The music industry is dead, deceased, over, kaput, it has shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible: it is an ex-industry.

The essential reason for this is a fairly simple one. Companies profit by solving a problem and charging for the solution. Industries profit because the scale of many solutions prohibits small groups or individuals from attempting them. People who want to move about conveniently and quickly have a problem. The solution is cars. Making your own car is prohibitive in scale, thus: car industry. People in cars need petrol. Processing crude
oil and disributing petrol to service stations is prohibitive in scale, thus: Oil industry, thus: an economy.

Industries can solve problems because they are large enough to organise labour forces and can afford to buy raw materials in enough bulk to make the purchase worthwhile. The banking

Industry, for example, can afford enough money and enough staff to create the illusion that it has enough to
lend you the price of a house.

Industries do not, on the whole sell anything except a solution. The companies themselves – that is, those whose income varies with success – do not make cars or live on oil rigs. They do not mould tires or point dispassionately to the night payment window long after you’ve approached the locked petrol station door. What they do, at heart, is find all the
people needed to make a car or a petrol supply or loans, then find as many people as possible who need those problems solved, introduce them, then charge a fee for their time.

This is not, sadly, evil. It might seem evil but it isn’t. Industries add value. Just as a baker adds value to flour, eggs and sugar by organising them into cakes (F+E+S+structure=$$$), industries add value to raw materials, labour and design by organising them into products. Their efforts may seem ephemeral, tricksy and disproportionately rewarded – but without them you wouldn’t have the product and the problem would be unsolved (This is an oversimplification and there are models that compete with this – the worker’s co-op being the most obvious example – but that is our economy as it stands and manicheanism rarely achieves anything).

The health of an industry then, depends on two things:
1. The existence of problems that need solving
2. The complexity of the solution being such that individuals and small groups cannot achieve it.

So let’s look at the music industry.

First: what problems existed that needed solving?

I think these are threefold:
1. People could not listen to music in their homes without paying for the services of extremely scarce musicians.
2. Musicians could not be heard by more people than they could feasibly play to directly.
3. People did not have enough information to discover music they might care to listen to.

The complex solutions provided by the music industry were:
1. To bulk buy the otherwise prohibitively expensive machines needed to record musicians and re-use them to record multiple artists. To then liaise with vinyl pressers, graphic designers, distributors, shops and others so as to offer the resulting recordings for sale. Solving the first two problems rather neatly
2. To pay press officers, pluggers, marketers, brand consultants and their ilk to position the branded music prominently in the marketplace (prinicipally the traditional print media industry – also dead, but that’s someone else’s blog), alerting consumers to its existence and framing it in as kindly a light as possible.

By combining these two solutions, the music industry was effective in connecting producers and consumers. They took raw materials (that’s me and my friends in London) and added value to them until they were appealing to you (that’s you). And everyone may well have lived happily ever after, but for computers. Computers and the internet have changed everything.

Obviously piracy (a term approaching obsolescence as a metaphor unless we are supposed to imagine an eighteenth century where everyone under the age of thirty was casually puttering about the Spanish Main on galleons that cost less than milk to hire for a day helping themselves to exotic spices and coinage with only the most vanishing amount of peril or risk of
hanging) is assumed to be the big problem by most of the industry and commentariat. But really, it is a passing distraction. The death of the record industry is not the result of teenagers downloading music – this is a symptom of the more fundamental shift in the economics of the situation.

The real point is this: The problems that the industry existed to solve no longer require expensive large scale solutions. A musician needs very little money to record music well enough that it will be considered listenable by an audience. Musicians have no need for discs of plastic, distribution infrastructures or shops in order to allow remote audiences to access the music they make. Audiences with Last.fm, access to mp3 blogs, Pandora, its heirs and whatever the next patented algorithm turns
out to be have need less and less for their information about music to be filtered through publicists and ad-revenue driven magazines. There is no large prohibitive cost associated with the production, promotion and distribution of music – consequently there is no need for an industry. The access to infrastructure that was the industry’s only scarce resource has
become valueless – the industry adds no value, it is obsolete.

Now this may seem alarming. It often alarms me - as, committed as I am to the free flow of data and its benefits, I am also rather drastically in need of a pay day. Nobody has any idea what will replace the music industry as a means of preventing musicians from vanishing into the straight gutter of gainful, creativity deadening employment. That’s the way of things like this. Things fall apart. They have to because, before they do, they stifle their replacements. The old once-brilliant scientists
have to die their way out of tenured professorships before their brilliant successors can revolutionise the departments. The good enough must be annihilated before the better can gain traction.

NYU professor Clay Shirky’s rather brilliant piece on the death of print points out that the revolution prompted by the internet is mimicking that prompted by the arrival of print in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (as described by Eisenstein). As Shirky puts it ‘The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given
experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread’ . This was true with the invention of the Octavo size volume, it was true with the explosion of the blogosphere as a source for political journalism and it will be true of whatever comes to replace the music industry. Shirky points out that ‘Society doesn’t need
newspapers. What we need is journalism’. He’s right. And we don’t need a music industry, we need music. That won’t change. If EMI goes the way of Woolworth's it still won’t change. There will be music – it is just up in the air what kind of new structures will be built around it.

The recession can only be a good thing. It will hasten the demise of the old and invigorate the search for the new. The set-in-their-ways’ and the monetarily constrained will cease to hold the rest of us back. Desperation will prompt economic adventurousness. The kids who saw music as a viable career path and self-servingly gifted the world with their mindless,
heartbreaking crap over the last decade will go back to something with a promotion ladder to it. Hopefully, the myth of the hopelessly romantic neophobe artiste will be abandoned for the fiction it is as well. The driven eccentrics, on the other hand – the polymaths able to embrace tech and welcome change - will find the space to try out any and everything. Most experiments will fail, but some will take hold and from them new certainties will evolve to replace the ones we have lost. Now is the time to get to it. I’ve got a few ideas. I know quite a few people who’ve got some too. We’ll race you.

Article by Simon Indelicate
www.indelicates.com
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