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Hi, everyone.

English native speakers, I need your help!

I have a text about record business, that was translated into English and will be targeted on native speakers. But I’m afraid that the text contents some inaccuracy in translation that may be treated by the native speakers as rough. So, be kind, read it please and let me know, if there’s any of that inaccurate phrases which are out of date, and I’ll be very appreciated if you give me the variants of the correct phrases that could replace the incorrect ones instead. Thank you very much.

So, here’s the text itself:

Record business epitaph

Smells like medicine…

This is the feeling I get when reading reports about copyright and “legal” music battlefield.

Over the past twenty years far more than one industry gave up its soul under the onslaught of technological innovation.

The most intelligent and successful ones cured and benefited the most from this transformation.

Others have died simply, quietly and without fanfare. They will be soon forgotten; by the way, some people will keep good memories of them.

But the most disgusting are those, who, while dying, are screaming like slaughtered pigs, and, in their fever attack, smashing all medications on the table. Medications, that could have been a cure to their disease, had they paid attention to them.

But glass bottles are smashed, and the room is filled with the smell of medications.

One can judge by patient’s behaviour that the action is taking place in a psychiatric hospital. Patient’s actions are illogical, absurd and **** clumsy. On the one hand, you want to come closer, and help the patient, even by talking. But on the other hand, you only feel disgust and fear. Because of absurdity of the patient’s behaviour, you are completely discouraged from taking part in his fate. One could just contemplate this ugly picture, but I simply prefer to leave the room. Let’s recall patient’s best years, which he had plenty, without a doubt…

I have long asked myself, when has the music industry lost all its charm and appeal that it had in the old days? Good old days, when every record company had its own face, a bright personality, which is expressed not only in design of vinyl records’ labels, but in everything the firm did.

What happened to the music industry on the road from the “Beat” era to the “Bit” era?

There are many articles written on the topic. Most of them are absurd, referring to concepts like “business model”, “market share” and other abstractions.

They remind me of a placebo – a dummy pill that was placed on patient’s table. The patient looks at the pill and tells himself that everything will be fine, everything goes as expected, everything will come back to normal…

I would like to talk about abstractions of another level, the ones not directly related to the business itself, but are directly related to its death – Charisma, Illusions and Energy…

Charisma

What is the main difference between record companies of the golden era, “Beat” era, namely the seventies of the last century, and their today’s successors of the “Bit” era?

Indeed, there are many differences, but one catches the eye.

In those days, little record companies were led by great people. Personalities!

Today, huge record companies are headed by little people from the category of “no-body, and no-name”.

The majority of them has no relationship to the music whatsoever. They are either accountants or lawyers.

Sometimes at heart, which is particularly awful.

That is, in classic’s words – “office plankton”. (for more about the origin of “office plankton” term - read here http://www.transparent.com/russian/phraseology-in-the-news-??????-the-knee/ or here http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/... )

Even if it is a very well paid and glossy plankton, it is still plankton, and it would be a mistake to think that the quality of music only depends on the musicians themselves.

People like Richard Brenson (Virgin), Stig Anderson (Polar Music), Berry Gordy (Motown) and Daniel Miller (Mute) were carrying a huge charisma just by themselves. And yet it is not clear who had more of it – record companies’ artists or record companies’ leaders. Brenson’s charisma certainly did outweigh the one of all his musicians, and it still hovers over his 200 companies, no matter what they were doing.

Only an idiot would confuse Motown’s vinyl with Virgin’s vinyl. They were carriers of a specific culture. They had both style and drive.

Their product outlived both the record companies themselves and the artists they were recording. Today, thirty to forty years later, their product is still being sold, changing hands several times and, the most important, with price going up.

Sold for real money, despite the fact that the music from these records is available on millions of websites. Despite its free availability, people spend 30 dollars for the same thing on vinyl.

This is not because vinyl records sound in some special way.

The reason is charisma, which is present not only in people, but in inanimate objects too, despite what organized religion would make you think.

But this holds under one condition: only if the inanimate objects were created by people who had that charisma. Only if the creator put his soul into the product.

Charisma creates added value. And in our times, where everything is becoming free, it creates simply value. Not added value, but simply value, which is amazing just by itself.

Charisma is the key to success of computers with the ‘bitten’ apple logo.

Charisma is what sells Beatles vinyl records, this time with the “incised” apple. These two companies – musical Apple and computer Apple – are the most remarkable examples of charisma. No one needs to be persuaded to buy their product. People fight for it, despite millions of seemingly free alternatives.

I would like to know this: when has all of this become mass production of piles of faceless plastic, that you need to persuade someone to buy?

This moment is actually known. It is the moment when absolutely all bright and interesting music labels have been bought out by transnational companies, beginning full depersonalization of music.

A mere acquisition of one company by another has little meaning. It was very rare when it has brought tangible benefits to justify the acquisition cost. Especially when a huge accounting firm acquires a little creative and effective team in the hope to buy its creativity and charisma. However, the only thing they can achieve by this is killing all of the creativity and bringing their former charisma to zero, sinking it in the muddy puddle under the name of “corporate culture”.

But one way or another, acquisition cost needs to be recouped. And at the same time they get a new format in the form of questionable-sounding but low-cost and convenient compact discs.

Vinyl records, being also a result of pressing plastics, strictly speaking, still had great individuality despite it. Let’s start with the fact that the same record, released on different labels in different countries, sounded absolutely differently, and had a bunch of other fine details. But greed and desire to re-sell the recording material bought from genuine record labels in a new form has led to mountains of inanimate plastic. This put a first nail in the coffin of the music industry.

Despite the euphoria about huge initial sales of CDs, it may only be compared with an injection of a last dose of a strong narcotic. You will feel very good, but not for long.

In the meantime, charisma of artists was suffering equally dramatic changes. The era of musicians whose life could fill a book was replaced by the era of musicians about whom one could only write an article.

And then, one could only write a paid advertorial, because there was really nothing to write about the artist. And only journalists’ and PR managers’ creative thinking could help to get the public to know the artist, whose disc they had to sell.

We all know how it ended. Music press came to naught almost everywhere in the world because of absolute lack of basis for its activity. Cheap scandals and attempts to “make up” a bright personality do not work for the new generation, who feels it’s all fake. While Amy Winehouse scandals look comical, in the case of some B. Spears they are just abject.

Charisma is named charisma because it attracts people. This attraction works for the benefit of the charismatic personality and those found close to it. Even when things are universally free, charisma will generate money for its holder, one way or another.

There is only one issue with charisma. It cannot be created artificially. It either exists or does not. And those who preach pop psychology, those who claim they will teach you to be charismatic through various NLP methods, they can all go to hell. As everyone knows, the only benefit of an NLP training is NLP instructor’s salary.

One last difference of the old music industry from the new one, which is unrelated to charisma but deserves to be mentioned, is functionality.

What were the historical functions of recording companies?

There are five basic functions.

- Find an artist

- Record the artist

- Promote the artist

- Distribute recordings

- Deceive the artist

Until a certain time, all these tasks were performed pretty well, especially the last point, where highest levels of technology have been achieved.

But with the advent of the net, and it is even indecent to say, the label has left only one task it can perform better than the artist, and it is the last one. Artists, though, can also deceive themselves well, especially in their expectations.

Otherwise, artists find themselves, record at their own expense (thanks to technologies, who made the process cheap, and recording quality does not matter, as it was found out). Distribution is now a wonder, and promotion somehow can happen with the help of that same network in all its manifestations.

At some point the situation seemed idyllic.

Full freedom of expression (usefulness of which is to be discussed separately), no filters in the form of record companies’ A&R-managers (these are strange people who believe their musical taste to be close to the one of the masses), immediate distribution of music worldwide. This is just some kind of fairy tale that is coming to us now!

All is well in this new picture, except for one annoying detail.

People don’t buy this music.

And they don’t buy it in any form. Neither on CD, nor as music files. Neither expensive nor cheap. Neither from the record label, nor from the artist.

- No, thanks. I don’t need it.

- But why?

But please, do not give me iTunes Music store and Radiohead success examples as proof that it is still possible to sell music and you just need to find a business model.

I am sick of these two examples, because only a very lazy publication did not write a story or two about Radiohead.

If someone has taken seriously the Radiohead experiment to let the audience choose their own price for downloadable tracks from Radiohead’s new album, I would like to have that childish and naive view of the world. I think it would make my life simpler.

In reality, Radiohead’s tactic is still brilliant, but in a totally different way. By leaking their well-done foul story to the net, the group simply owned (in both senses of the word) the world’s media, with an advertising campaign of unprecedented size and the same unprecedented arrogance. It is not surprising that, after a while, both Radiohead and its record label got their return, with excellent sales of real CDs and vinyl records, accompanied by great accessories.

The only lesson I take from the Radiohead experience is that when music is really good and the artists are bright individuals, their product will be sold for real money anyway.

Piracy or no piracy, it does not really matter. Especially if you put aside your illusions…

Illusions

First and most bizarre illusion is that a publication of each new album should lead to a materialization of at least a huge mansion on a private island.

Even Beatles thought at the scale of “one song - one swimming pool” (and then it was a joke). But they may think that way. Their music brings real happiness to millions of people for more than forty years and millions of copies are being sold even today.

During these forty years, no artist could get even close to their level of genius.

But then, who said that a singer whose album can be listened to only once and on fast-forward deserves the same income? Who cares that a million dollar budget has been invested in ‘this’ and it must be recouped?

Who even invented the concept that a music band or composer should have excess income?

World history does not confirm this state of affairs. If you exclude these twenty to thirty years of record industry boom (which is a drop in the ocean), the rest of the time creative people had incomes that are just sufficient enough to do the things that they love to do, and not to worry about money too much. Anyway, no need to be distracted from creative activity and no need to be forced to earn money in some other way.

Nobody ever promised a private island for this sort of activity.

Let’s have a sober look at things.

It was only a moment, a moment between the past and the future. It was called the music industry. It was very brief. It was at the crossroads between the time when there was no physical media, and the time when there is no more physical media. And what is horrible in that?

We still have a lot of relics from that moment. Maybe that’s enough for everyone?

I liked the most a phrase told by one of my friends, who is a sound engineer. One of his job duties is to listen to a lot of new artists for one reason or another.

I do not listen to music for free - he said.

Copyright defenders and all other lawyers, there is no need to start cheering. It does not mean that he does not listen to free music. He meant that he wilfully refuses to listen to modern music, unless he is getting paid for it.

Approach that is worthy of respect and understanding. After all, if you bought a rotten fish, you consider it as damage to your health. So why do not worry also about your mental health, or at least about spoiled mood?

And the problem is created by these same advantages I mentioned earlier as a potential fairy tale for the music business.

Those technologies, which were designed to provide previously unprecedented creative freedom, the absence of barriers, free flow, – they worked in the exactly opposite direction.

The illusion of freedom of expression

That sounds tempting, if you put aside a fact that is proven - 99% of people cannot create anything of value in principle.

The best way to prove it is the Internet itself, namely its Web 2.0 reincarnation.

People, who created quality content in the past, continue to create it. Everything else is filled with junk.

Have you ever noticed that really serious people never blog (unless it is their profession)? Chatting is not their specialty, and they have little interest in others’ opinions. Their job is to create something…

Good or bad, but other people’s purpose is to consume, not create, and this has always been so.

Today, every other person expresses herself, and it is not a problem in itself. It is even beneficial, if no one sees it.

The problem is that all this is done not for oneself and one’s friends, but thrown at the market as a real music product.

Now, try to find something you can like on this market inside a pile of music junk. At the minimum, you must be a really determined music lover in order to spend all your time on filtering.

I have a question for the music industry.

Do you seriously think that I must pay the same same 18 dollars for all this noise and for the Dark Side Of The Moon on a nearby shelf?

Or are you just kidding?

What have we got in the end?

Freedom of expression was good in theory but in practice has lead to the situation, in which even for people who master technologies rather well (and I am among them, frankly speaking) it is practically impossible to find anything valuable on the net. The noise has already surpassed all reasonable levels.

Illusion of censorship.

Previously, censors were recording companies. While they were young and managed by creative personalities - they were good filters. They have done great things, saving us, the audience, from swimming in the sea of ****.

Yes, they sometimes made mistakes and did not always recognize talent, but in general, these firms left us at least a few artists of calibre and great potential. If it were not for these filters, we would not hear about them ever.

As these corporations were absorbed by gangs of accountants-lawyers through transnational media groups, filters became worse and worse. Eventually, they became so crappy that, indeed, it would be better without them. But, as it turns out, the problem is not in the filters, but in their quality.

So, here is what we get.

Musicians and the industry have got everything that they could have imagined. All of the most advanced technologies are in their hands.

Virtual studios – create almost for free.

Distribution system is simply free.

Marketing opportunities are enormous on the net, given a creative marketing approach.

Everything’s just excellent, except one thing. Most people do not want to buy most of the new music at all. They don’t have fear, these bastards, neither of the laws, nor of permanent ‘harassment’. Musicians and the industry got everything they always wanted, yet people don’t buy most of their product.

Or rather their new product.

Because The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd, ABBA, etc. still sell in unthinkable numbers of copies. In mp3, on CD, on vinyl - whatever you like. Musicians are all retired, but their records are still sold, without any special marketing efforts.

At this point it would be appropriate to accuse me of fear of novelty, but it is not necessary.

First, I don’t give a ****.

Second, I know that when a new band that can be really loved appears, I love it.

Similarly to how I fell in love with Air, Zero 7, or a reincarnation of Future Sound Of London. I already had their mp3 totally free, and then went and bought everything on CD, and then on vinyl.

Crazy?

But this is an exception to the rule. Alas, there is very little to fall in love with among the new music.

Almost nothing …

Everyone knows a superb music site – Last.fm. This site is a great tool to understand what most people ‘love’. As everyone knows, Last.fm gathers statistics on what real people are actually listening to on their computers. It’s much more honest information than all paid-for charts in the world. Even if not paid-for, charts are reflecting purchases, but not real love. You can buy without thinking too much, or under influence of the media. But no one will force you to listen to it every day.

So, as long as existed Last.Fm, I do not remember that those same Beatles dropped below the third rank. Forty years after their last song.

And the rest of the Top 20 are real artists and bright personalities.

And, by the way, elderly are not the only people who use Last.fm.

“Isn’t this a sign of creative impotence? Is it that no one is able to compose new materials, relating to those that we did before? Of course, I am proud, happy, flattered and all that, but how can it happen that the greatest success is enjoyed by stuff that was done twenty years ago – and that in a cover version? Something is not right. This should not occur.”

Benny Andersson (ABBA)

Energy

So, there are artists who were selling, and are still selling their music for real money.

They are not many, but who said that there have to be millions of them?

Maybe their sales numbers are now lower, but who said that every inhabitant of the planet must buy music product?

This delusion is only in the heads of marketing of transnational music companies.

References to past industry performance (especially in the seventies of the last century), are only making me laugh.

In those days, people had no other home entertainment except music. VCRs did not exist, neither did computer games nor gaming consoles. No gadgets at all. Books and vinyl records were the only entertainment in our homes. That’s the first explanation. Today, buyers’ attention has spread among all the new media and arts, while their available income remained pretty much the same. Music gets less attention. The attitude to it became simpler … in general. Music became nothing but a background.

When talking about energy, it is good to start with what was long pointed by the sayings:

“What we get cheaply, we value it little”

Or do not value at all.

This applies to music in the sense that the process has become too cheap and mechanical. Creators now invest less of their own energy. However, listeners feel this through some special sense and perfectly understand it.

‘Beat’ way

There is a musical genre such as Ambient (in Russian – just a set of noises or sounds that are usually passed with fervour as the concept). Many think that this is an entirely new music genre that has appeared not so long ago. However, similar to how the Beatles laid the foundation for the brit-pop with one of their song, invented the hard rock of seventies with another song and all of the contemporary psychedelic with the third one, the ambient genre in its contemporary form appeared on early Pink Floyd recordings together with that same psychedelic genre.

In those days, music creation was extremely difficult and costly. Synthesizers have just begun to appear and they felt out of the ark. There were no ready-to-use sound samples. To achieve the desired effect of the guitar echo, a musician needed to come down into an empty swimming pool, it was not possible to do it otherwise. So people had to be inventive in a variety of ways.

They played with the tape, cut it into pieces, glued it, or created some custom devices just for the sake of achieving that one effect. The great producer and sound engineer Alan Parsons went to a clock shop in order to record the chiming clock. And this was honest.

Honesty - this is the word that best shows how music was made at the time. There was no cover of technology behind which one could hide, and it is very clearly seen in music of that time.

And this still has value.

‘Bit’ way

Today, any teenager can instantly download from the net a lot of trendy sounds, samples, loops, and other «content», then launch a virtual studio program on his laptop and assemble something with it.

Depending on whether the noise is performed forward or backward, the final product may be called whatever you like.

But there is no meaning neither in the first version, nor in the second.

Smart-looking teenager, of course, will blow out his cheeks and begin to talk about the unique concept of his work, ideas that he put into it, and the pain of creative activity.

Music critics will operate the words “cult” (one should kill for this word), “cultural stratum”, and provide analogies of similar artists, whose names do not say anything to anybody except the critics themselves.

But all this does not work.

Music that was easily assembled from Lego blocks has no value. Musicians think in vain that ordinary listeners do not care. And the problem does not lie in computing, but rather in freebie.

This result, which was previously achieved by the tremendous creative effort, mental energy of the creator, is now achieved through few random mouse clicks in arbitrary fields of a software tool. And at a first glance, in both cases (for ambient music) we got the same set of sounds and noises. Some sound landscape.

There is only one problem… In the first case, it sounds like a work of art, even forty years later, while the second looks like a piece that any idiot can make.

Is mental energy, like emotions, transmitted through the result of creative activity?

I brought only the most extreme example, but for anyone who can think, it is easy to see all this throughout the rest of contemporary music product.

In any case, this is the explanation to a catastrophic drop in interest in electronic music worldwide. Making it became not only non-profitable but also not prestigious and irrelevant.

One particular case

Every person, from time to time, asks herself the question of how should she personally relate to the consumption of music today, when the issue of copyright is literally hanging in the air?

On the one hand, I am sure that, at heart, almost everyone understands that the work of good writers, composers and other creators of intellectual property must to some degree be compensated.

Otherwise, its production would almost stop; and that, I am sure, no one would want.

On the other hand, when we begin to apply this issue to ourselves, we quickly realize that when we get the slightest opportunity not to pay for books, music and movies (and in fact, and for everything else), we are happy to seize it.

And it does not matter what the law says on this issue, because the influence of law on our Internet activity is greatly exaggerated. I guess the law will have less and less impact as the information technologies progress, despite the activities of copyright defenders and other regulators. In fact, it is steadily approaching zero.

A minority will not be able to tame an overwhelming majority, especially in high tech era.

It was shown and proven a million times, and if some still don’t get it, it is solely their problem.

The moral side of the story matters little to me as well. I am sure that truly free people will never be guided by principles of public morality, which they replaced long time ago with personal principles.

Taking into account the absolute subjectivity of such concepts as “good” and “evil”, others’ perceptions in this regard are of lowest priority too.

“Morality caresses the weak, but falls under the strong”. I fully share that beaten truth and would only add that strong in the new century are precisely those who master technologies. That is, the vast majority of young and smart people, but not a bunch of functionaries, who yesterday had a clear problem with e-mail.

Either way, just for myself, I tried to define the way that I am going to consume music, while being in harmony with myself, before everything else.

Earlier, I was practicing digital hoarding, like most other people. At some point, however, I understood the absolute stupidity of this activity.

And, incidentally, its extreme inefficiency with regard to the expansion of my personal development in the area of music culture, which I care about deeply.

I notice that 99% of all new music that I downloaded, I have listened to only once. Then it was either staying as a ballast inside my computer, or was immediately deleted. I wrote earlier on the causes of this phenomenon, but now I am concerned with the consequences.

You don’t need to think too long to realize that I consumed most of this music in radio mode, and not in home media center mode. Such music never reached my iPod. I kept downloading, deleting, downloading, deleting until I understood the futility of the process.

At this point all music in the world was divided for me into two classes – music that is so good for me that I will listen to it for my whole life, and music, which is so “nothing”, that is was only worthy of brief one-time sampling.

Since then, I stopped downloading anything from the net.

All of my favourite albums have been bought long time ago on CD and on vinyl, and of course they were regulars on my iPod.

I switched to using the radio almost exclusively.

By radio, I certainly do not mean that mediocrity that is present on the FM dial in Russia (and not only there). I am talking about real radio, the one that Internet is giving me in the form of thousands of stations from all over the world, in quality that is acceptable for one-time music.

Soon I discovered practical benefits of this kind of music listening.

Unlike their prehistoric “colleagues” on the FM dial, real radio stations always tell me what they are playing at the moment. This leads to a huge number of musical discoveries, which I could only dream of before. Often, I get to real masterpieces, which I would never get to know through visits to countless music websites, with millions of bands whose names don’t tell me much.

And when I get to know them, I get an opportunity to explore band’s creativity and perhaps to buy their CD. Or download…

But it depends on the degree of the genius of the album and its ability to stand on a shelf next to ‘Queen: The Night at the Opera’ or ‘Air: Moon Safari’.

Music industry now has one and only chance to sell something to me: to show me something that I can strongly fall in love with. Love it so much that I will willingly want to buy it and put on my shelf. I think that it has no other way now, and won’t have it ever again.

From now on, only super-rarities will be sold for money. Masterpieces that are impossible to pass by. And whether music industry will offer me such, it is, honestly, its own problem.

But I do not rule out another scenario; furthermore, I feel it would be ideal.

When record business almost ceases to generate income (and this will happen, inevitably), all those involved in music just for money will leave it.

The few that remain will be creating only because they have real spiritual needs.

And, as is customary in such cases, all that is done with soul will be so good that we will want to buy it again.

There can’t be too much of good music…

Music industry in the state to which it arrived, does not like their customers. It does not like artists either. The music industry loves only itself. And this is the reason why the energy it spends does not come back to it in any form.

I started this article with a quote from King Crimson, and will finish it with the last line of the last song of the last LP by The Beatles.

This message has a strong meaning and is the quintessence of what the band wanted to say to the world. It shows their true attitude to people and creativity, and that is why records of this band sell and will always sell.

If the music industry can apply these words to itself even a little, then it has a chance.

- and in the end the love you take

is equal to the love you make (The Beatles)

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