On The Perverse Effects Of An Upside Down Music Business

 

I began reading Mohamed Sadek’s piece A Musician’s White Whale: Perfectly Recreating the ‘Funky Drummer’ Beat with piqued interest as a music maker. As a session musician, composer, etc. I was initially and positively intrigued. But as I read on I became less so and ultimately annoyed with the once nascent and now well established practices within what was once an industry comprised largely of creative players convening to physically perform and record original music.
 

The prevailing process of recording music during that "classic" era, an ideal was pursued by session participants. A respectful veneration rightly informed the various manifestations of influences within our cultural canon, conscious or not, then fueled a collectively inspired ensemble effort. I find the new laboratory-like process of seek, scan, scroll, review, formulate, emulate and import of existing sounds to be antithetical to that group-based spirit. It's cold and overly calculated, more akin to reviewing the lunch take-out menu over a colleague's shoulder than musically interacting, and I doubt that the joy in achieving its aspired result is anywhere near the same at the completion of "tracking".  Maybe on some other level, but I've witnessed collaborators in these "loop productions", and I sense a disparity in the overall goofy zeal that players show when listening back for the first time to the ensemble "take" they've just played as a group. I've indeed been involved in both processes and I'll humbly share that for me there's no comparing these two "celebrations".

Production processes steadily and constantly innovate and adapt to fashion/style/trends etc., and are then propelled and reinforced by larger economic interests and compulsions. But the most brilliant innovators and pioneers (such as the oft cited and reasonably artistically worshiped drummer Clyde Stubblefield) were bringing their own body, mind, heart and soul to render something truly original, albeit informed by vast and myriad influences, such as ever was the case. See this piece by Brian Eno.

Rap, Hip-Hop and other Avant-Garde brought audio sampling into the process, which led to further “needle-drop” tactics that were-- and are still--exciting within the paradigm of anything becoming art, with and to which I truly agree and occasionally subscribe. Digital recording has accommodated further and admirable “democratization” of musical creativity with prerecorded loops that undoubtedly allow more meagerly-funded and otherwise under-resourced artists to create on a higher and, I daresay, competitive level. 

I'm all in for creativity for its own sake, live and let live, live and let play. But I’m also an advocate for righteously corrective legislative efforts such as Fair Play/Fair Pay, and have been to Capitol Hill to help grass-roots lobbying for the rights of my fellow musicians who’ve been historically excluded from performance royalties by dint of the fact that US terrestrial radio had never been required to pay for those repeat usages via a legal loophole unchanged since the 1920’s. Those remedial efforts have been marginally successful despite--and perhaps due to--the confluence of transitions in market paradigms precipitated by non-unit based sales, digital streaming and subscription platforms. These developments--beginning in the mid 1990's--and the opportunistic measures ushering them to the fore have been the culprit for a tragically decimated income stream for songwriters and musicians. Perhaps not as much for deejays, but that’s another story.   

There nevertheless are forensic aspects in the re-conditioning of recorded music that have always proved fascinating, as any conversation with a “remastering” engineer will bear out, especially those who technically revitalize or restore older, deteriorating ad/or earlier more primitively recorded pieces (hello Smithsonian Folkways) to a new appreciably improved sonic state.

But when this current "blueprint the lick" niche market emerges (and I’m surely not intending to disparage anyone’s admirable work ethic here, much less those that are cultural and arts-based) whose very existence was born from the sonic pursuit of a “more affordable” requisition option other than the statutory norm, thus enabling the "client/buyer/creator" to sidestep higher fees and royalties that would be paid to the owner of the master recording (which could perhaps eventually trickle down to the artists, players, producers, etc., but more often does not) then proceeds elaborately, intricately further by laboriously recreating as many nuanced aspects of that original artistic expression as possible, the line from homage-like dedication is thereby brazenly crossed into the realm of  “just business”, at which point it becomes cultural appropriation and exploitation, all procedural artistic admiration notwithstanding.

I've personally and repeatedly seen my work as a writer, arranger and player become part of a larger licensed income stream for other business entities. I've seen musical notes that required reverent artistic deliberation and many hours formulating, creating and expressively performing end up as commercially marketed sheet music, the proceeds from which I've seen nary a penny. These situations aren’t rare. Artist's recording deals are signed and recording sessions (contracted and not) eagerly occur, but by the time the lucrative “back-end” is in someone else’s pocket, any efforts to reclaim some rightful share would require lawyers, energy and time. As many struggling (that's most) artist might attest, we’ve got more creative things to do. The litigious process of redemption can not merely sap the muse, but devour the spirit along with other resources more wisely spent elsewhere. 

In light of all this, I read here of a fellow musician, surely blessed with formidable talent and developed craftmanship glowingly praised for his entrepreneurial spirit and industrious efforts in meticulously recreating/re-manufacturing/reselling what someone else has already created, thus achieving a purvey-able facility that surgically removes the remunerative rights of those who are the original conveyors of such work as well as those of their survivors. And its lack of authenticity, as seemingly undetectable as it may claim, is surely to be felt on a deeper level of spiritual consciousness, as negligible as one may allow themselves to be convinced.

On one hand, this enterprising culling and (re)production of music (or its elements) is impressive. All sorts of sounds have been digitally sampled and marketed for over a half century. Obversely, when entire performances, riffs and licks that originally channeled through a talented human while in a spiritually high (and collaborative) expressive state are deconstructed, analyzed, rebuilt, reproduced and marketed anew as if it were an original creation, it casts a scorching and unbecoming light on this increasingly more normalized but lamentably vampiric age. Whose hands made that nearly exact but always better music in the first place?

~JC