Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music - Hardcover

Kot, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416547274 ISBN 13: 9781416547273

Publisher: Scribner, 2009

Synopsis

A decade ago the vast majority of mainstream music was funneled through a handful of media conglomerates. Now, more people are listening to more music from a greater variety of sources than at any time in history. And big corporations such as Viacom, Clear Channel, and Sony are no longer the sole gatekeepers and distributors, their monopoly busted by a revolution -- an uprising led by bands and fans networking on the Internet. Ripped tells the story of how the laptop generation created a new grassroots music industry, with the fans and bands rather than the corporations in charge. In this new world, bands aren't just musicmakers but self-contained multimedia businesses; and fans aren't just consumers but distributors and even collaborators.

As the Web popularized bands and albums that previously would have been relegated to obscurity, innovative artists -- from Prince to Death Cab for Cutie -- started coming up with, and stumbling into, alternative ways of getting their music out to fans. Live music took on an even more significant role. TV shows and commercials emerged as great places to hear new tunes. Sample-based composition and mash-ups leapfrogged ahead of the industry's, and the law's, ability to keep up with them. Then, in 2007, Radiohead released an album exclusively on the Internet and allowed customers to name their own price, including $0.00. Radiohead's "it's up to you" marketing coup seized on a concept the old music industry had forgotten: the customer is always right.

National radio host and critically acclaimed music journalist Greg Kot masterfully chronicles this story of how we went from $17.99 to $0.00 in less than a decade. It's a fascinating tale of backward thinking, forward thinking, and the power of music.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Kot has been the music critic at the Chicago Tribune since 1990. He has established a national reputation not just for his comprehensive coverage of popular music -- from hip-hop to rock -- but for enterprising reporting on music-related social, political and business issues. His Tribune-hosted blog, Turn it Up, is considered a must-read for music buffs and industry insiders alike. With his Chicago Sun-Times counterpart Jim DeRogatis, Kot cohosts Sound Opinions, "the world's only rock 'n' roll talk show," nationally syndicated in over twenty markets and avialable worldwide on the web. Kot has been a regular contributor to Rolling Stone since 1992, and has written for Details, Blender, Entertainment Weekly, Men's Journal, Guitar World, Vibe and Request. Kot’s biography of Wilco, Learning How to Die, was published in June 2004. He lives on Chicago's Northwest Side with his wife, two daughters, and far too many records.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Chaos and Transformation

Peter Jenner is a man who knows his "freak-outs" -- sixties terminology for an intense, drug-induced emotional experience. He was Pink Floyd's first manager, after all, and he has remained one of the industry's most forward-looking thinkers for forty years. So when he spoke to a room full of music executives in the fall of 2006 at the Future of Music Policy Summit in Montreal, his assessment of their business resonated.

"We are in the midst of a technological freak-out," he said. "The business is broken.... Digital technology is fundamentally changing our business in a way that no development of the last two hundred years equals, except the onset of electricity."

Jenner described a worst-case scenario for people who had made a lucrative living as middlemen in the twentieth-century music business, the conduits between musicmakers and consumers. The Internet was making them obsolete.

"We're trying to force a nineteenth- and twentieth-century business model into twenty-first-century technology," he said. "I'm not surprised we're in chaos."

Peer-to-peer file sharing had turned consumers into distributors. CD burners had turned them into manufacturers. This shift in responsibilities left the industry with only one role: as "policeman...hostile to consumers...[and] stopping progress."

In a report prepared that same year, Beyond the Soundbytes, Jenner expanded on his disdain for this shortsighted response: "The flagrant spread of 'Internet piracy' in developed countries is a reflection of the failure of the industry as a whole to develop an appropriate copyright response to the distribution and remuneration options made possible by the new technologies."

He mocked the industry's response to the new challenges posed by Internet distribution and peer-to-peer file sharing: hand-wringing, followed by litigation, in which "the endless predictions of victory reminds one of the Vietnam War."

We were back in the sixties again, when Rock 'n' Roll Inc. was still in its infancy. Now four decades later, it was looking like a relic. "When five percent of the artists are making ninety-five percent of the money, the system is broken," Daniel Levitin, a McGill University music professor, proclaimed.

Through the breach rushed a new generation of bands and fans empowered by personal computers and broadband Internet connections. Willy-nilly they forged a new world of music distribution that seized control from once all-powerful music and radio conglomerates.

In less than a decade, a new Internet-savvy music hierarchy had been created. Commercial radio, MTV, retail stores, and record companies lost their exclusive tastemaker status, while consumers morphed into de facto music programmers who shared information and music via message boards, Web pages, e-zines, and MP3 blogs.

In the process, more people than ever were creating and consuming music. Without a physical product to sell, costs sunk for recording and distributing music. At the same time, opportunities to be heard increased. In this world, the fringe players could more easily find and build a dedicated audience, and a musical ecosystem encompassing thousands of microcultures began to emerge.

"We're moving into an era of massive niche markets rather than a mass market," Jenner said. This was bad news for people awaiting the next Beatles or the new U2 -- a band that could unite the masses in a whirlwind of hits and hype. For everybody else, this was an opportunity for more music to flourish in more places than ever.

In this broader, more diversified world, bands such as Montreal's Arcade Fire, Seattle's Death Cab for Cutie, and Omaha's Bright Eyes rose to prominence. They were viral success stories, selling out shows around the world before they were selling albums in the kind of numbers that would make the majors take notice of them.

It was enough to make Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla proselytize like a digital evangelist: "This is the golden age of the Internet. The laptop kids have clued in everybody else to what's going on: radio, television, the record industry -- they're all following the Internet's lead. Because those kids know their laptop can make their cultural existence more fulfilling than any media corporation."

Who knew a laptop could be so empowering? The music industry sure didn't. But the Internet turned fans into gatekeepers. It also gave bands an independence they never had: the ability to communicate directly with their fans in ways their predecessors never could have imagined.

Consider that when the nineties roared to a close with CDs generating millions in profit, the industry consisted of six multinational record labels, and a single corporation (SFX, soon to be bought out by Clear Channel) that dominated the concert and commercial radio businesses. The primary decisions about what kind of music most of America would hear and how consumers would access that music (through radio, retail, and touring) were essentially being made by a few dozen key executives at a handful of companies.

But that power structure, the by-product of a century's worth of empire building, started to crumble the instant the first music file was ripped onto a computer hard drive and shared online. Metallica and the major labels took the rogue file-swapping service Napster to court in 2000 and held back the Internet tide for a few months. But as independent producer Steve Albini said, "It's like trying to hold back the ocean, like trying to keep the sun from rising every morning. It's a whole new era, except the music industry doesn't know it yet." It would find out soon enough.

In the fall of 2000, Radiohead's Kid A was a Napster-fueled hit on the Internet long before it arrived in record stores. The esoteric album barely registered on commercial radio; but it was in heavy rotation on the Net months before its release. The result was a number one album, an extraordinary confluence of underground taste and mass popularity.

The industry responded not with vigorous new ideas, but with strong-arm tactics and threats. It served fans not with digital innovation but with lawsuits -- more than twenty thousand in a span of four years, in an attempt to intimidate consumers away from file sharing.

Seven years after Kid A, Radiohead released In Rainbows through its website, without the aid of a record label.

The cost to fans? "It's up to you," Radiohead told them.

In contrast to the major labels, the band embraced one of the fundamental principles of good business: the customer is always right. It was a moment of clarity, a moment in which the future finally overtook the past. The following pages contain the story of that transformation.Copyright © 2009 by Greg Kot

1

Consolidated to Death

In February 1999, Sheryl Crow found herself in the strange position of having won a Grammy Award for an album put out by a record label that no longer existed.

In the weeks before the Grammys, A&M -- the record label that had signed her, nurtured her career, and overseen her rise from Los Angeles studio singer to international rock star over the previous decade -- was gutted and folded into the Interscope label as part of the newly formed Universal Music Group. The demise of A&M was the result of a $10.4 billion purchase of the PolyGram music companies by Seagram.

As the rest of the industry celebrated itself at the Grammys, Crow saw trouble ahead. In her acceptance speech, the singer delivered something of a eulogy for her old label. She was the only artist at the nationally televised ceremony to publicly acknowledge the huge toll exacted by the wave of consolidation that had washed over her profession.

Up until a few months before, she had been working for one of the smaller major-label companies, headed by veteran music executive Al Cafaro; now Cafaro and A&M were gone and she found herself under contract to the world's largest record company, headed by Edgar Bronfman Jr. The immediate costs of the merger were easy to quantify: besides Cafaro, more than twenty-five hundred employees lost their jobs and 250 bands lost their deals with labels such as A&M, Geffen, Mercury, Island, and Motown.

But in the long term, the effects of consolidation would be even more profound, and usher in a decade when the twentieth-century music industry would suddenly find itself fighting for its life, undone by its single-minded pursuit of profit at the expense of the cornerstone principle that had allowed it to thrive for decades: artist development, as nurtured by savvy executives who not only knew their business but knew their music.

Now Cafaro, a music lifer, was out, and Bronfman, a longtime liquor magnate, was in. He'd soon head the biggest music corporation in the world. Bronfman was heir to the Seagram fortune and was running the family business in the nineties when he sought to diversify the company's holdings by branching out into music. As with the other moneymen taking power in the consolidation-heavy nineties, music was not central to his vision but rather a piece in a larger portfolio of products.

Cafaro was one of Crow's champions; he had signed her to her first record deal in 1991 and had allowed her to rerecord her debut album because she was dissatisfied with the initial results. Cafaro's faith was rewarded with a hit: Tuesday Night Music Club established Crow as an artist to be reckoned with in 1993. It went on to sell more than 4 million copies and her career flourished; her 1999 Grammy was her sixth.

Yet she wasn't in a particularly celebratory mood in the days after the '99 ceremony.

"It's a frightening time as far as the music industry being an artist-nurturing industry," she said. "Now everything is so numbers-oriented and new artists get one shot, maybe two, to get a hit, and that's it. They sign two-album deals now. I was signed to seven albums and I was given a chance to get on the road and hone my craft. You want artists who have a strong point of view, who have the potential to grow ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1416547274
• ISBN 13: 9781416547273
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272