Andrew Orlowski has just posted an excellent interview with Feargal Sharkey, the singer whose inimitable warble iced the cake that was The Undertones. Sharkey has, Orlowski reports, “crossed into regulatory and policy work” in the music business. His level-headed observations about the future of that business, at once realistic and optimistic, provide a nice counter to the fuzzy-headed thinking that often arises in discussions about online piracy, free music, and the cost structure of musicianship and recording in the digital era.
Sharkey praises the fact that the Net has provided many people with new ways to express themselves – “in my book anything that’s going to encourage people to be creative in any way gets my bloody applause every single time” – but he puts a fork into the rose-tinted arguments that piracy is good for the many musicians who struggle to turn their passion into a living:
I’m aware a lot of people seem to think that when downloading something off the internet for free, there’s a large, black, soulless, faceless, moneygrabbing multinational company there that will never miss the £7.99.
But the brutal reality of life is: according to the Musicians Union, 80 per cent of musicians will make less than £10,000 this year. And according to the MCPS, 95 per cent of composers and songwriters will earn less than £15,000 in royalty income.
Invariably, it’s artists and creators who are at the sharp end of this food chain, and they’re the ones that will get to the stage that they’ll give up and go and do something else – because they have to pay the rent, pay the gas bill and feed themselves, buy shoes, and deal with all the things normal people expect to deal with in life. So people have to realise there’s an implication in this.
There’s been all this play about FairTrade coffee and FairTrade sugar – but what about FairTrade bloody music?
Good question.
I completely agree with Sharkey. It’s just slightly frustrating that all these publishers and record companies were so slow to react. There’s no excuse for the fact that it’s easier to steal the music than to buy it. It’s getting better but for a long time it was like a supermarket without any checkouts. Until they make it easier to buy the music than to steal it they’re always going to be fighting a losing battle. Shareholders really ought to start getting tough with these music execs, perhaps even replace with some of these cheeky scamps who are stealing all the music.
I don’t see a direct link between the low wages for songwriters and composers he cites and free music downloads. Where is the study that connects the dots here? If we look at the wages of PERFORMERS, I would guess that they are making a lot more than the £15K/year! Its kind of a generational thing: Sharkey comes from an era when success in the music business was measured in number of vinyl records shipped with bands expecting to be on the radio for decades making money off airplay. Do you remember the gold, silver and platinum records awards? You don’t here much about that today.
If you look at the modern music business with rap/hip/hop being the current form of pop music, you see a completely different mindset. Artists tour most of the year, make product endorsements and appear in movies and TV to enhance basic royalties. Rap artists tend to appear suddenly, peak, make most of their money quickly and disappear after only a few years avoiding the long term impact of free downloads on their bottom line. Have you heard about M&M lately? The point I am making is that intellectual property as we know it MAY be dead. Artists may have to find other ways to finance themselves rather than depend on CD or download sales alone.
£7.99? For how long hasn’t he been buying a disk? Vinyl generation, indeed. Many of my friends haven’t bought either for a very long time, and none would thing a disk is still so cheap! An easy thing to remember? iTunes is considered predatory prices by the producers.
It’s a good thing he complains about how little money musicians *have* *been* making for *decades*: the shitty wages he describes have nothing to do with digital, or piracy, but the insane margins that the producers get.
I’m not familiar with the conventional rate sin the UK, but if it is anywhere near the 4% that the Writer’s Guild of America have been fighting for, that would be far more then what musicians get here in France (a country praised for it’s generously socialist subsidies for culture) — what they get, provided they manage to find their way in the maddening maze of legal minutiae. No one can tell how or where the money actually flows — no one: composers, copy editors, producers, side musicians, roadies. . . and I can tell this because I share my desk with the one who has been looking into that question for years.
We don’t need more money to “music” or “poor starving musicians” or “greedy corporation”, we need transparency: if I spend £15 on a disk, how much will go to the musicians, how much will help new bands to start, how much will feed the cocaine addiction of producers?
FairTrade for music exists, and it’s not about earning decent wages, but knowing who you buy the music from, being clear about what the value chain is. FairTrade for music has been around for years, and it’s called iTunes, eMusic, _Rainbows_ by Radiohead; FairTrade for music can be about letting the CDs fairly be copied (no marginal costs), and the performers rewarded —— because this is want has been, scarcely but truly, been paying the rent for decades.