It’s Music, Jim, But Not As We Know It
Accusations that some big name musical acts have been miming their vocals raises some tricky questions.
Popular music is in danger of becoming a parody of itself. Where once we dreamed of a fairer, more equitable landscape, big money is ever more concentrated in the hands of a shrinking group of artists and record companies.
The problem: at least one of those big names has been accused of miming their vocals, raising some uncomfortable questions. Not the least of which: Are we being suckered into paying insane amounts for a one-off, premium artistic creative experience which turns out to be anything but.
For sure, it’s not the only problem in the music industry. But it does illustrate the absurd extremes the industry has gone to to preserve its hegemony.
Let’s take a closer look.
First off, the industry has defied the predictions — made by David Bowie, among others — that a long tail would evolve which benefitted home-spun talent, broke the monopoly of the major record labels, and lead to a new ‘artistic class’.
But, after exhausting all other options, the record companies, and streaming companies like Spotify, have been clever. Twenty years ago the industry was on the ropes. Napster looked to have crowbarred open recorded music, ripping the digital song on a CD into an MP3 file small enough to be freely distributed, freely shared and freely downloaded. Who would ever pay for recorded music again?
It took a while, but a way was found. The question was asked: why do people want to own music? The answer was: they don’t, if they can get access to that music whenever they want. Enter streaming. So then it was just a question of cost. Well, two questions. How much would users pay, and how little would artists settle for?
The answer to the second question was easier: it’s not how much the artists would settle for, but the record companies. And by the time the question needed an answer, that was really only a discussion among three players as the others had been gobbled up: Sony, UMG and Warner. Which made agreement easy. The three have exerted constant pressure on the streamers to pay more royalties to the big artists and less to the long tail.
This brings in decent money. But the real money is elsewhere: performance. The music industry has shifted back to what it was before the introduction of recorded music.
This is how big players make their money. Live music accounted for more than half of overall music industry revenue in 2023, rising 26% year on year (more than recovering from the pandemic.) But most of this money is driven by big names — Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Coldplay, Elton John. Taylor Swift grossed more than $1 billion from her Eras Tour. Eagles made $70 million this year from tours.
But it still entails a cost — especially on the artists. Playing sets every night can be wearing. So within the ‘live’ sphere there have been innovations.
One of them is not to tour. It’s called a residency, and U2 grossed $230 million from theirs at the Las Vegas Sphere. Eagles have just started theirs.
Another is not to sing. A British musician called Fil has been running some recordings of live performances through software that shows the exact pitch of each note, and he’s demonstrated that a number of artists, including Eagles, are actually miming some, if not all, of their vocal performances. (He’s not the only one: Kiss, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Dua Lipa, Britney Spears, etc have all been accused of miming instruments and/or vocals.)
If you’ve coughed up several hundred dollars to watch and hear them play, you might be a little upset. You expect a few elements to be pre-recorded, especially if the artist is also doing some complicated dance moves, or flying through the air, but as far as I can see, most of the Eagles frontline were standing in a row (like Pretty Maids, you might argue). No trapezes or twerks in sight.
Of course, Abba have presented what many think is the next step — holographic avatars — but I think we’re still some ways off everyone doing that. But it does open up possibilities for posthumous performances. Or at least to further blur the lines between what is a real performance and what isn’t, addressing the issue of whether Eagles can continue to make money ‘performing’ after they have all gone to that Hotel California in the sky.
What Fil unearthed, and continues to unearth, is troubling. He tells me that no one has gotten back to him to complain, or sue him, and his methodology is transparent. It suggests that some artists see performing live as both a pure money-making event, and the definition of ‘live’ to be fungible. (It also explains why such concerts usually ban audience members from shooting video or recording audio on their phones; it was these clandestine recordings that allowed Fil to compare ‘live’ with a recording of a previous concert.) Fil, it should be said, does not see this as the norm across the industry — his YouTube channel includes a lot of genuinely live performances and told me “I think within the professional community miming is not looked upon too fondly.” (I noticed some of Fil’s analysis has been removed because of a copyright claim.)
Vicious cycle
In short, the industry has caught itself in a vicious cycle it may not be aware of. If the big money moves from audio to performance, however loosely you define it, then you now have a bottleneck in the supply chain, namely the artists themselves. This doesn’t matter too much for someone like Taylor Swift, though it has made her a target for crazies, but it does for those who aren’t able to hit those high notes anymore. It’s in some ways understandable: Eagles last had a hit single in (checks notes) 1980, with I Can’t Tell You Why, and the median age of the current line-up is 76. (But this shouldn’t be an excuse: Fil points out that other artists like Roger Daltrey, who’s older than any surviving Eagle, can still belt out The Who’s old hits pitch perfect, in the original key.)
In short, live takes its toll, and if that’s the only way to make money fans may be increasingly unwilling to shell out if they find out they’re not really watching what they think they’re watching. It might not deter many music fans, but it’s early days: we still don’t know how many artists do this. Fil has only so many hours in a day, but I feel we haven’t heard the end of this. A collapse in confidence could lead to a collapse in demand for this ultra-profitable revenue stream. A ticket for Eagles could cost between $300 and, well, the limit. A lower-level suite for Las Vegas on December 6 would cost $35,139.82. (And don’t get me started on TicketMaster’s dynamic pricing.)
It’s a long way from where we thought the music industry was going at the turn of the century. Where we thought the internet and digital would more equitably distribute the value of an industry, it has done the opposite. Where did we go wrong? I suspect it has something to do with the same errors that led us to think that social media, in its original meaning of a Web 2.0 that flattened the barriers to entry of creating and distributing content, would spread the wealth around.
As things get easier to produce so an abundance of choice triggers Barry Schwartz’s ‘paradox of choice’. While many of us love the endless array of music we can listen to, and love supporting individual artists on Bandcamp, a lot of us get confused and overwhelmed and gravitate towards the most prominent. In this way record companies become more important because they are able to promote their artists across the full spectrum of media. The number of smaller artists grow, but the funnel between them and a decent income, let alone a big one, feels relatively tighter and tighter.
Long tail
Meanwhile, the long tail, ever longer and thinner, across the floor. Bandcamp, the most prominent marketplace for self-produced music, has more than a quarter of a million ‘active stores’ — meaning acts selling their music (in both digital and analog varieties, along with merch). That’s a three-fold growth over 2022.
Bandcamp is great for artists, but its vibrant community is more of an anachronism than a view of the future. Followers are often invited to name their own price for whatever they buy, and are invited to ‘listening parties’ with their favourite artist. Some artists offer subscriptions, where fans get all the albums released in a particular timeframe.
The company has changed hands twice in two years, and only half of its staff have survived the moves.
End of Scarcity
The other effect of more democratic means of production and distribution is this: the output is no longer scarce. Napster may no longer be with us, but it taught us that a CD or digital album wasn’t as valuable as we thought it was and coincided with the rapid decline of CDs. We stopped thinking of music as a possession and more as a service. When you buy a radio you don’t expect to own the sound coming out of it. Why should a smartphone be any different? Enter streaming services, where you pay for everything but, apparently, don’t care that own nothing.
So where is this all going?
But I think we’ve seen in the music industry the bifurcation I mentioned in the last piece — where communities of artists survive through a closer connection to their audience, while at the other end we see a widening of that gap (you’ve got to be pretty detached from your -per head audience to mime your way through your performance, hoping a ban on cellphone recording would keep your secret safe.)
If Bandcamp, or something like it, survives, then I think there’s hope that independent artists (including my own humble other self) still have a chance to make a modest income. That’s by no means assured. The options for playing live to promote your act are shrinking: artists are playing half the shows they were in 1994, according the Music Venue Trust, because doing so is too expensive.
AI
AI is the next wave, and it’s clear that the likes of Sony think it might make them richer. I’ve tried it out and I have to admit it comes up with some quite listenable stuff (here’s Udio’s effort at an early Yellow Magic Orchestra sound.) But it’s the musical equivalent of the awful AI art we’re drowning in. We will quickly learn to differentiate between AI and real music and woe betide anyone who tries to sell the former masquerading as the latter.
But done well it might create its own musical niche, and we can’t afford to be precious about it. Music has been artificially generated since the old piano rolls of the late 19th century. Algorithmic music dates back to the 1960s, and even I was using a primitive sequencer in 1982. Bands like Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark used drum machines (or tape recordings of drum machines.) Nowadays many songs are ‘composed’ of pre-fab loops woven together. Artificially created music is something we’ve long embraced.
It’s the songwriting that we probably hope will still remain a human-centric endeavour, the application of art. But even there we are bound to be disappointed. Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson composed a suite for string quartet using the ILLIAC I computer in 1957. Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory in Paris created an algorithm in 2002 that could resume a composition after a live musician stopped playing. The likelihood is that it will lead to a ‘just good enough’ approach to using music in ads, TV, airports, lifts, jingles, phone trees, in the process putting a generation of jobbing music creators out of work.
Money for God’s Sake
The bigger lesson? Art is created by artists, but while we claim we love art and want to support it, the people financing the production and distribution of it are more concerned with Mammon.
The music industry is probably a canary in a coal-mine. It was the first major industry to be ‘disintermediated’ by digital/internet, and things looked bleak. But it tackled its problems and is now more profitable than ever, while the actual number of people who are able to make a living from it has shrunk. (These two are not unconnected: the big three have successfully pressed Spotify to pay more to the bigger artists and less to the others.)
So we have to assume that these trends will continue, and that they will apply to other industries too. Books have followed a similar pattern; podcasts are currently doing the same thing to radio/news/audio. Global podcast ad spending is likely to hit $4 billion this year, with more than 400 million podcasts. But the top 500 account for 44% of podcast ad spend. While podcasts aren’t as concentrated as music and the written word, it’s heading that way. I would imagine newsletters following a similar trajectory, as I mentioned in the last piece.
So where does this leave us? Music is always going to find a market, and the great thing that digital + internet has given us is the power of discovery. It’s just that not so many of us as we thought might be able to make a living from it: only 4% of the 200 million ‘creators’ worldwide make more than $100,000 a year. A YouTuber with 20,000 views per a day earns a little over the U.S. poverty line. That means that 97.5% of YouTubers don’t make enough to reach that line.
AI will only make that worse. Record companies have made clear they take AI seriously — both by exploring its potential and coming after companies that might challenge them. I don’t imagine AI will follow a predictable path: none of the prior disruptions in music this century have been. But I don’t see anything in there to suggest that original, heartfelt, authentic music will come out on top.
My suggestion? Dig around Bandcamp and look for some new stuff to listen to and support. My belief is that this is what scares music industry execs — a broad church of music lovers with catholic tastes. Rob Stringer, CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, acknowledged to Bloomberg recently that the power of the algorithm in streaming, pushing similar songs to users to keep them listening to the same kind of stuff, had been hugely profitable. But he saw the downside:
I listened to everything because the BBC had a government mandate to play you every type of music. So I was kind of open to that experience. Whereas I think the disadvantage with automated taste is that you end up, as you said, being funneled the same music.
I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here, where he argues that this is about art, not money (he was an early Clash fan, so I have to.) But to me good algorithms, which tried to dig deeper into what you liked rather than just as close a match as possible, could unravel the streaming model quite quickly. You would quickly rub up against the limitations of Spotify and seek out more esoteric fare on the likes of Bandcamp.
Hurry though. Bandcamp itself feels like a commons living on borrowed time.
