Swimming With Sharks

The tunnel at Green Park station

Once upon a time, before I had any real responsibilities, I used to sing protest songs in London’s Green Park Tube tunnel. I used to sing other kinds of songs as well, and do all kinds of other crazy stuff, but the protest songs were the ones that really came from my heart. Since then, I have come to believe that absence of a sense of real responsibility is almost a prerequisite for making any kind of protest art. Almost, but not quite.

One of the big digital music headlines last week was Daniel Ek’s contention that Spotify is out to “save the music business”. Glass-half-empty types might immediately have pointed to the fact that it’s pretty hard to do that when 18% of your company is owned by the major record labels. Well, I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, so I’m going to give Mr. Ek the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he shares my long-held belief that the only way to affect any kind of significant change is to swim with the sharks rather than question their right to exist. To deeply understand any business, and thereafter influence its direction, you have to work as an insider. In the music business, this means that you have to get into the old boy network to expect them to help you give your organization the juice it needs to do what you want to do as an entrepreneur.

I never had enough musical talent to move from the subway to the concert hall, so building tools for sharing music eventually became my own way of making music. As a result, I find myself travelling down a similar road to Mr. Ek, with the crash course on the inside of the music industry that that necessarily entails. Before I get to the place where he is currently standing, however, I wanted to take this opportunity to make the protest part of my voice heard while it still has an edge. Someone who knows me well recently mentioned that, for a guy known most of his life for shooting his mouth off regardless of the consequences, I’ve been remarkably muzzled lately. His statement was both painful and true, so, in the spirit of the openness with which I have recently become re-infected, I figured it was time to distill what I’ve learned and give you my perspective on what the music business looks like from the inside. This is my voice, my protest song, unedited and uncensored, probably unwisely and perhaps for the last time, as an attempt to hold on to some of my street cred before it becomes diluted by my association with The Man. That said, it still comes with a disclaimer. It is an exposé but not a judgement, because I’m hoping you’ll understand that I have to stop short of making this one of those protest songs that you know is so good that it is going to completely ruin your chances of ever signing that big deal.

The Spirit of Radio

I’ll start with radio. I was a little surprised that nobody really bit on my mention of the role of independent promotion companies in my last post on FYI music. If you don’t know what I mean, there’s a great article describing exactly how the whole scam worked, which I never would have thought to look for had I not spent a couple hours with a music industry veteran hearing all the gory details up close and personal. Perhaps I was missing something and the existence of this “evolved payola” system is common knowledge, or perhaps the feeling is “Relax, hippie, it’s just business”, but this intimate relationship between big money and the recommendation of music makes the idea of a “music meritocracy”, in which

Image courtesy of Salon.com

the best music finds enough market support to keep getting made, virtually unattainable. The system was “officially” abolished in 2004, but its legacy lives on in the way that new artists are “discovered” and promoted, so much so that it has forced new artists into the situation in which they currently find themselves, having to set aside their music and gulp down and digest knowledge of social media, music production, and contracts just to make a living. This is all stuff that used to be done for them in the early days of the music biz, so they could concentrate on making and playing great music.

The common defense of the existence of most kinds of commercial radio, and ‘Top 40′ radio in particular, is that it’s what the masses like, but I find this ridiculous generalization to be quite insulting to the ability of “the masses” to discern quality. Large-scale musical tastemaking is more about the tastemakers’ money than the listeners’ preferences, and any argument that advocates maintaining the current structure of music radio is musically indefensible. The fact that some amount of quality music is delivered through this channel is merely an accidentally positive side effect of a very bad trip. It must be changed with the view of protecting those with good musical intentions currently making a living off it, musicians and their support networks, but gutted to work in such a way that both tastemakers and artists can still profit while bringing much better music to those fabled masses.

The Establishment Principle

Radio, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger lesson I take from the horror story of independent promotion companies is that it’s not the major labels that are the core of the problem, it’s the financial establishment of which all these companies are a symptom. An establishment of any kind never likes change, until it has figured out a way to profit from it. In my most popular music-related post so far, I mentioned the consideration of music being displaced by the consideration of money in running a record label. This was meant to be an observation, not a condemnation, as it is a typical stage in the evolution of a business. Once your investment becomes successful, running the business becomes about protecting the investment, which makes sense. Part of protecting any investment is the necessity to devote at least a small portion to innovation, but in most successful companies it’s much easier to acquire someone else’s innovation than to continually maintain a company culture of innovation. This ‘protect your investment’ model works fine for widget makers, but when the product is music, innovation is too important to the product to take an organizational back seat.

I’ve also seen this “establishment principle” at play on a personal level. There is a way of doing business taught and learned at the highest level business schools and carried into the highest level boardrooms, of using one’s existing trusted business relationships to meet one’s new partners and discover one’s new opportunities. My experience is that “big music” runs on very much the same principle. Some of the younger music generation is fond of thinking that the very way of doing business is going to change and usher in a new era where relationships of influence will no longer be the currency of artistic success, but I think that’s a little unrealistic. It’s unrealistic, because it isn’t specifically a generational thing, it’s more of a lifestyle thing. In any industry, those close to you in business help you support your own lifestyle, and if the lifestyle is one you like, you will have very little incentive to broaden your professional horizons and create more work and uncertainty for yourself. Channel 4 Chairman Luke Johnson, very much a part of this establishment, wrote a great article in the Financial Times (free subscription required) elaborating on this very principle. The closer you get to retirement, the more this principle applies, and the more you’ll likely sympathize with the point I’m making here. I find that most criticism of how the major record labels do business tends to ignore this inevitable human tendency. For meaningful change to occur, there needs to be a way for those accustomed to this method of doing business to allow change to enter their world comfortably and through their existing relationships, but that also allows new tastemakers with new artists much better access to the “airwaves”.

Our Version of Real Radio

This is where Mediazoic comes in. Partly out of fear of being squashed by the establishment I’ve just outlined, I can’t yet show you what our software does, but there are a few things I can tell you. We have a new model for real radio, different from Pandora, different from Spotify, complementary rather than competitive to either of them because neither of them is what I would call real radio. When I say real radio, I don’t mean going to a web service and searching for what you want to hear. That is not radio, that is a record store. Radio is curated, monetized content, brought to you by someone whose opinion you, and sometimes the community at large, have deemed worthy of recognition. Mediazoic’s platform makes the fan, rather than the artist or the label, primarily responsible for finding a way for the artist to be financially supported, not just by listening to them but by actually getting them airplay. In some senses, the better a fan understands the music, the more s/he will be able to do to support the artist. Just as posting quality tweets increases your true influence on Twitter, the better choices you make as a music fan on Mediazoic, the more support your favourite music will receive.

Another thing about real radio is that it does not depend on subscribing to a particular service, which in computer terms means requiring a particular piece of software. Life in the Mediazoic Era is about not having to make this kind of choice in order to listen to what is being broadcast. You should be able to change stations as easily as you turn a radio dial. To approximate true broadcasting, anyone with any receiver (software or hardware) should be able to tune it. This implies also allowing the carriage of not only commercial but also public service messages. After all, radio’s earliest application was all about news and navigation rather than entertainment.

Entrepreneurial Art

Certainly, my preference would be to just make our software freely available to my fellow music lovers and let them figure out how to use it, to donate this beautiful piece of entrepreneurial art, as it were. This admittedly idealistic inclination probably arises because my life is roughly divided in half between being an entrepreneur in some form and being an artist in some form. I have little personal interest in being uber-wealthy, and, like James Dyson says in his commercials, I just like things to work properly, after which I’m happy to just make a decent living. I understand how the musician feels because I’m great at the artistic part and I only do the money part because I have to. I also know what it means to have to deeply consider

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

compromising the artistic vision in order to “sell” the artistic item. Finally, I understand completely that it is not the amount of people who “get it” that has any determination of the quality of the work, and it should not be the criterion for determining whether or not it is made, or how it is made. What I really need as an artist is creative space, courtesy of a benefactor who doesn’t really care about making money, with an almost parental faith in the ability of me as an individual to make it work, the same faith that I have in music fans to make it pay for itself. However, the problem with having entrepreneurship as your art, as opposed to painting, literature, music or other art forms whose spark is seen to be primarily above commerce, is that your patrons tend to be in it more for the money than the art.

So, while secretly hoping for a phone call from such non-beholden music industry heavyweights as Trent Reznor, Steve Earle, or Thom Yorke to inform me that they’ve become so inspired that they insist on marshalling their resources to send me into my own development bubble for a few months, I have had to figure out how to get my art made in the real world. In June, I packed up my shiny new tool and started not with the tech business but the music business, thinking a bit naively that it was all about the music, when in fact it is really all about the business. I kept hearing the same message coming from different mouths:

“This is a revolutionary application of technology that would be great if you were in some Asian backwater or European pirate haven and didn’t want to make any money.”

And:

“It’s the best tool we’ve ever seen for people who really love music to share their music, but unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it can make a ton of money, it has no place in the market.”

The good old days...

I guess the artist still occupied a significant part of me, because, to me, that was like finding a cure for cancer and not releasing it because nobody could make enough off the treatment drug. If you have a cure for cancer, you have a moral obilgation to share it. Now, I’m not saying we have something as important to the world as a cure for cancer, or even that my motivation for wanting to release it is strictly moral, but I have no doubt whatsoever that we have a new treatment for some of the numerous cancers currently multiplying through the bloodstream of the music business. Still, the entrepreneur in me saw the good business advice inherent in such dire diagnoses, and the result was a fairly significant surgical procedure on the business model that was likely necessary for any chance at long-term health.

With that surgery completed, it seems now that we’ll have a pretty good shot at tackling some of those cancers. I received word yesterday that one of the most successful advertising companies in the market thinks that, with a little work, we may have “a better advertising platform than Facebook.” This is wonderful news for our as-yet-unconvinced ‘patrons’, as it means a great potential return on investment, and even greater news for the artists who will also benefit, but it likely means the “entrepreneurial music” I’ll be making will start to feel some pressure to change from protest songs to hit songs. The busker in me might be a little ashamed, but the entrepreneur in me won’t miss waiting for the next coin to drop into the case. That’s why, with the wait almost over, I thought I’d better get this particular protest song out of my system while I still could.

Your Protest Song