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<nettime> THE CAPITALIST MUSIC INDUSTRY IS OBSOLETE (fwd)


http://www.lrna.org/league/mr/mr3a.html

August 29, 1999

Music & Revolution 3

THE CAPITALIST MUSIC INDUSTRY IS OBSOLETE: WHAT CAN TAKE ITS PLACE?

A music industry that prices music out of the reach of tens of millions of
people, intentionally keeps most music off the radio, and censors
musicians has clearly outlived its usefulness.

A music industry that gets laws passed to prevent the distribution of
music by computer technology, makes music a slave to the whims of Wall
Street, and would rather work with the FBI to combat "piracy" than put
money into artistic development is not only obsolete, it's dangerous. The
beauty and power of music can no longer co-exist with the corruption and
greed of the capitalist music industry.

These harsh assessments may seem hard to accept, since the rise of the
popular music that dominates most of the world today has been closely
linked to the rise of post-war capitalism and to thousands of music
business entrepreneurs. The Post-War Music Industry

As rock and soul music emerged in the 1950s, new record labels took the
stage and made the new sounds available at affordable prices. Clear
channel radio stations beamed music from the deep South out across the
country. Even payola--the payment of bribes by the record companies to get
records played on the radio--had a positive aspect. Payola helped to break
down many of the barriers in the broadcast industry, allowing the music of
Southern blacks and whites to break out and become the raw material of an
emerging culture.

Entrepreneurs were indispensable to this process. Although they brutally
exploited artists, the owners of record labels and radio stations helped
to create and shape a previously non-existent teen market (the idea that
youth has a culture of its own did not exist before the 1950s). The
emergence of the teen market was an important step in the evolution of
today's revolutionary youth culture. However, the music we take for
granted today did not emerge peacefully. In the 1950s, there were constant
attacks on music by politicians, the media, police, district attorneys,
the Klan, and the church.

In the late 1960s, a concert industry developed which brought a variety of
artists into every town in America with a decent-sized theater at an
affordable price. At the same time, both national record store chains and
a new breed of independent record stores brought a diversity of recorded
music within driving distance of most Americans.

The strength of the U.S. economy--not just high profits but the growth of
jobs and even welfare benefits--allowed music to develop as it did. For
the first twenty-five years of the rock & soul era, the stock market
allowed music companies to raise the capital they needed to fund an
infrastructure that brought music to almost everyone. It allowed
corporations to raise the money they needed to build the factories and
offices that kept us employed. Those jobs provided the money we needed to
buy records and concert tickets.

In the 1980s, entrepreneurs made sure that new styles of music became
widely available and, in the most striking example of that process, rap
was transformed from a New York neighborhood phenomenon into an
international language of the greatest importance.

The Worm Turns

The 90s has seen a resumption of the full-scale war against music that
took place in the 50s. Once again, politicians, the media, the police,
district attorneys, and the church are attacking music, blaming it for
everything from drug use to the depressed state of the economy.

But there is a very important difference today. The same music industry
that helped make our culture possible has become one of the foremost
obstacles to getting music heard. High Retail Prices.... Although total
manufacturing cost for a CD is around 50 cents per disc, the consumer pays
up to $20 for it. In a world where 3 billion people live in poverty
(including 80 million people in the U.S.), many music fans can no longer
afford to buy the music they love.

Live Music.... Many concert tours now have average ticket prices of over
$100. Ticketmaster surcharges are now sometimes more than the price of a
concert ticket itself was only a few years ago. With millions of Americans
who used to enjoy a night out now living in poverty, many clubs have gone
out of business. Those that remain often force bands to pay for the
privilege of playing while fans suffer from high cover charges and drink
prices. Many clubs have become dependent on tobacco company promotion
money and, as a result, musicians must promote lung cancer in order to be
heard.

Censorship.... The major record companies now place warning stickers on
many of the albums they release. This means a lot of music that does get
recorded can't be sold to teenagers or, in many cases, anyone. The major
record store chains all actively promote censorship. The record companies
all have in-house censorship committees that, among other things, forbid
criticism of the police.

>From its beginnings in the mid-1980s, the current wave of music censorship
has been orchestrated from the highest levels of power, led by politicians
who receive strong music industry support. For example, in 1986 a secret
meeting was held in the Maryland countryside to discuss the danger music
presents to the ruling class. Sponsored by the Parents Music Resource
Center (an organization founded by current Second Lady Tipper Gore),
participants included the commandant of the Marine Corps, representatives
of foreign countries, most Democratic and Republican Presidential
candidates of the past twenty years, a former chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission, current vice-president Al Gore, a
vice-president of Merrill Lynch and a vice-president of Northwest
Airlines. The music industry has gladly accepted many of the demands of
the Parents Music Resource Center, such as placing warning labels on CDs
and cassettes.

Radio.... Since the 1996 Telecom bill made it legal to put together giant
radio chains--including ownership of several stations in the same
city--radio has played a narrower and narrower span of music, focusing on
selling advertising to national corporate clients. Record companies now
openly pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to radio chains to get their
records played. This keeps anyone without a multi-million dollar slush
fund from being heard.

Many people have turned to unlicensed ("pirate") radio as a way to
broadcast the music and news ignored by the big radio chains. The response
of the broadcast corporations has been to pressure the Federal
Communications Commission to shut down all pirates. Over the past few
years, the FCC has raided hundreds of unlicensed stations, often at
gunpoint.

Technology.... There has been a steady stream of advances in music
technology since the end of World War II: stereophonic sound, eight-track,
cassette players, compact discs, DVD, etc. The music industry embraced and
promoted them all until the most important advance ever--the
Internet--came along.

A lot of people all over the world use computer technology to listen to
and distribute music without paying for it. The response of the giant
music monopolies has been to hire people to search the web for
"unauthorized" use of music, to sic their lawyers on music-lovers who use
the Internet to distribute music or lyrics for free, to prevent artists
from putting their music up on the Internet for free, and to get
legislation passed to criminalize the free distribution of music.

The Stock Market

The role of the stock market has changed. Today, the only thing Wall
Street wants to hear from a company is how many jobs it's going to
eliminate. The more people who hit the street, the higher a company's
stock price goes. The increase in poverty and homelessness that results
undermines the distribution and enjoyment of music because it removes
millions of music consumers from the economy.

The stock market is also used as a club to force record companies to
censor themselves. Politicians in several states who control pension funds
that own record company stock have threatened to dump that stock on the
market if music that's critical of society isn't eliminated. For instance,
every major record label passed on issuing a pro-choice compilation album
featuring several well-known musicians, saying that to release it would
cause them to be attacked in the stock market.

What can replace the capitalist music industry?

There was a time when it was almost impossible to even record music
without using a full-blown studio controlled by a record company. Today,
it's easy for any musician to make high-quality recordings and to
distribute the result via the Internet. In other words, we no longer need
the capitalist music industry. For anything. It's obsolete. It's
worthless.

But the rapidly-growing music underground is only an indicator of what a
bright future culture can have. By itself, the underground is not that
future. We can't settle for simply finding ways to circumvent the
capitalist music industry while most musicians remain in poverty and the
attacks against the music underground continue in the form of lawsuits,
raids, and punitive legislation. That is a losing strategy.

The League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA) proposes that we
turn the music underground into an overground of unlimited musical
creation and enjoyment. We already have the capability to guarantee the
basis for the full creativity of every human being: Food, shelter, medical
care, education, and 24 hour a day access to all the tools anyone needs
for producing music.

It is computer technology that makes the current music underground
possible and modern technology also produces an abundance of food,
shelter, medicine, and, of course, musical instruments. We simply need to
take music and the other essential elements of life out of the hands of
the capitalists and place them in the hands of the public. By removing the
barriers of the music industry, of the stock market, and of capitalism
itself, what naturally wants to happen will be able to happen.

The result will be that everyone who wants to create music will be able
to. Musicians will be able to be heard by anyone on earth who wants to
listen. They won't have to work at degrading day jobs. Music and other
forms of culture will finally be free to fully reflect and uplift the
human spirit as part of a cooperative society that nurtures humanity every
step of the way.

- --

The entire contents of Music and Revolution 3 can be found at on the
League of Revolutionaries for a New America web site at:

http://wwwlrna.org/league/mr/mr3.html

Send articles from Music & Revolution via email to everyone you think
would be interested.

League of Revolutionaries for a New America
P.O. Box 477113
Chicago, IL 60647
(773) 486-0028
E-mail league@noc.org


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