Re-Mellencamp On The Music Business
Reading Mellencamp on the music business is like listening to Fred Silverman or another legendary network programmer lamenting the advent of cable, which decimated dominant television shows from the big three. Mellencamp wants us all to bury our heads in the sand and jet back to 1972, or at least 1982, when he became a superstar, and live in a world of darkness, where shady characters playing a Mafia-esque game had a tight grip on music production and distribution.
Hogwash.
To criticize SoundScan is to demonize statistics. It’s bad to know how many people pursue an activity, it’s bad to quantify behavior. No, the problem is what people do with this information! Which Mellencamp does detail, but his points about record companies and stock prices in the nineties? Didn’t most record companies go corporate in the sixties and seventies? Isn’t that when Elektra and Atlantic sold out? And weren’t MCA and RCA and PolyGram always part of the big bad corporate machine? As for laying off employees, that happened after Napster, not before the year 2000. The record companies were fat in the waning days of the last century.
You’ve only got to check statistics. Which Mellencamp has not seemed to have done here. Just because he rewrites history in his head, that does not make it true.
And blaming BDS for bad radio is like blaming baseball statistics for bad Yankee teams. The real crisis in radio can be traced to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed radio consolidation, and the homogenization of playlists.
We can argue about history, but what bugs me about Mellencamp’s diatribe the most is how he has a problem with the present.
Let’s look at the present.
The major label hegemony has been broken. No longer is the musical landscape dominated by fat cat gatekeepers who get to control what America hears. You can write and record your own music, and release it too. Will anybody buy it? Probably not if it’s bad, but you no longer have to get permission to play, and that’s great!
And you can get paid! Make a deal with TuneCore, and you won’t get any lying on your statements. I’ve never met a musician who’s audited a record label and found out he’s been overpaid. The label recoups recording costs not based on actual dollars spent, but your record royalty, and then screws you if a profit has been made. This is the system we’re trying to prop up? Which was originated by the original shysters, um, legends? We’ve entered an era of transparency, where data can tell you exactly what has transpired. Tell me an artist has never employed SoundScan to tell the label it was owed money. More information is good for the artists, not bad!
You can choose your own business model! You don’t have to be beholden to the major label game of selling physical product! If you want to give away your music online to drive concert attendance, great! Furthermore, at least you’ve got a chance of being heard, unlike in the days where you had to pay off the radio programmer to play your record. And you can sell your own merchandise, which you can order as needed, just in time, online.
The tools available to the musician are staggering. From the production to the exhibition of music. Yes, you can use eventful.com and tour where people want to see you, and you can make money.
But my major complaint is Mellencamp’s misguided concept that musicians have to do it all by their lonesome, that they’ve got to be "songwriter, recording artist, record company and the P.T. Barnum, so to speak, of his own career". Uh, John… Isn’t this the way it’s always been, when an act was starting out? The singer may have written the songs, but the drummer was making fliers and calling clubs and… Hell, bands have always done almost everything themselves until they’ve broken through. The same is true today. The only difference is, once you’ve gotten traction, you don’t have to play by the old man’s rules, you can invent your own!
If you’ve got any traction, a plethora of people will track you down and try to make deals with you. Labels still exist, agents are more powerful than ever and every successful act needs a manager. Doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a record deal or they’re playing your track on the radio, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a handler, who takes care of the business for you. Even nascent bands have managers, who sometimes stay with the acts beyond their breakthroughs.
The act has more power than ever before and this is a problem?
No, the problem for John seems to be that you can’t plug into a giant machine that will spit out a million dollar lifestyle. The problem is not record companies or radio, but America in the twenty first century. In today’s world, where people use Google to search for exactly what they want, where ads are targeted to their exact desires, do you truly expect everyone to listen to the same damn music?
I too lament the lack of melody on Top Forty radio, but to get pissed about that is like bitching about the quality of play at a minor league ballpark. It’s a backwater! Top Forty radio is not dominant because there are so many options! Why listen to radio with umpteen commercials when you’ve got an iPod, when you’ve got satellite radio and over 100 stations? If broadcasting were the future, network television ratings would be going up! But they’re tanking, to the point where many people believe the network model is dead, with shows being launched on cable outlets, to the point where Starz is now airing original programming!
You’ve got to pay for Starz, it’s not even basic cable, it’s a pay channel! But it makes economic sense for the outlet to make shows to satiate its subscribers. Just like a band you’ve never heard of can be profitable, playing to its audience. This is a bad thing?
Sure, it’s hard to know what’s good, hard to find the good stuff. But that’s only because a filtering system akin to MTV has not emerged online. But be sure, when it does, it won’t be limited to forty clips, it might be limited to forty genres! I had to listen to Louis Armstrong on WABC to get to the Beatles, sure I now know "Hello Dolly", but thank god I don’t ever have to listen to the music of Mariah Carey that Mellencamp derides, because I’ve got options!
The old systems have broken down. Because they don’t comport with the new reality. Are we at the final destination yet? Not even close. But to lament the loss of the past is to miss the point.
Sure, if you want to make a lot of money overnight, you can sell out to a major corporation. But even they don’t have that much money or reach anymore. And playing the Super Bowl didn’t make Bruce’s new album a hit. No, in today’s world, first and foremost you’re a musician, not a star. Can you make a living? Sure! But you might struggle mightily along the way and not end up flying in a private jet. Why should musicians be immune, when the financial industry is crumbling, when the veil has been lifted on the shenanigans of corporations?
Sure, the major labels made mistakes. But the artists played into their hands. By compromising, trying to make it. Now these compromises yield limited results. Now you’ve got to rely on the fundamentals. And that all comes down to the music. That’s a bad thing?
As for Mellencamp’s statement that "I’ve always found it amusing that a few people who have never made a record or written a song seem to know so much more about what an artist should be doing than the artist himself. If these pundits know so much, I’d suggest that make their own records and just leave us out of it.", I guess a football coach needs to have played on a Super Bowl team, or an auto titan needs to have won the Indianapolis 500. Isn’t this the exact thought process that got the major labels in trouble to begin with? That a nineteen year old college student couldn’t possibly come up with a better concept of music distribution than they could?
If you think you’ve got to be a musician or record producer to know anything about the music business, then I guess you never wanted to be managed by David Geffen or Irving Azoff, neither of whom has twirled a knob in the studio. And Cliff Burnstein, who’s steered Metallica to the top, is first and foremost a fan, not an artist.
Hey Mellencamp! You’re talented, you’ve written some great songs, but you’re not entitled to live your life and guide your career the same way you did twenty years ago. There’s no longer guaranteed employment at the corporation and you have to go through career changes, just like the rest of the American population. Why should you be different, just because you’re a musician?
Create a great track. If it’s truly good, it will reach its audience. But you won’t sell ten million albums, no one can! And you probably won’t play stadiums, maybe not even arenas. Because so many of those Mariah Carey fans hate your music, and don’t want to see you!
And that’s a good thing. As Devo sang, "freedom of choice".
The musicians now control their own destinies. The listeners have more music at their fingertips than ever before. It’s a brave new world. And it’s good. As your buddy Don Henley sang, get over it!
