Bands and the Internet : A Love / Hate Relationship

By Lisa Dib
More Feature Articles : Bands Who Should Have Quit

Downloading Music

Janis Ian

Ever since music became a method of entrepreneurial enterprise, there have been more and more ways to bring it to us, the hungry public. With the mushrooming sales of iPods and mp3 players and mobile phones with entire music libraries inside, having music readily and on command is becoming more and more important. So how does your small fry local band somehow crack their way into this expanding, seemingly all-encompassing market? Through the glorious web...

The Internet has done a number of things: Made banking and shopping easier. Opened doors to free videos and movies. Allowed us to add amusing, grammatically erroneous comments onto pictures of cats doing odd things. But what gets a lot of knickers in a lot of twists is the proliferation of free and easily-found music on the Big Bad Web. A lot is said on the apparently ghastly impact illegal downloading and file sharing is having on the record industry.

Lily Allen’s recent remarks, for instance, has flamed the argument of file sharing, ironically, into the ball park of the supporters.

"I think music piracy is having a dangerous effect on British music, but some really rich and successful artists like Nick Mason from Pink Floyd and Ed O'Brien from Radiohead don't seem to think so. These guys from huge bands said file-sharing music is fine. It probably is fine for them. They do sell-out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world. For new talent though, file-sharing is a disaster as it's making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge”

"Is this the way we want British music to go? Now, obviously I'm going to benefit from fighting piracy, but I think without fighting it, British music is going to suffer."

Allen has been dubbed a hypocrite for her comments and, considering she plagiarised much of the apparently passionate argument on her blog, a touch bogus. Consider how we listened to music before the Internet. If you were anything like me, you would tape songs from the Hot Thirty Countdown onto a cassette tape, that I would later play in the car or on my Walkman, or buy singles for four-ninety-nine (sometimes a now-ludicrous ten dollars) from a local record shop, that, when I was finally allowed one, played on my Discman (which I ended up keeping well after the age of the iPod was born). My computer was used only for documents and the two or three dodgy games we had.

Then, as the Internet grew legs and flourished, there became more and more ways to find music. There was even the option, for the creative amongst us, to make burnt mixed CDs for each other; the idea of CREATING one’s own DISC OF SONGS was staggering at the time- we had been raised on So Fresh and Pepsi Max Hits.

Now, there are literally thousands of avenues one can traverse in order to find new, old, dead or newly-born music. But what kind of the effect is it having on the up-and-comers, the fresh faces? Is it detrimental to their cause, or are they simply happy to get their music out there? One of the first paths to free and easy music we found as the Internet heaved its influence over the world was illegal downloading. Now, the alleged punishments for this act did not become clear to us until many years later, so we revelled in our newfound goodies.

Kazaa, Limewire, FrostWire, the infamous Napster; all with unlimited musical access. Well, sort of. You wouldn’t have found the band playing at the pub that night down the street, but if you needed some filthy rich pop tart’s latest hit, you would surely find it. And that has been the argument thus far; that musicians (especially the ones that protest this sort of thing: Metallica, anyone?) get paid such absurd amounts of money that downloading one album from a file-sharing network is but a drop in the ocean.

And it is; what is quite a sizeable dent in the average person’s wage (thirty dollars for an album, let’s say) would go by utterly unnoticed in the bank accounts of Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Unless they were particularly fastidious with their funds- I don’t know, I don’t know them personally. But you can bet your iTunes dollar that one less Hummer in the garage of some postulating rapper that spells his name wrong isn’t going to keep me awake at night. On the flipside, one can see where the file-sharing debate comes to head.

Though it isn’t a critical problem right now (“insanely rich record companies losing money, boo hoo”), in the years to come, with the mushrooming market of illegal downloading, burning and file-sharing, who knows where the record industry will be? The market is seeing a future in legal music downloads. Earlier this year, ARIA released some interesting stats: Physical CD singles were down 46% from 2.5 million to 1.3 million, with digital single sales up 43% from 17.6m to 23.4m. Sensing a pattern?

Physical album sales were down 10.5% from 44m to 38.6m, representing $323m in sales, while digital album sales were up 99% from 0.8m to 2.8m. But before we egg on the Digital Age and the birth of a robot nation, you might be surprised to know that sales of vinyl were up 93% (!) from 17k to 28k units. It is understandable why the Bonos and Britneys of the music industry might be worried by the inflation of illegal downloading; with albums free on the Internet before they even hit the JB HiFi shelves, their CD sales would plummet drastically.

And, considering the type of fan who is likely to pay good money for a Britney Spears is not generally the type of fan to be as dedicated as to pay the thirty dollars as opposed to getting it for free. But the aforementioned pub band, would they necessarily care? Are they watching the ARIA charts with baited breath, or are they just happy getting punters to their gigs? I have spoken to many musicians in my time, and, for the most part, it is the local acts that are the most behind digital media.

Many acts give away their tracks for free on MySpace or Triple J Unearthed in the hopes that it will drive traffic to the shows, which is where the bulk - if any - profit is to be made in the local arena, as well as merchandise sales, if they have those to vend, too. Local acts are finding it increasingly difficult to rely on their income as musicians alone; especially with the closing of many music venues and average door price barely covering the band’s lunch that day. Not that the Internet is entirely to blame for this dip in live music experience; most people’s financial situations make it hard to justify the ten bucks for a local band on any given night (you must also factor in drinks, perhaps some food, cab fare and lord knows you’ll want a t-shirt...)

The Internet has blurred the divide between artist and fan; now there are scarily accurate ‘games’ that can simulate the thrill of creating one’s own freak-out guitar solo or blazing DJ set. As MC Lars mentioned on his latest album, This Gigantic Robot Kills on the track Guitar Hero Hero; “American Idol won't make you a star/ beating Guitar Hero doesn't mean you play guitar”. To combat the massive blood loss the record industry must no doubt be keen to stitch up, a number of precautions have been made.

For instance, any track bought from an iTunes store can be burnt onto a blank disc a maximum of seven times (that’s seven separate discs, not the same track seven times on one...why would you do that, anyway?) to combat mass piracy. And, considering most of the tracks in the iTunes store go for $1.69, if you were to buy all of the, say, thirteen tracks of an album, it would work out twenty-two dollars. About the same amount you might pay in JB HiFi. But, as an increasingly lazy (or, shall we say, resourceful) world continues to find shortcuts and easy solutions, many people find it far simpler to cut out the middleman of uploading a disc into iTunes and buying it straight from the online media. But let us look at this from the other side of the coin.

Assume you’re in the mood for a live experience; you wanna know what’s going on and where in your hood, and who you might be able to see on any given night. What do you do? Before MySpace and the like, you might’ve had to rely on your local streetpress, or, in some more athletic cases, heading down to venues themselves and scoping out what’s to be seen. Even in those cases, you would still have to go by the band name and door price if you didn’t already know what the band were like. I don’t know how often that sort of traipse led to disappointment, it often does for me, but the solution is at the mere touch of a key.

Now, post-MySpace Music, almost every band that is playing in your area, along with most of the venues they play at, has a MySpace. You can check out a band’s tunes- a band you had never even heard of before you logged on- without leaving your swivel chair. You may instantly fall in love with said band and rush out and see them that night, and the next, and procure a great devotion for them; or, you might immediately abhor the sound of their wares and remember their name only so as not to accidentally see them in your travels. Both have happened quite frequently.

I, personally, have gotten yards of use out of MySpace Music; where else can I have-literally- a world of music at my nimble fingertips? MySpace began in much the same way we know Facebook now- a social communicating network. MySpace obviously had more of a personal touch than the streamlined, quasi-generic Facebook, but it was a massive boom for bands as well. MySpace has the functions to add streaming music (there was a downloading option back in my day, but it mysteriously disappeared), gig guides, bios, blogs for reviews and band news, photo albums, details of band members and record company; the list goes on.

Facebook, while being an easily-adaptable, simple method of communicating between friends and co-workers, is a terrible avenue for bands and musicians. It is appropriate for fans of the band, in order to keep them updated on gigs- usually through status updates that many people do not pay attention to- but, for the most part, does nothing to bring in new waves of punters. How are you to judge a band by their Facebook page? The most you can discern from that is where they play and that they all wear skinny jeans in their promo photos.

American singer/songwriter Janis Ian posted an interesting case on her website: “My site (www.janisian.com) gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975.When Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who'd downloaded Society's Child or At Seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But… that translates into $2700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn't include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows”

Janis also explains that the reason many people download music through free file-sharing programs is not out of some deep-seated anarchic desire to Damn the Record Man or overthrow the music industry, one Santana b-side at a time; it is, as you may know from your own experience, a way of finding new, little-know and forgotten music. Especially deleted singles that even the ancient record shop in some back alley doesn’t sell. Even the most rabid, hungry music fans are averse to shelling out $22.99 for a CD they haven’t the foggiest idea of, except that the song titles sound kind of wicked. These file-sharing programs give you a seemingly endless library of music from different and varying genres and eras, all at the mere click of a mouse.

Another notable element in this sordid debate is where radio stands.

“You can't hear new music on radio these days” Janis says. “I live in Nashville [Tennessee, USA], "Music City USA", and we have exactly one station willing to play a non-top-40 format...The situation's not much better in Los Angeles or New York. College stations are sometimes bolder, but their wattage is so low that most of us can't get them” This is one argument that many people can relate to. Those of us not interested necessarily in hearing the same Lady Gaga song over all three mainstream radio networks in the span of an hour have to find musical solace elsewhere. No disrespect to the Gaga, but there have been many occasions wherein Poker Face has been playing on two or three different stations AT THE SAME TIME, and it’s a bit worrisome.

So, what is waiting for us in the future? A robotic uprising? A wireless world? A grim, 1984-esque dystopia void of creative output? Who knows. But one prediction that is likely to stick is that the profligacy of our current Internet-bound ways may not last. It could go either way; either the Big Bad Government will tighten the chains of oppression and give harsher punishments to illegal downloaders, giving record companies the freedom to charge thirty-three dollars for a compilation of World’s Greatest Beer Songs for Bogan Barbeques or Power Ballads, Ahoy or Songs About Women What Done You Wrong, Pardner. It’s all a fallacy; the major labels are scared as hell.

All this talk of the death of the album and the coming extinction of record labels (since everyone is a producer now) is making their shareholders run for the hills, feeling their ludicrous bank balances tipping into only the few millions. But there’s always going to be people buying CDs; that you take comfort in, local musos. Some of your more dedicated fans cannot live with the prospect of illegally downloading and would rather pay the dosh for the real deal. It’s all about the package; the cover art, the liner notes, the sensation of inserting a spankin’ new disc into one’s CD player and excitedly pushing ‘play’. I myself have been struck into wilful poverty by my refusal to “steal” many times; but, hey, it’s all about the music.

Brought To You By The Dwarf