Culture | The economics of the music industry

From rock to crock

Two very different books analyse the troubles plaguing the music industry

Original Rockers. By Richard King. Faber & Faber; 252 pages; £18.99.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy. By Stephen Witt. Viking; 296 pages; $27.95. Bodley Head; £20.

TWO months ago Geoff Barrow, the instrumentalist for Portishead, an award-winning British rock group, revealed on Twitter that 34m streams of his music had earned him precisely £1,700 ($2,604) after tax. He sarcastically applauded Apple, YouTube and Spotify, and his record label, Universal, for “selling our music so cheaply”. Some have quibbled with Mr Barrow’s figures, but no one has suggested the band has earned more than a tenth of a penny for each song streamed. What is more, few artists achieve Portishead’s level of success, which suggests that writing music has become a lousy way to make a living. Two new books present differing explanations of how the economics of the music industry fell apart.

Richard King’s wistful effort, “Original Rockers”, reflects on the three formative years in the mid-1990s when he worked at Revolver, a record shop in Bristol, Portishead’s home town. It was an establishment that cultivated a high-handed air and “a reputation for stocking and specialising in iconoclastic and esoteric records”. Dominated by its anti-social and abrasive manager, Roger, Revolver was not a place to pick up top-40 hits. Instead, it was a real-life version of Championship Vinyl, the fictional record shop in Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, “High Fidelity”, in which asking for a lowbrow record risked the ridicule of the staff. Mr King recalls one customer at Revolver emptying the contents of the bin across the floor after Roger had insisted the record he was looking for “was more likely to be found in a skip than in Revolver”.

The ethos of the shop was never commercial; its main purpose was to be a cultural centre for those with marginal tastes. For Mr King, daily visits as a student eventually yielded a job and access to “a larger and deeper archive, one that could be reached only with Roger’s assessment and approval”. During his years in the shop, he discovered reggae and dub and experimental English folk. But his music education came to end when the shop’s finances entered a downward spiral. Mr King blames this on the atmosphere that Roger cultivated: “For all our regular customers who visited the shop expecting to engage in badinage, there was a larger number who, having in their eyes been humiliated, decided never to return.” Revolver also refused to acknowledge changing tastes: “As customers arrived, looked through the racks, then slowly left, their empty-handed departure gave the impression they had long grown tired of seeing the same wilting sleeves in front of each divider.” But were there larger forces at work, beyond Revolver’s narrow walls?

In “How Music Got Free”, an accomplished first book, Stephen Witt considers the nearly 15,000-strong records he collected in his 20s. He built his archive without ever stepping into a record shop, thanks to music piracy on an “industrial scale”. In explaining how he, and millions of his peers, were able to get away with it, he weaves a narrative around three people. Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German audio engineer who created the MP3 format by learning how to record high-fidelity music using very small amounts of data. At a house party Dell Glover recognised music by artists whose work he knew. Mr Glover did not recognise these particular songs because they had yet to be released; the only reason the DJ had them was because they had been smuggled out of the plant where they were being put on CDs. Mr Glover sensed an opening, learned about MP3s and soon became “the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music”. As the leaks became impossible to ignore, Doug Morris, a senior record-label executive, was forced to get to grips with a technology that he had no desire to understand.

Part of what makes Mr Witt’s story so compelling is that none of this trio is quite what he seems. Mr Brandenburg released the software that enabled PC users to digitise their CDs for free, a move that Mr Witt believes “catalysed a golden age of copyright infringement that decimated the music industry” and made him extremely rich. Mr Glover, who undercut the earnings of thousands of musicians, is revealed to be a tireless worker, good with money and devoted to his young son. And Mr Morris’s business instincts turn out to be as applicable in the digital age as they were in the analogue period.

There is no happy ending. Piracy became widespread, causing a long-term decline in record sales, whereas legal digital stores, such as Apple’s iTunes, enabled songs to be sold on a piecemeal basis. These forces combined to sound the death-knell for the album format, which had provided high profit margins for record labels and desirable editions that facilitated a record-shop culture. Mr Witt notes that customers of next-generation streaming services, such as Spotify, tend not to pirate, but nor, as Mr Barrow suggests, are they paying as much for their music. The piracy-induced switch from owning a record collection to renting one has cost both record shops and artists dear.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "From rock to crock"

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