Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Prince’s ambivalent, contradictory attitude towards the industry, his fans, and the life-altering impact of the Internet is a microcosm of a prolonged and possibly terminal crisis within the music business. The same word – ‘digital’ – which heralded an era of ballooning profitability for record companies and artists alike now spells doom for the business model which prospered for a century. The process of transferring recorded sound on to a physical artefact, and then selling it to the public en masse, is effectively dead. Prince’s dream and worst nightmare have both come true: for much of the population, much of the time, music is now a free commodity, available to anyone at the click of a mouse, a tablet or a mobile phone. As John Alderman, one of the first analysts to study the digital revolution, noted in 2001: ‘Digital distribution means16 that music is no longer tied to an object such as a record, tape or CD, but [has] become, as it is being shared and consumed, something more ethereal. Depending on how you look at it, in the online world, music has been either stripped or liberated from its body; only its soul remains, its digital code.’

  In his quasi-apocalyptic 1983 song ‘Licence to Kill’, Bob Dylan identified mankind’s first step towards doom as being the moment that we dared to touch the surface of the moon. For the record industry, that step was the marketing of the CD. The music business had long preached against the evils of copying music illegally, but the process of transferring a vinyl or cassette recording on to tape entailed a noticeable loss of sound quality, ensuring that there would be no substitute for buying the original artefact. The digital make-up of CD sound ensured that it could be copied endlessly on to other digital media (recordable CDs, or CDRs; or digital tapes, DCCs or DATs) without any loss of sonic clarity or volume. The hundredth-generation copy should sound identical to the original source. Shortly before the introduction of the CD, the industry had launched a publicity campaign designed to tug at its consumers’ consciences, with the message: ‘Home taping is killing music’. Researchers discovered that the majority of home taping was actually done for the purchaser’s own use – transferring a vinyl record to cassette so they could play it on a car stereo, for example. There was criticism of a crusade which treated customers like potential criminals.

  CD exacerbated the problem, especially when home computers were fitted with CD drives, enabling the user to copy the contents of digital files. When CD sales were booming, as they did throughout most of the 1990s, the industry could overlook the potential consequences of unauthorised duplication. What few seem to have anticipated, despite years of warnings from in-house analysts, is that the introduction of the super-fast broadband connection to the World Wide Web would torpedo their business, the explosion occurring out of vision with a devastating after-shock.

  Well into the 1990s, the Internet was regarded by most consumers as a haven for computer ‘nerds’. Initial experiences with the dial-up connections which were standard until the beginning of this century did little to alter this opinion. When a song from Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes was leaked on to the Internet before the album’s release in 1993, there was annoyance but little alarm: few fans, it was believed, would be prepared to wait twenty or thirty minutes to download it on to their computers. That same year, Depeche Mode demonstrated their affiliation to modern technology by holding an interactive question-and-answer session with fans around the world. They imagined that as many as 50,000 people would be able to view and perhaps participate in the web-chat. Instead, the band’s Internet server was out of action for more than an hour, and when the connection was established, fewer than 300 people managed to log in.

  Depeche Mode were not alone in recognising the looming shape of the future, however. David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead were early adopters of social media as members of Stewart Brand’s online community, WELL. Bono envisaged a time when the band would place its multitrack recordings on game consoles, enabling fans to remix their music or create their own U2 videos. Todd Rundgren went a stage further, reinventing himself as TR-i. He issued a CD symbolically titled No World Order, with the intention that consumers should be able to reshape all the constituent parts of his songs into music of their own design. He even incorporated this principle of total democracy into his solo live shows of the early 1990s, inviting his audiences to augment his music as he performed.

  Meanwhile, the industry proceeded as if the past was the perfect template for the future. Having profitably introduced the CD, it made numerous attempts between 1985 and 1995 to supersede it with a new vehicle for recorded music, which would require consumers to upgrade their equipment. After the CDV (compact disc video) failed to take off, a battle was staged between the DCC (digital compact cassette) and the MiniDisc, on the assumption that – as with the video duel between VHS and Beta – one or the other would emerge on top. Instead, the public showed no appetite for either format. Nor was there any demand for CD+, which offered additional content if it was inserted into a computer. In the years immediately before the boom in Internet access, the CD-ROM became a popular method of transporting a mass of audio-visual and textual material – encyclopaedias, for example, or multimedia ventures such as the Bob Dylan release Highway 61 Interactive (1995), which was part entertainment, part archive repository. But hopes that CD-ROM might become the standard carrier for music albums were quickly dashed. The only innovation which survived was the DVD, successor to the short-lived VCD (video compact disc) – itself the first attempt at a viable digital medium for films and television recordings. The DVD soon ousted the VHS tape with a speed reminiscent of the force with which vinyl had been vanquished by the CD.

  The avid consumer’s home might now be filled with stacks of outmoded methods of bringing music (with or without visual accompaniment) into the home. Far from offering an array of competing formats, the industry of the 1990s had only one product to offer, the CD – reminding old-timers of the period between the 1920s and the late 1940s, when the 78 rpm disc was effectively the sole medium for recorded sound.

  In 1995, at the height of the music industry’s doomed campaign to introduce new formats, a revolution was enacted, and power changed hands – without the rulers even noticing what had happened. That year, the Integrated Circuits arm of the German collective known as the Fraunhofer Society launched WinPlay3, an audio player which allowed computer users to play MP3s. These files compressed digital recordings so that they would occupy the minimum of space on a hard drive or floppy disc, and made it possible for music to be swapped, stolen or even sold without the necessity for a physical object to hold the sound. It was now that the flaw in the otherwise perfect design of the audio CD was revealed: it was being sold without any form of copy protection. Overnight, the MP3 shredded the century-old safeguards of copyright in musical recordings, forcing artists and/or record companies to pursue individual miscreants who had made music available online for others to download.

  The launch of Napster in June 1999 increased the stakes a thousandfold. This was a peer-to-peer (P2P) operation which enabled its users to share their MP3 files with other customers. Napster’s creative team claimed that they were not breaking copyright legislation, as they were not physically hosting music on their site. But that did not prevent the RIAA, the collective voice of the American record industry, from filing suit against Napster that year, or the metal band Metallica from obtaining the names of 335,000 people who had illegally (in their view) obtained their music via Napster. Metallica launched lawsuits against US colleges whose servers were hosting P2P, and threatened to extend their reach to the individuals on their list of miscreants.

  Aware that something was happening that was both urgent and incomprehensible, other artists reacted in glorious confusion to the MP3 threat. Oasis, like Prince, confronted fan websites which offered even the briefest of free downloads. Meanwhile, their label, Creation Records, declared that they would make all their new singles available for free download via their website – until their parent company Sony instructed them otherwise. Tom Petty defied
his record label, Warner Brothers, by posting his 1999 single ‘Free Girl Now’ as a free download for just two days, during which time 157,000 fans accepted his offer. The single did not reach the Billboard Hot 100, confirming the industry’s worst fear: MP3s could eradicate record sales. Sony Music and the hip-hop label No Limit responded by selling downloads over the Internet. Meanwhile, the rappers Public Enemy removed the record label from the commercial relationship between artist and fan, by selling their new album, There’s a Poison Going On, as a set of downloads from their own website. Here, it seemed, was the new shape of the industry. But the most radical transformation in the lives of artists, consumers and corporations was yet to come.

  With iTunes, it’s not stealing17 anymore. It’s good karma.

  Steve Jobs, 2003

  Not having a tangible item18 you can touch, just having it virtually – it’s not the same as owning it, touching it, putting it on the turntable.

  Neil Sedaka, 2012

  It’s possible the past 10 years19 could become the first decade of pop music to be remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual music itself.

  Eric Harvey, Pitchfork, 2009

  The sign above the high-street store in my home town reads: ‘Entertainment Exchange’. Inside, there are aisles and shelves stuffed with artefacts: DVDs, Blu-rays, games in formats that few over the age of 40 would recognise. Teenagers and young adults flick through the racks with a focused passion that I recognise from my own misspent youth in the numerous branches of the Record & Tape Exchange in West London. But one thing is missing from this updated picture: there is no music on sale in the twenty-first-century Exchange. As far as high-street retail is concerned, Music is no longer Entertainment.

  Frisk their pockets, however, and those customers would almost certainly have been carrying smartphones, on which an iTunes app would give them instant access to their private stash of downloads; or a Spotify subscription might allow them to trawl through multiple millions of musical tracks dating back to the invention of recorded sound. Everything musical in the world is at their fingertips, but none of it is on their shelves. Is music central to their worlds, as it was to mine? It’s certainly inescapable, piped through every café and restaurant, shopping centre and superstore; accompanying every movie and television programme; soundtracking adverts and trailers; dominating the immeasurable catalogue of YouTube videos; or trimmed to a few seconds of ringtone, a personal ID in a global web of messaging and banter.

  This is the state of the music industry left by Steve Jobs, the remorseless entrepreneur who named his Apple empire after the Beatles’ record company, and – after multiple legal battles – ended up owning trademarks that the Beatles had assumed were theirs. His death in October 2011 was greeted with the kind of tributes that might once have been directed at a rock star cut down in his prime. He was far from being the sole catalyst for the earthquake which has struck the entertainment landscape over the past fifteen years, but his company’s impact on music was so far-reaching, and profound, that it is Jobs and his colleagues who have occupied the central place in our culture once taken by a Sinatra or a Presley, a Madonna or a Cobain.

  At some point in the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries – estimates vary – technology became sexier than the music it was invented to carry. The academic Michael Bull explained to author Leander Kahney: ‘With vinyl, the aesthetic20 was in the cover of the record. You had the sleeve, the artwork, the liner notes. With the rise of digital, the aesthetic has left the object – the record sleeve – and now the aesthetic is in the artefact: the iPod, not the music.’ That was in 2005; iPod sales began to decline in 2009, with the iPhone and its rivals picking up the slack; and by 2014 the iPod was declared extinct, eclipsed entirely by the smartphone revolution.

  The link between the iPod, the iPhone and the iTunes music store – a searchable database of inestimably vast size, providing legal downloads within a couple of clicks – is Apple. The Beatles’ company of that name was intended to reinvent consumer capitalism with a hippie slant. Steve Jobs’s company not only succeeded where the Beatles failed (allowing for the fact that yesterday’s hippies are now sometimes oligarchs), but permanently altered our outer and inner space.

  iTunes was launched as a music library in 2001 with a slogan so suggestive of rock ’n’ roll rhetoric that it could have been coined by Malcolm McLaren: ‘Rip. Mix. Burn.’ Its companion was the iPod: a tiny digital music player which became the iconic star of its era, its trademark white headphones visible on every street in the West. But the pair only flowered when Steve Jobs overcame the inertia and paranoia of the major record companies, and began to sell individual tracks via the iTunes Music Store. A million songs were sold within six days of the launch in April 2003; within three years, that figure had risen to 1 billion. During that period, iTunes not only saw off the music industry’s own download stores, Pressplay and MusicNet, but also sent history roaring simultaneously forwards and into reverse. Each advancement in iPod and iTunes technology jerked the CD closer to its demise as the premier source of recorded source. That was the future: the past was evoked by Jobs’s insistence that the iTunes store should be allowed to sell individual tracks, rather than complete albums. At a stroke, the purity of popular music’s dominant art form for the previous three decades was destroyed. Many artists refused to allow their work to be decimated in this way, but as the industry tilted ever more violently in Apple’s direction, each of them was forced to give way.

  Apple’s technological genius severed the link between music and artefact; it made music effortlessly transportable; and it encouraged every single user to create their own filtered world of sound. As iPod users strolled through city streets, apparently part of a community, their moods, actions and demeanours were being altered – some might say scripted – by their playlist, or the random ‘shuffle’ programme which transformed each device into a personalised radio station.

  Other entrepreneurs offered an alternative to Apple’s near totalitarian dominance of the digital music market. But when all you were buying was access to a digital file, why buy? The days when a vast LP or CD collection was a source of prestige (imaginary or otherwise) were past. Rapid advances in broadband Internet access, via mobile devices as well as static computers, ensured that purchasing (or indeed stealing) music files was no longer necessary. Indeed, both Radiohead (In Rainbows, 2007) and Nine Inch Nails (The Slip, 2008) enabled fans to download new albums without paying – although Radiohead did encourage them to contribute whatever they thought the music was worth. U2 gave their 2014 album Songs of Innocence to every user of iTunes for free, a novel form of corporate sponsorship for the band. (The scheme backfired when iTunes users around the world demanded that the company give them software to delete this unwanted intrusion upon their personal soundtrack.)

  Even free files were soon insufficient enticement to persuade consumers that music was still something that needed to be owned. The boom in music-streaming services has enabled anyone who has downloaded the appropriate software the chance to hear any piece of music they desire, from a choice measured in the tens of millions. The most prominent source of streaming is Spotify, accessible from computer, phone or tablet: subscribers can choose between a free service, with limitations to the amount of music you can hear, and random advertisements inserted between songs; or, for less than £10 per month, universal access, without the interruption of advertising. Dozens of competitors have been attempting to chip away at their dominance, some with a global span, others focused on specific geographical areas, such as Anghami and Ournia, both aimed at the Arab world.

  Our choices in the post-artefact age don’t end there. For many years, MySpace was not only the social media destination of choice for Western teenagers, but also a showcase for perhaps millions of musical performers, amateur and professional. As its users gravitated towards Facebook, music remained MySpace’s primary focus: in 2014 it claimed the world’s biggest digital music
library, with 53 million songs and videos on offer. Or, of course, there is YouTube, a sprawling repository of video clips covering every imaginable subject and form, from the promo clips which would once have dominated the MTV playlist, to feature films and TV programmes (legally downloaded and otherwise). YouTube is also signalling another death knell to our understanding of how the entertainment industry functions. Much of its content is devoted to video clips made by individual users, the most successful of whom attract literally millions of viewers around the world, and are treated like superstars at YouTube showcases such as VidCon and Summer In The City. To the bafflement of music-industry pundits, today’s teens and young adults have created icons out of (mostly) young men with acoustic guitars, offering pleasantly gentle covers of familiar hits, new and old: the opposite of the outrage we associate with rock, hip hop and the rest, but with a far more devastating result on the record business. Stardom is intact; but today’s young consumers prefer to select their own stars, rather than meekly accepting those churned out by lumbering corporate giants.

  This is how far we have come: from the days when families would give up a week’s income to own a Red Seal 78 by Caruso, to open access to the entire history of recorded sound. For those of us who grew up owning a handful of records, replaying them endlessly until we had saved up enough pocket money to purchase another, today’s children and teenagers seem like kids let loose in Hamleys’ toy warehouse, with the freedom of taking everything home at the end of the day. But with this freedom has come a loss of perspective that can be both chilling and exhilarating. Beyond the handful of (usually) dance tunes in constant rotation on radio and in clubs, there are no signposts through the musical library of Babel. Everything exists outside history; nothing is connected; everything is equally valid (or not). The tastemakers of old, the critics and disc jockeys, have been rendered totally obsolete. But they cling on, catering to the diminishing proportion of music listeners who care about the validity of their choices. Most are happy to make their own way through the cluttered wilderness – restricted only by the fact that their choices are likely to be signalled, via one social-media connection or another, to the whole of their virtual milieu, for admiration or amusement.