the Who guitarist Pete Townsend who called internet music sales companies digital vampires and suggested they should reinvest some of their profits in the music industry.
Everytime you open a newspaper these days, switch on the radio or read a specialist music magazine, someone, somewhere is bemoaning the state of the record industry.
Last week it was the turn of veteran Who guitarist and songwriter Pete Townsend who used his platform as the first person to deliver the John Peel Lecture to have a go at the Apple and iTunes which he dubbed a digital vampire – sucking the creative life-blood out of the music industry by promoting cynically prefabricated marketing phenomena rather than genuine musical talents.
As you would expect, it was a stance which made a lot of people sit up and take notice. the blogs and music forums on the web were full of contrasting reactions. There were the iTunes supporters and the old time rock’n’rollers who undoubtedly agreed with Townsend, drawing up battle lines.
Personally I think that Pete Townsend is to be congratulated for at least getting people excited about music again. Despite the success of X Factor, popular music seems to have taken on a less important role in our lives. For many people it has become nothing more than aural wallpaper. It’s on in the background, one tune blends into another and some DJs now don’t even bother to back announce records.
There have been rare occasions when I have heard something in the car and I have waited, having reached my destination, just to catch the name of the artist and the DJ hasn’t bothered to say who it is. If you can’t manage basic information then what are you there for?
There is the argument that the internet has democratised music, that you no longer need a record company to market your music. that would be true. Singers and bands can record their own material and make digital downloads available for all but the trick is marketing. how can you attract an audience to your musical sapling in an overgrown forest of noise?
Very few people buy music without hearing it, which is why radio play was and continues to be so important. but, radio play has become increasingly polarised over the last 15 years.
Stations have either become resolutely mainstream or they have become so niche they have effectively ghetto-ised themselves.
It has become harder to drive along listening to the radio and go: “Oh that’s great, what’s that? Who’s that by? I want to hear some more stuff by them.”
For those of us who want to surprised and engaged by music, it’s not a new problem. It seems that some commercial radio stations exist with a selection of greatest hits albums and have a playlist of two tracks by each artist – one old and one reasonably new.
What I would love is to have a selection of stations where the DJs control the playlist and don’t have to play the hit single. I want to hear their choice of music. I want them to enthuse, I want them to open my ears to new bands and new music. We need someone to embody the spirit of the old pirate radio DJs – people passionate about the music they play.
OK, you’re not going to like everything you hear but if you get to know the DJs, then you are likely to gravitate towards the people who share a similar taste in music to yourself. this is what John Peel did. He was a conduit for new bands, new singers and songwriters. You wouldn’t always agree with his choices but you respected him.
What we need these days to compensate for X Factor’s bland, fame hungry, media darlings is a range of DJs pitching a wide variety of new acts and rediscovering interesting music by older ones too. Artists who love their music not the fame that it can bring. the station that comes closest to my ideal is BBC Radio 6Music. I don’t know if the DJs choose all the music but at least they enthuse and talk knowledgeably about the bands they play. Lauren Laverne, a musician herself, is particularly good. those of us of a certain generation took record collecting very seriously. We knew that record labels had a sense of identity – even large labels like Atlantic and Motown. then there were smaller more niche labels which served almost as badges of quality like the blues label Chess or the English indie label Stiff Records – home of such diverse acts as Elvis Costello, Madness, Dr Feelgood and the Damned. In more recent years Creation Records served a similar function.
You collected labels as you would collect the output of bands. the romantic in me also laments the fact that the age of the import has died. I used to love searching through record bins looking for that American import which had different tracks to the UK release or, holy of holies, the album which hadn’t been released here yet.
There was a sense of adventure in music then which is sadly absent now. Happily, virtually everything is available now, providing you know where to look for it. but older artists are merely preaching to the converted and new bands find it increasingly hard to create a profile in an industry which is content to lurch from one TV-promoted five minute wonder to another.
The music industry is falling apart because they have devalued what they are selling. they are selling image, they are selling sensation, they are selling the packaging which goes with a pop star but they are not selling talent or an individual’s musical vision.
Pete Townsend in his lecture asked for the internet giants to start investing in musical talent for the future. I know what he is after but I think he is asking the wrong people. Amazon, iTunes and Apple just sell the music.
Radio, particularly now it has gone digital, is really the way to get the message across. We now have the ability to promote a wide range of music and should be mixing the old with the new.
Radio should be doing what us oldies used to do with our mates. create thematic mix tapes of songs that we loved, that we thought that our friends would also love and help spread the word.
I have bought dozens of albums by artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered if it wasn’t for those carefully compiled compilations thoughtfully provided by my friends. Hopefully my return suggestions were similarly successful.
The other problem is that downloads have reduced the music industry down to a single-track culture. It is now very hard in a world of digital downloads to create an album which exists as a thematic whole.
The situation is not hopeless but we need to support real bands again – both locally and nationally.
We need to rediscover our enthusiasm for music. It should not be wallpaper while we do something else. It should command our attention.
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