It’s unusual to find a music critic writing a thought-provoking and intelligent piece on the UK music industry. Andy Gill writes for The Independent and this excellent piece appeared in The Independent On Sunday 20 July, 2010, just prior to the release of the Barclaycard Mercury Prize shorlist. It’s also unusual for us to include a piece by an external writer, but we felt it was an important enough piece to include on Shakenstir.

Andy Gill: Glittering ceremonies cannot disguise the problems of the music industry

The nominees for music’s biggest prize are announced today, but the industry is in terminable decline

Tuesday, 20 July 2010

This lunchtime, the list of nominees for music’s Mercury Prize will be announced, an occasion treated with almost as much ego-primping folderol as the announcement of the actual winner, sometime in September. Next year, perhaps, there will be an even earlier event to announce the date of the shortlist announcement? That would probably suit the award’s sponsors, which since the collapse of the original backer - ironically, given the subsequent boom in telephonics, a telecommunications network - have included both hardware companies like Technics and Panasonic and more recently complete bankers like Nationwide and the current corporate partner, Barclaycard.

Indeed, it seems a little absurd to continue referring to the prize as the Mercury Prize, when there are other, pre-existent Mercury Prizes awarded in the fields of Professional Communications (that’s PR to you and me) and Radio and International Travel Catering (the latter perhaps presented in a little plastic tray with a tinfoil lid). Then there’s the Australian brewery that has a Mercury Award named after its cider, which doubtless goes down better with the general public than Speech Debelle’s album did after winning music’s Mercury Prize last year.

So it’s a touch selfish of the Barclaycard Mercury Prize to insist on retaining its original title. There is, however, a certain irony in being named after a company that no longer exists, since that is the condition to which the entire record industry now apparently aspires - what little purpose it once retained now slipping from its grasp like a handful of mercury seeping through the cracks between one’s fingers.

Digital delivery - or downloading - has been the elephant in the music industry room for the best part of two decades now. Yet the record companies have been as one in their stubbornly ostrich-like refusal to tackle the issue in any sensible way, preferring instead to follow the American industry model of effectively criminalising their own customer base, demanding punitive fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars from teenagers found “guilty” of file-sharing, effectively the modern equivalent of taping albums for friends (which, of course, none of the industry executives would have ever dreamt of doing when they were teens). It’s an extraordinary position for a consumer industry to adopt, the kind of flailing-scorpion death-throes that surely portend ill for its future.

At last week’s Westminster eForum, Peter Jenner - who as former manager of Pink Floyd, founder of Blackhill Enterprises which managed The Clash and Ian Dury, and now Emeritus President of the International Music Managers’ Forum (IMMF) must be presumed to understand a thing or two about the music industry - was scathing in his contempt for the backwards nature of the record industry, with its desperate attempt to cling on to what he described as its “quasi-monopoly rights”. In the old days, artists may have been reliant upon the labels’ distribution systems for getting their product out to customers, but as Jenner pointed out, that is no longer the case. “In the online world, the marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero,” he explained, making it inevitable that the price of music will be pushed ever closer to zero, too.

Jenner doesn’t like to use the term “consumer” in the context of the digital realm, however: “In the digital world, we don’t ‘consume’ files: there is no limit to the number of files that can be copied; and every time you send a file to someone else, you increase the supply.” Attempts to stop people copying files, he believes, are as futile and misguided as the prohibition of alcohol in 1930s America. “The music business is about service, not product; but the record companies have always been in the product game.” Rather than the copyright extension for which the labels are desperately lobbying - that being their other obvious existing source of income - Jenner believes that a completely new model needs to be designed which will both satisfy the public’s demand for new content and allow the creators of that content, and those investing in them, to make a decent return on their creativity.