oasis are making noises about going the same way.

These people can afford to do so, because they have an enduring and proven ability to deliver their talent live on stage - in the performed music industry. And, at the moment, live music (and its attendant merchandise) sells at a premium. As the MD of Solo Music Agency put it last week 'I can sell a ticket for £150 for the Rolling Stones... and [the record labels] can't sell a CD for £10'. Of course, what our chortling chum failed to point out is that both are overpriced, but only one can be copied and downloaded for free. Experiences, until Second Life catches up with the first one, are unique and need no 'digital rights management'.

And yet, and yet, what happens when live music swans into one of its cyclical troughs? The price of concert tickets may have doubled in three years; can the market bear it doubling again? What will happen when the grandees of music have retired, or only tour once every five to ten years to ensure the experience is one worth savouring (and charging £200 for) like Ms Barbra Streisand?

Then the venues begin to shut, then the support slots begin to contract, then the ladder gets pulled up by those who have already made it. The new faces upon which any industry is dependent are discouraged by the expense and lack of reward - these are the people who were the secondary beneficiaries of the money waterfalls of the old days.

Yes, it may be true that the recorded music industry, fat on its five-handed monopoly, grew too fast and got too greedy, and as a result must submit to this extended period of necessary correction. However, new acts will now be forced to depend on the vagaries of internet-inspired publicity and do-it-yourself distribution - or hope for a kind word from a Cowell drone on a nodding dog show. They will not need to pretend that they would prefer to record the electronic Sgt Pepper rather than acquire a fleet of Hummers, because the choice will not be theirs.

The accessibility of music has never been greater, yet its diversity has never been under more savage threat. What the web gives with one hand, it takes away with the other - we must trust that the balance will be kind.