I've recently finished Steve Knopper's exhaustive - and frankly rather exhausting Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. The book has a lot going for it: Knopper has researched his topic thoroughly and the book is straightforwardly written and not without humour. Furthermore, Knopper rather cleverly goes way further back in the recent history of the record industry than the 90s, tracing the the history of the industry's DNA-level Ludditism right back to the introduction of the CD.

(For me, it was actually the earlier chapters in the book which engaged the most. One way or another I lived through the CD boom on the inside. But I was an ultra-minor player and, in truth, oblivious to the scale of growth which CD ushered in. Yes, the 1985 through to 2000 were very obviously good times, but the degree to which the majors got rich from the boom is truly laid bare here - as is the US industry's nigh-on, very deliberate murder of the single as a retail format - a move which naturally encouraged consumers to fork out for an album featuring perhaps only one or two passable songs.)

In the end though, I got a little lost in - or bored by - the endless list of music biz names, label mergers, general excess, failed tech initiatives and on and on. There's a good Vanity Fair article article in here, but I don't think the book needed 250 pages to makes its points. 

Furthermore, the whole area is moving so fast that despite its 2009 publication date it's already out of date. The final chapter makes some pointers to how the industry might develop, looking in particular at subscription models, but even then dwells on "rental" models and tethered downloads. He barely touches on streaming, with Last.fm barely scraping a mention and Spotify untouched. Indeed, it's telling that he hints - albeit in a footnote - that Sandy Pearlman's  "paradise of infinite storage", with consumers carrying around millions of songs on hard disks the size of coins, is a viable vision of the future. Mmmmm. Clearly, this book was conceived before the word "cloud" was on every tech writer's lips. 

Oh, and there's a real sense at the end that while the record industry has collapsed the live music scene is blowing up. Now, that was true as of this book's writing, but currently the live music scene is looking distinctly wobbly; there are plenty of stories about, say, the U2 shows bombing, and on a personal note I was saddened to see the Beachdown festival in my home town of Brighton bite the bullet just two days before opening.

But like I say, things change fast, and it'd be unfair to hold Knopper to account for not spotting trends which had barely emerged while he was writing this.

None of which is really the point; this isn't a place to post book reviews. Instead I want to make one observation off the back of it. What comes over to me most clearly from this book - a notion which just grows and grows over time - is that there's simply going to be less money around in the whole music ecosystem. A lot less money. The accounts in Appetite make it clear just how freakish, how historically accidental and how huge the "good times" have been. 

Of course, one can indulge in schadenfreude and enjoy watching it all tumble, taking the line that all the money was being made by a few greedy moguls and superstars, Clive Davis on one one hand and Jay Z on the other. 

But I'm not so sure. The cash might not have got to everyone, but the sheer amount of it led to some kind of trickle down. I speak from experience here. Through the 90s I was working at Virgin UK, later EMI Virgin, releasing some pretty challenging material for a major, from Kevin Martin's and David Toop's genre-bending compilations to new work by, among others, Paul Schütze and Techno Animal. Sure, there are other ways to get such work out there now. 14 Tracks is the new specialist compilation (and, shit - they can do one a week!) and the networking opportunities - and therefore exposure - opened up by the web are vast. (Case in point: the YouTube "video" below: a punter has posted one of Paul's pieces from the Virgin-era album Apart up on to YT with a simple slide. Go figure why - but know that this is happening all the time... and will be the subject of another post.) But I'm convinced that for a while back there quite a lot of us benefitted from the fat, even if we didn't exactly grow rich off it.

And, while I'm at it, how exactly do you think Korn sound quite like they do on record? Or the Deftones or Mudvayne, for that matter? You think you can record Untouchables in your bedroom on Logic or Cubase?! Well, while you're at it go and re-make Chronicles of Riddick in iMovie.

So if I'm right, and there's simply going to be a lot less money in the system for musician and composers - and the business built around them - what's this going to mean for the practice of making music - and for making a living, any kind of living from it? Over the next few months, Justin and I are going to be exploring this theme here (and, indeed, through practice not just theory; witness J's the latest incarnation Eva Hipsey venture). We'll be thinking about the essential differences between hobbyism and amateurism, about what it means to make music - or any kind of art - not as one's primary source of income (and, therefore, with simply less time spent on it), about how certain kind of work might simply no longer be viable, about the death of the format (and, again, what that means for the art of music, not just its distribution) and about the rise of a fractured niche-based market...

There are reasons to be optimistic about the new music marketplace, but reasons to be concerned to, and as ever, we'll try to approach these themes without either wide-eyed Utopianism or death-grip stubborness. But let's be clear about one thing. The boom is over. We can't see it ever coming back.
Simon

As our work with Save the Children gathers pace, we're keeping an even keener eye on mobile around the world. We heard today from 3G Americas press release via the very fine GigaOM that the worldwide number of GSM connections around the world is  about to reach 4 billion, which seems pretty staggering.

Here's how that breaks down internationally:

We mention self-styled Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard often here; he's an adroit synthesizer of contemporary thinking about media, technology and business - especially when it comes to the music industry.


Here's the slide show for a presentation he gave recently to the AMBC conference in Sydney. As ever with de-contextualised slide-based presentations, you have to do a bit of mental leg-work, but his narrative is pretty clear, and his contention that getting attention trumps seeking control every time seems, to us, incontestible.

A big question - are we ready to govern ourselves? And can we be led to believe we are ready and able because of clever new software?

YourOwnDemocracy.org puts the case very clearly - do the citizens of the United States want to continue with a representative democracy with all the power brokered on their behalf or would they like a new direct form of democracy? Their suggestion is that tools could be easily built that would enable many more voices to be heard on a much wider range of issues. They also believe that this would prove so compelling that political participation would increase and at a much more nuanced and useful level.

This idea is something I have been discussing with Simon and John for a quite a while. We have argued about whether online polling on important issues would be worthwhile, whether the results could be trusted and whether it would allow for extreme or uncomfortable decisions about the way our country works.

The difficulties that seem to arise quickly from such ideas gather around the tension between two points - one, the need for humans to have direct and clear leadership, at its worse the kind that can subjugate enough humans that the pyramids could be built over several generations, or at best provide the social stability that can reduce extreme poverty over several generations. Or, two, the kind of democracy that allows as many voices as possible to guide policy decisions, that distributes power and makes citizens responsible for letting the state know what they think rather than who they favour to do their thinking for them - but that can lead to vagueness, inertia around decision making and potentially scary outcomes around contentious issues.

I'll let you work out whether YourOwnDemocracy.org looks like it can tackle this enormous conundrum. But I will say that I for one am extremely happy to be seeing the web take this idea on in a really mature way - I am going to be keeping my eyes open for a great UK version.
Justin

We haven't got time right now to analyse this thoughtfully-argued piece by the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot. We'll try to get round to that sometime, in maybe a larger context, but in the meantime it's well worth a listen. We may not agree with some of his boy band vs indie fulminating, but his essential "they only have themselves to blame"  schtick is pretty strong.