On The Value of Music
When you think about the value of music, what springs to mind?
Maybe you think, “Well, you can dance to it, it communicates a mood, sentiment, or a feeling.”
Perhaps, like me, you think of a favourite song, or a memory that you associate with a particular piece of music.
Or maybe, more generally, you think about that moment when you reach a perfect state of oneness between artist, song, and yourself, when everything that you feel is reflected in everything you hear.
One thing I don’t think of is money. How much a record costs to purchase. How much a record label gave a band to make the record. How much the label spent on the band’s behalf to promote the record. How much the band actually spent on the record, as opposed to the amount of the advance spent on alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, bling, personal expenses, instruments, equipment, etc.
What percentage of the record’s sales the artist is entitled to (industry standard is 15% of everything after the record company breaks even)? How much of that percentage is owed to a manager, an artist’s lawyer, etc.?
All of these factors are critical to the existence of most of the modern popular music catalog, but none of them are particularly relevant to the experience of music, which is a much more emotional and subjective thing.
For instance, I don’t remember how much of my allowance my mom and/or I paid for Van Halen’s 1984 when I was eight (likely somewhere between $4.99 or $6.99 on cassette at Beltway Plaza Waxie Maxie’s), but I know every note and nuance of Hot For Teacher and to this day I do not understand how the opening drum solo works.
Since 1984, a lot has changed. Making a record used to mean booking expensive time at a professional recording studio, which usually includes a house sound engineer, maybe hiring a producer skilled in the art of the muse as well as the process of recording, and then there’s expenses, food, drinks, and somewhere to sleep for the band. It got expensive really quickly. Usually an artist would want a record label to finance it based on a demo the artist sacrificed and saved to make.
These days, making a record means having a laptop and plugging a mixer into it. Anyone can do it for a virtually unlimited amount of time in the comfort of their own home. With a lot of work and a few good microphones, a talented artist can eventually produce something that even a major label would be proud to release, at least, sonically speaking.
How much is music worth to the average music consumer?
Without getting into an unnecessary rehash of Napster, the RIAA, and the ever-falling recognition of music as a commodity, at the most basic level, what is music worth to the average fan?
I’ve stayed up late, worked odd jobs, set up multiple computers for click-a-thon ticket purchases, camped out, and traveled cross-country to see performances by my favourite artists.
So in the sense of the lengths I’ll go to experience it, music is worth a great deal to me, and I imagine, most people who care about such things.
However, is recorded music worth a lot of money to the average music consumer? Anyone in the record industry will tell you that it’s not, and increasingly so.
The old guard of the major media companies and their music subsidiaries have a pretty good thing now in that conventional radio stations dutifully bring their wares straight to a willing market, a steady diet of mostly pre-fab pop stars with some exceptions, plucked from a viral video, or maybe a celebrity’s son/daughter, perhaps an Idol finalist. The label knows what they're selling, and mostly has an existing audience ready to buy.
Of course, these stars have very little negotiating power with their label and are under tremendous pressure simply to recoup the amount of money the label spends making them a household name. Even more than in the old days, they owe the label EVERYTHING, often having signed on to 360 degree deals that include not only the record, but touring revenue, merchandise, publicity, etc.
Gone are the days where hundreds of bands would negotiate anything from zero to full artistic license, take the label's money to make an album, and then take home 50% or more of their ticket gross while letting the label figure out how or even whether to sell the record. For every Dark Side of the Moon or Blood Sugar Sex Magick, there were a thousand albums we’ve never heard of, many of which never even saw release.
The new status quo of easily commoditised pop stars is much more controllable from a profit/loss standpoint. Idol stars come pre-developed with a built-in audience and name recognition. That’s half the battle right there. The same is true of celebrities and their offspring.
But what if you’re not interested in making pop music? What if you aren’t a celebrity or the spawn thereof? What if you don’t have the looks or the knack for cliché and sports metaphors to make it in reality TV?
What if you’re just somebody who wants to make your own sound and let people hear it?
You can still do it, but a record company isn’t likely to want to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars making you a household name, and you probably shouldn’t expect what’s left of the record-buying public to make you wealthy while you are mostly unknown. That ship has sailed, and the industry in which that is possible no longer exists.
A few years ago, I put together an e.p. in the spare bedroom of the house my partner and I were renting. It was called 1/2 Mast, and was a meditation of sorts on the second Bush Administration, the Iraq War, Lone Gunmen, and the Military Industrial Media Complex. We're talking commercially viable stuff here.
At the time, I was inclined to give it away on my website for free, but my partner said that I’d spent a bit of money on a microphone, guitar strings, drumsticks, tambourine and the like, and encouraged me to try to recoup my costs. I decided to sell it for $4, invested in a PayPal-friendly e-commerce program for my website and emailed everyone I knew a short blurb about it. I managed to sell four copies, to a former bandmate, my cousin, my partner and my mom.
Granted, I was an amateur performer at best (this was my first real foray beyond the drum kit), so I wasn’t in a great position to promote it to the world. There wasn’t much to be done about it, but it was unfortunate, because to this day, 1/2 Mast is my favourite collection of music I’ve put together, and I am deeply proud of it. You can download it for free here.
At that point I returned to my initial inclination, which was the following: If you are not an established artist and have little in the way of a built-in fanbase, you probably can’t expect people to pay for your original music. Hell, most major-label artists don’t expect to make money on a record anymore, so it seems unreasonable to expect to do it yourself, especially without a multinational conglomerate bribing radio networks on your behalf.
Freeing Art From Commerce
Admittedly, my music is free because nobody wants to pay for it, but even if people did want to pay for it (and some have tried), I think I would still prefer to give it away. I have been paid to license my music, and I’d be happy to take money for live appearances if for some reason there was an interest in my doing that, but right now, I like that there is no monetary motivation going into the actual production of the music I make.
When I write a song, I don’t think to myself, “Would someone pay money for this?” Nor do I consider questions like, “Does this measure up to things on the radio?” More stuff I don’t consider: “Is this catchy enough?” “Have I added enough hooks?” “Is the first song on my record the strongest song?” “Is rock music selling this year?” “That sounds too much like this, and this isn’t cool anymore, if it ever was.”
I've also determined that I don't want to live the life of a career musician. I don't want my family and survival to depend on my ability to write or play a song, how much a bar wants to pay me, or any number of other factors beyond my control. It's a really hard life that I have failed at in the past, and I feel much more comfortable letting a reliable day job maintain my quality of life.
By freeing my art from commerce, I find that there is no outside pressure to impose external notions of what music should be on myself.
The only pressure I feel is my own personal drive to craft something with integrity and heart, something from my point of view that only I could make.
And to my credit, I’ve managed to give my music away to many, many people through my website. Did they like it? Is it on heavy rotation on anyone’s iPod? I have no idea, and the less I know, the better, honestly, because success breeds repetition, and I like that I’m still stabbing in the dark with new and different (to me, anyway) approaches.
The only thing that matters to me is the possibility that I might communicate something of my experience to a friend, a family member, or maybe someone who came across my website. If I can provide them with a moment of catharsis or enjoyment, provoke a thought, or spark a memory, that is worth more to me than any amount of money I could have asked for which likely would have prevented them from having a listen.
That bond is the value of music to me. All I really want from music is the pleasure of making it and the honor of sharing it.