I can’t tell you how much I loathe the cult of Australian Idol. some fellow music lovers see it as a good thing; the expansion of the music market. “It gets people passionate about music”, they argue.
My argument is quite different. What ever happened to creativity? Whatever happened to innovation? New songs, new films, new concepts?
Why is it that our popular culture is so overwhelmed with the remade, remodeled or re-adapted? We have been inundated with conservatism at corporate level, employees not wanting to take a punt and rather preferring to reach for the safe option of cover songs, cartoon characters and apparently saleable multimedia franchises. Seemingly, this is the end product of the media behemoth; products so predictable, so fucking boring but again so inoffensive that after exercising one or two original ideas, we are left with Hulk (Marvel adaption), Spiderman 2 (sequel of another Marvel adaption, Cheaper by the Dozen (another remake), Shrek 2 and so on, and then cover songs that are clogging up the charts like plaque on a diseased artery, covers like “What About Me?” from Shitbox Shannon (which is currently number 2 on the Irish charts!), “Word Up”, “My Prerogative” and “Boys of Summer” – these are songs which have entered the charts just within the last few weeks, let alone the past few months.
The economics of the entertainment industry have a lot to do with this. The dot com boom heralded a new era of “content provision”. Artists, creators, writers and musicians become content providers and the companies around them became the “content distribution networks”. As a result of the internet, these companies followed a belief that they would become obsolete unless they got into the content game and could own the coolest bands, brands, songs and TV shows. Copyright was as hot as hell.
Company heads then realised that the easiest way to increase the level of content was by buying out other companies with large content libraries and merging with them. They reckoned it would save on overhead and they would have a huge catalogue that they could then distribute. Universal took over the much larger PolyGram in an incredible $US10bn deal, BMG took over Zomba, EMI and Warners marriage was stopped at the altar, and now Sony and BMG have just merged their music units only last week. An alternative view was that if the content providers merged with new economy businesses then it would create the best of both worlds: a company which had old copyright and new distribution. One of the most crazy and stupid examples of this was the merger of Time Warner and AOL, where Time Warner believed that by merging as equals with a considerably smaller and largely US based ISP, they would have the channels to reach the customer. Of this merger which was nutted out one weekend, rival Rupert Murdoch described a conversation between two members of the Time Warner board: “what the hell were we smoking that weekend?”
The problem with the mergers hasn’t been the larger companies dominating the industry, but the fact that their mergers have not led to the pot of gold, the synergies and massive savings they believed they would. Economies of scale are largely irrelevant in the music industry because it doesn’t matter whether there are 20 artists or 200, holding all else equal the same money is spent on promotion and development in any case. So in an effort to exercise some cost savings, companies cut down the amount of A&R staff and artist development staff. It is relatively cheaper to buy a company and keep the back catalogue than it is to actually develop your own talent from scratch. Instead of creating, innovating and providing choice, the boards of these companies chose to cheat by buying revenue and market share – generally a short term approach.
Considering new artists are the lifeblood of these companies, one would think that they invest heavily in the area, testing the product thoroughly before releasing it to the market. But no, it’s all too hard. While there is an abundance of Marketing, Finance and Administration staff in any Australian record company, it would be rare if there was any more than one A&R Manager being given a minimal budget to invest in new talent. Hence the decline of the industry into the rehash territory, where it’s much easier to revive an old hit with the excrement of an elaborate TV game show such as Australian Idol or Popstars.
And they wonder why people aren’t connecting to new acts? The music industry has forgotten that it is not as simple as regurgitating the old and providing content for their distribution networks. It’s about telling a story, about connecting on an emotional level, about building a fan base and about encouraging people to be zealots of their favourite band or artist. Until these companies return to the days of devoting love and attention on their “artist R&D”, they will merge into insignificance.
Until that point however, we will continue to have media companies reward the talentless and mediocre.
I’d love to read some comments on the length of time before we start seeing real talent on Aussie TV again; if ever…
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