Talking Recording Industry, Part Two.

So...the music business. The Recording Industry has existed for around a century, becoming a dominant force in the music business sometime around World War One. It's important to note that the culture industry, of which the recording industry is part, comes to prominence around this time, with the advancement of movies and records and radio. It was indeed revolutionary for consumers to be able to purchase copies of their favorite symphonies, etc. Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" gets to the heart of the matter:

...technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

In other words, the art becomes portable and private and can be repeatedly consumed at the purchaser's leisure. It's a tremendous advancement that also creates a need for a distribution network: from the point of production (the studio time) to the store shelf. With commercial success requiring the distribution network, the record labels by and large controlled the head of the distribution chain (without a record contract you could certainly book your own studio time, but who was going to distribute or promote your product?).

This model has collapsed. Anyone with a halfway decent computer program and/or an 8 track can create reasonable recorded music and distribute it themselves for almost no cost. Between youtube.com and myspace.com, for example, distribution is free and controlled entirely by the artist. The drawback, of course, is that you won't make any money off your downloads. However, that's the Recording Industry's fault across the board: the money will no longer be available for the recorded product.

I see a revival of local music scenes and regional sounds, but that does not mean the demise of megastars -- just the demise of the worst the pop world has to offer. Small labels will remain -- they're more labors of love than they are money-makers -- but the era of the big label is over.

Of course, I could be wrong. Capitalism has an amazing way of co-opting movements and technology to serve its needs (one need only examine the marketing techniques directed at the 1960's counterculture to see how revolution against the system quickly turned into revolution through consumption: being a revolutionary became and image not an activity).