Bethany Klein on Pop Music, Advertising, Labels, and Filters

Matt Palmquist of Miller-McCune interviews Bethany Klein of the University of Leeds regarding the interplay of pop music and advertising. (via Snarkmarket, who says about Miller-McCune, “Miller-McCune is also just an intriguing journalistic model: a foundation+subscription-supported magazine about the intersection between academic research and current social issues/problems, like a combination of the Chronicle and Mother Jones.”)

My comments are embedded in brackets.

[from Miller-McCune | Article | The Close Relationship Between Pop Music and Advertising by Matt Palmquist]

M-M: So what do we do about the labels?

Klein: (A long, heavy sigh.) What do we do about the labels? I’m not sure that I have specific answers for that, but my broader answer about the industry is to encourage more transparency in terms of media policy, media production and media regulation for the public to think about and deliberate on these issues. It’s kind of astounding when you think about how infrequently any regulatory issues are in the public eye; and when they are, they tend to be deeply moralistic issues, like the Parents Music Resource Center Senate hearings (in 1985, which resulted in the Recording Industry Association of America’s “explicit content” warning labels on CDs). You get a debate like that, which is really about protecting you from a certain kind of culture, but you almost never get issues in the public eye about allowing you to be exposed to as many different types of culture (as possible).

[The labels create an economy of false scarcity, and try to regulate the price — like the diamond cartel. But to us, it’s an attempt to meter culture, not to manage property rights.]

This is what the debate about media deregulation would extend to, but the public knows almost nothing about it. I say that I don’t have specific solutions because I think it’s up to the public, the citizens, to make those decisions — which they can’t do without any knowledge about how things work.

M-M: But these major labels employ several thousands of people worldwide; they’re such a huge part of the music industry. What do you think is the best way forward for them in this changing landscape?

Klein: (Another sigh.) It’s a really difficult question because I guess I just don’t really care. [emphasis mine.] I mean you’re right to say they employ thousands of people, but I think the music industry as it’s structured might be better off to raze it and start all over again and think about completely different systems of production and distribution, in which those thousands of people can still participate but in a slightly different way. It’s hard for me to think about how to fix an industry that, long before piracy, long before the digital revolution, was already failing in a lot of ways, in terms of cultural explorations.

M-M: How, exactly, were labels falling short?

Klein: Major labels function with the assumption that 90 percent of artists they sign are going to fail — that should have been a red flag for everybody. I mean that’s a bizarre business model in any arena.

[Actually similar to venture capitalists expectations for start-ups.]

But particularly in the cultural arena, the idea that the system through which culture is transmitted is dictated entirely by profit should concern us, because that’s going to narrow the types of culture that are transmitted.

[When our culture is treated as a private preserve by an industry instead of a commons shared by us, we are disenfranchised.]

And then, on top of that, the alternative venues of distribution are stuck in the shadows of these major labels. So it’s not like there’s a viable alternative, necessarily, for artists who don’t fit into this very narrow range that can become the 10 percent that are profitable and popular.

M-M: It also seems like there’s something missing: some kind of entity or service, either on the Internet or through another vehicle, to make up some of the ground that major labels have lost in bringing new music to consumers. Do you get that sense?

Klein: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. One of the advertising creatives that I spoke to talked about doing away with the middlemen of record labels, that ultimately music could be released straight through advertisers. And I just thought, “God, that’s so curious that he would see that as doing away with the middleman when it’s clearly replacing the middleman.” And I can’t say for sure whether advertising executives are worse than record executives, but I don’t think they’re better. So, yeah, I think there is a gap here. And what the Internet offers is some possibility of — if not completely removing a middleman — creating a more transparent middleman and one that doesn’t take away so much of the money. We’ll have to see if cases like Radiohead releasing their music the way they are now (their 2007 album, In Rainbows, was released as a digital download that customers could order for whatever price they chose), whether that starts to change the paths for other artists. I’m still not sure.

M-M: And, really, Radiohead is one of a handful of bands popular enough to take that kind of risk. How much meaning does that have for bands that aren’t at that level?

Klein: I feel the same way about MySpace. For the couple of examples of bands that have been discovered through MySpace and, not incidentally, then signed to major labels, there are millions that are just languishing on MySpace, and most deservedly so. But it’s difficult to assess the situation right now as we’re in it. I’m not sure everything is doom and gloom. And I will say that, as much as I’m opposed to the way that major labels do business, I do — and I will confess this — believe there needs to be a filter of some kind. MySpace is basically music being distributed filter-free; well, what that means is that you get a million bands that are kind of awful and a few gems in there. But it’s a lot of work for consumers, and I’m not sure it’s more productive, or even more liberating, than other models like independent labels that clearly have a type of music they’re going to promote or a fanzine culture that also starts to filter things for you. Do people write fanzines anymore? I don’t know; I guess they blog. Maybe that’s the problem with the many-to-many communication style of the Internet — it becomes more difficult to find gatekeepers or filters you find trustworthy.

This is where Klein falls down: the Web is a great resource for filtering around music, it’s just not iTunes or MySpace where you should be looking. Last.fm’s social filtering is a great example, as in Pandora’s Music Genome. Witness the assault on Pandora by the music industry around music ownership as an example of why taking back filtering away from the hit-based, mass, industrialized music scene is an act of cultural resistance.