Chapter Three: The Cost of it All

Friday, 13 June 2008

When it comes to communicating the music industry’s plight to the Australian public, the designated industry representative - usually someone from MIPI or ARIA - dispenses with direct, hostile language and instead takes on the role of the firm but fair educator.

This essentially consists of making the general public feel like they are hurting the very people they claim to love.

For validity and maximum emotional impact, their assertions are backed up by Actual Artists (naturally, signed to major labels) who are wheeled out to plead for mercy, to beg respite from the general public's program of wanton theft and wholesale destruction.

The trump card in the music industry's deck, and the argument most often put forward to explain why they must re-educate and/or prosecute people, is that downloading music directly harms artists because it reduces artists ability to live and therefore prevents them from creating new art.

Because now they’re starving. Because now records aren’t selling.

And how do the shocked public react? Oh! They feel the burning, hideous shame! They recoil from the terrible truths being revealed to them! Could it possibly be true? Could a musician’s entire living hinge on record sales alone? What's that? If they don’t sell records and they don’t get on radio and they don't chart, they get dropped from the record label and are left in the gutter to die? My God, what have we done to Art! Terminate my internet connection, right now! I confess!

Come on.

Artists have lived and created art for centuries, in all kinds of woeful conditions and without financial incentives and rewards. Some have managed to make a living. Some have not. Who cares? An artist’s purpose in life is to create art and at most, leave a little piece of themselves behind when they go.

Of course artists need money. They are like anyone else. They enjoy it. It makes things easier. But their primary responsibility and reason for being must be to continue creating art, no matter what. You don’t become an artist by choice. You do it out of a sheer inability to express yourself properly any other way. True artists will always keep their jobs, regardless of their economic or living conditions.

What the industry’s campaign of guilt is really about is the recorded music industry, particularly its executives and especially the ones at major record labels. The ones who might not keep their jobs unless they get 50% younger and 10% smarter right now.

The subtext of the guilt campaign is this: without record companies there will be no records, no more musicians and therefore no more songs or music, and any recorded music that does exist will be of inferior quality.

This is a dangerous precedent to set, because in and of itself, the concept harms artists emotionally. That sounds odd, I know. But it does.

It harms artists because it reduces them from being powerful and dangerous forces to be reckoned with to precious and delicate flowers, who must never know or accept the truth of their art (that it is a product) nor come to understand the commercial reality of their art (that this product is the property of the record company).

When you produce art (if you’re any good at it) you do it from the gut, the head, the heart and the soul. But once you present it to the public in recorded form, that’s the end of the matter. It simply becomes product. Many artists can’t handle this concept. And that’s when the benevolent record company steps in to look after them.

OK, so the major label argument has been laid down. No record companies … means no artists … means no music … means the imminent collapse of culture.

What utter bullshit.

Desire cost approximately $13,500 to record, mix and master. The entire process took 13 days. The record was made with a world class producer in a high quality studio. It will cost around $1500 to manufacture the album in a physical format and cost nothing to convert it to, and distribute it in, digital formats.

It will cost around $3000 to publicise and promote the album and that includes a video clip for the single. No, the video clip won’t get played on Video Hits, but that’s not my kind of party anyway. All of the money to do all of this was sourced and fronted personally.

My accounts are always open and I am telling you now: $18,000 is the reasonable cost of making and promoting an entire album. It doesn’t even need to cost that much. I just happen to like big old studio records. You could record the same songs for $18 and publish them on the internet and quite probably get away with it. The essence is in the songs and the performance.

So from a late night conversation in a bar, we come to Desire as a finished product. Singles available globally right now and the full album to be made public in three months time. End of story.

The core of the major label/music industry guilt trip is this:

Records are hideously expensive and difficult to make and even harder to promote and therefore only major record labels have the power to create and market them.

Their records are expensive to make and promote because more often than not, they are junk.

Their premise is a disgraceful lie.

A record costs what a record costs to make.

(For that last line, I would like to thank Dennis Potter, from whom I paraphrased. May he continue to Rest In Peace.)

Well, until the next time ... Stay Tuned.