[Introspective] Panel discussion featuring Neil Tennant

[Carlos E Restrepo]

The Times (London)
December 10, 2003, Wednesday
SECTION: Features; Times2; 4
LENGTH: 2161 words
HEADLINE: It's music, but not as we know it

BODY:
THE ONSLAUGHT OF THE NAPSTER WEBSITE, WHICH TURNED THE DOWNLOADING OF SONGS INTO A HOUSEHOLD CONCEPT, HAS MADE FOR GRIM READING ON THE RECORD COMPANIES' BALANCE SHEETS. NOW COCA-COLA IS TO LAUNCH A PAY-PER-SONG SERVICE. HERE, EXPERTS DISCUSS WHAT IT ALL MEANS FOR THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

THE PANEL

NEIL TENNANT, the Pet Shop Boys

MOBY, American with a techno take

NICK HORNBY, bestselling author and vinyl addict

PETER GABRIEL, Supergroup singer who went solo and founded Womad

BILL FLANAGAN, MTV Networks

TONY WILSON, music industry impresario

PETER JAMIESON, chairman, British Phonographic Industry

IF YOU think "file-sharing" is an accounting term, you'll only too readily understand the gloom brought about by the declining fortunes of the music industry in recent years. Most people interested in music can pinpoint the moment when the rot started. It was 1999, when a 19-year-old American, Shawn Fanning, developed Napster, the groundbreaking site that made file-sharing and downloading a household concept. For the music industry, the onslaught of Napster, a host of imitators and millions of users, has made for grim reading on company balance sheets. In the past year alone global sales have dropped by about 7 per cent, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. 

The federation claims that about 600,000 people worldwide could lose their jobs because of music piracy, which includes bootlegging near-impeccable copies of CDs and their covers.

So can the music industry survive? On Monday Coca-Cola announced a pay-per song service, containing 250,000 songs. Apple, now heading towards a million downloads -thanks to its iTunes software, which offers each song at 99 cents (60p) -is an example of the industry's fightback.

Here, inudstry experts -including the musicians Moby, Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and Peter Gabriel, MTV Networks' Bill Flanagan, and Peter Jamieson, of the British Phonographic Industry, as well as passionate music fans such as Nick Hornby and Tony Wilson -try to unravel the industry's myriad problems.

THE FUTURE OF THE ALBUM

The album has been the standard unit of the music industry for the past 35 years.

How might it change and what will the repercussions be?

Moby: People will be more inclined to buy one song that they know they love, rather than an entire album that might be filled with garbage. 

Wilson: The single will be replaced by a download, but the collection, as I prefer to call the album, will remain.

Flanagan: The single song was the dominant unit in music sales -sheet music and records -from the beginning of the industry and well into the 1960s. That will be the case again.

Jamieson: The "single" track will revive as the staple currency of online systems.

HOW FAR AWAY IS MASS DOWNLOADING?

Will downloaded music ever amount to 50 per cent of the market, and if so how soon?

Jamieson: Yes. Say two years for singles and five for everything else.

Gabriel: Certainly, and more. I would think 50 per cent in three to five years, 80 per cent to 90 per cent in eight to 12 years.

Tennant: CD is a very convenient form to buy music in and still reflects, as an artefact, the culture of the music contained on it. Downloading doesn't give you the same quality and isn't as satisfactory an act of participation. Downloading will become more like on-demand radio: a new market.

WHAT'S IT WORTH?

Will the abandoning of physical formats make music cheaper for people?

Moby: Yes. Everything about the music business will become less expensive, but also less lucrative. I think we're about to see the end of million-dollar videos and marketing campaigns as well as the end of million-dollar executive salaries and millionaire musicians.

Tennant: I bought the remastered What's Going On by Marvin Gaye for £4.99 the other day, so I think music is already too cheap. Music should be presented as both essential and special, indeed, as more valuable.

Gabriel: An American record executive told me that the average record sold in America is listened to 1.3 times. I didn't believe it at first but then I looked at my own collection and there was a lot of stuff I'd checked out only once - something you wouldn't mind about so much if they'd all been downloads.

What price your friendly record shop?

Will record shops as we know them still exist?

Wilson: Yes, like bookshops, as social entities. The future is Amoeba in Los Angeles, not Tower on Sunset Strip. Back to the old hippy bean bags of Richard Branson's first shops.

Hornby: No, and I suspect they'll disappear very soon. There may be a niche for smaller, specialist shops.

Tennant: They will survive only if they learn the current marketing mantra "shopping is theatre" and provide an experience that makes you want to go into a record shop.

PUTTING THE MAGIC BACK

The Beatles used to release a couple of new singles every year and never put those singles on their albums. For the past 25 years (in every area but dance) singles have been taken from albums. Will artists release music more often, but in smaller quantities?

Hornby: I hope so. Ben Folds is releasing three EPs this year -there have been two so far, both brilliant -and it's a much better way of connecting with a favourite musician.

Moby: I think that more and more artists will release music directly from their homes.

Gabriel: I would love to subscribe to a site where I could hear them writing songs, rejecting songs, playing gigs, even screwing up. You have these nights when you walk out of the studio thinking that you've done something really great and you want the whole world to hear it that night. I can see a much more open process in the future.

Wilson: This would disavow present contractual arrangements, which are built around delivery of albums. Bands no longer seem to play one-off gigs. They prepare themselves for a bout of marketing and being on the road. A more ad hoc structure would be more fun, but I don't see it. All those T-shirt sales cluster around albums and tours and the merchandising imperative will be obeyed.

Tennant: They'd have to change the charts.

THE ROBBIE WILLIAMS QUESTION

Pop's big acts don't sell the numbers of records that they used to, but they can make fortunes from merchandising, commercials, film music and concerts. Is the Robbie Williams deal with EMI, wherein the record company participates in the revenues from other areas of his activities such as touring and merchandise, a template for the industry?

Wilson: It is in many ways the only way forward, although it's happened only because the industry got its knickers in a twist over the internet, the way it did with radio in the 1930s.

Flanagan: Yes, but who says it's the record company who makes that deal? Maybe it will be a giant promoter such as Clear Channel that will sign up lifetime recording rights along with the gigs and merchandise. How long before McDonald's designs, signs and distributes a boy band of its own?

STRAIGHT TO THE FANS?

At the height of internet fever five years ago there were predictions that artists would do the job of record companies themselves. Few have done so. Why?

Tennant: It's too much like hard work.

Wilson: I'm pleased that I got this right. Some of my colleagues thought that it was the coming of punk at last. The artists could cut out the record company and go direct to the customer. Bollocks, I said. Musicians who fill our lives with art and joy are also miserable, greedy bastards -and ungrateful -and any band who make it on the internet without a label when offered half a million pounds will bite the label's hand off and sign away their freedom for the cash.

Jamieson: Very few artists have tried to look after themselves alone, and those that have done so are in most cases those that have already enjoyed a successful platform courtesy of their original record company.

Flanagan: They will. It's still early. No one wants to stick his neck out until someone else has proved it's safe. Besides, the current trend is to get the last big advances out of the label before the bottom falls out. Major artists want to take advantage of corporate paranoia to fill their canteens one more time.

ALBUMS AND OBSOLESCENCE

Is the album an expensive, obsolete concept?

Hornby: Most kids I speak to download the songs they like that they've heard on the radio. They wouldn't dream of downloading the whole album most of the time - they've worked out that most contemporary albums are of arbitrary length and variable quality, like early Motown LPs.

GETTING OFF THE ROUNDABOUT

What, if anything, is going to change the single/album/tour cycle that has been in place for 30 years?

Gabriel: Digital distribution and artist subscription sites -and I hope they do.

Tennant: It's predictable, but it works. Actually the web makes it easier in terms of downloading the single and buying the tickets.

Flanagan: It has already changed. Some artists (Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews Band) are in the touring business and the album is a sideline, like the T shirts.

The Who haven't made a new album in 20 years, but are at a high point as a touring band.

TOO MUCH OF NOTHING?

Are there too many records?

Moby: No, just not enough time.

Jamieson: How can there be "too many records" when whole genres of music are daily disappearing from recording schedules across the globe? There may be too many recordings of a certain type for specific media channels to disseminate adequately -but there are not "too many records" -there aren't enough!

Tennant: No, but they hang about now through reissues. And the audience is broader in terms of age. Forty and fiftysomethings were never expected to be part of the audience for pop music, but they are and sometimes they find it a bit bewildering.

I don't think an 18-year-old would think there are too many records.

IS THE FUTURE LIVE?

Tickets for a show by a major act can cost £100 a pair. Will live music be responsible for an increasing share of earnings from music?

Moby: The days of a musician getting rich from record sales and doing some token live dates are at an end. In the future most musicians will have to be able to perform live in some capacity to make a living.

THE DAD ROCK OF THE FUTURE

The rock giants of the 1960s and 1970s such as Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones have proved to have enduring appeal, so will the stars off the 1980s and 1990s have the same commercial pull?

Tennant: A few bands and artists have survived from each era.

Moby: Some, like U2 and Radiohead, will. Many won't, because they never developed a loyal, live audience.

Hornby: I can't see why not. It could well be that the acts from the 1980s and 1990s will be the last on the boat before the drawbridge is pulled up: people will always want music, but they might not want to have to learn how to hunt down the new stuff they might like. The chances are that they'll want to hang on to what they know, so it could well turn out that the Foo Fighters and Bryan Adams will have the staying power of Dylan.

BREATHING LIFE INTO THE CHARTS

Is the current system, whereby records are released to radio weeks before they come out, spend a week at No 1 and then fall away, good for the chart?

Tennant: No, but try getting anyone to change it.

Jamieson: Today's system is very effective as a marketing tool, which benefits artists, companies and retailers alike. It appeals far less to the consumer and thus it is not good for the charts.

DEATH BY RESEARCH

Radio is increasingly research-driven. In whose interest is that?

Moby: The Devil's.

Tennant: It encourages playing safe. The public should never be consulted.

THE iPOD QUESTION

MP3 players such as the iPod are transformational pieces of technology. Does the iPod influence how we listen to music?

Hornby: I listen much more to compilations than I ever did. The iPod gives songs and artists and albums and playlists equal weight; a hi-fi can't do that. It takes seconds to make a playlist, and who wouldn't rather listen to a collection of favourite tunes, or selections from new albums, than wade through 70 minutes of an album to find maybe half an hour of decent music?

Wilson: It makes it sexy because they made the thing look so good. A decade after the visual of the LP sleeve disappeared, sex is back.

A longer version of this piece appears in the latest issue of Word magazine, out tomorrow.

1877 Edison first records sound with phonograph

1901 First 10in "78" gramophone disc

1948 First 12in long-play record (LP)

1964 First audio cassette tape

1983 First compact disc

1999 Napster launched: record sales fall by a quarter over 3 years

2001 Napster suspended after legal action

2003 Apple's iTunes launched with record industry backing