The Evil Empire strikes again

No, I'm not talking about Darth and his asthmatic team of henchmen wreaking havoc around the universe, I'm talking about the music industry, which has been fairly dumb about music on the internet. And why? .. pure and simple greed. It's not enough that we pay nearly £14 for a brand new CD from shops in the UK, it's worse when you hear that the artist's cut is less than one pound. So you know straightaway that the record company, purveyor of nothing but distribution, marketing, premises etc is making the real killing. Should a third party that is merely an enabler make the lion's share of the rewards, when they actually produce no music at all?

What's so fantastic about the recent Arctic Monkeys rise to fame is that from their creation, they built up a huge fanbase on the Internet. This meant that when they starting touring in earnest, even they were surprised that hordes of people actually turned up to their gigs. Furthermore, their first single went straight into number one, with no bespoke record label hyping and very little radio airplay. How cool is that? The record company's (naturally) clamoured to sign them, and radio stations had to play their records, in order to reflect the zeitgeist. But it was the music and its fanbase that ensured success, nothing that the Evil Empire did.

Because of the fundamental greed, the music industry sees the Internet as a potential dent in profits, and keeps attempting to introduce restrictive measures, particularly in the arena of music copyright. Their thinking is that people who download music are slashing their profits. So they've introduce Digital Rights Management, so that tracks contain license information that restrict the copying and distribution. In some cases, this means that the tracks cannot be loaded onto iPods or other MP3 players. This is stupid. Damien Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, put it nicely in his NY Times article "DRM Screws me, and my fans", when he says:

"As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software.

The truth is that the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. This is not just our megalomania, it's Marketing 101: the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to catch the ear of someone new. It doesn't do us much good if people buy our records and promptly shelve them; we need them to fall in love with our songs and listen to them over and over. A record that you can't transfer to your iPod is a record you're less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with and less likely to tell your friends about."

Arctic Monkeys proved that the appetite for sales was whetted by free exposure, by handing out free 16-track demo disks at some of their early gigs, and being available for free downloads. Within 3 months of their first single release, they have managed to fill Brixton Academy, holding 4000 people, three months ahead of the gig. The current Number 1 in the UK music charts is Nizlopi's JCB song, a cutesy folk song about a boy who rides on his dad's JCB at work. When interviewed on the radio this morning, the band's singer Luke explained that they had built up a following by touring relentlessly, and by getting Web presentation company Monkeyhub to put a line-draw video for the song on the internet. What prompted them to actually release the song as a single was when they realised the video had attracted over 1 million hits. And there they are, at Number 1. Bad for profits? Of course not. He did add however that they won't be number one next week. He knows, and we all resignedly know, that the might of the Evil Empire will swamp the market with the manufactured pop of this years X-Factor winner, or Westlife, who are so successfully marketed, that this will be their 4th Christmas number 1. They will ensure massive radio play, massive marketing and massive sales, leaving us all massively dispirited with the state of our music industry, just to achieve a Christmas Number 1.

I say industry, not the actual music itself - the internet has meant that up-and-coming music is as healthy as it's ever been. CD sales actually increased to a record high last year despite the Empire's draconian measures. Fingers crossed they don't succeed.