CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project

Cameron Gray writes

It's Time, Baby

07

to die by your side the pleasure, the priv’lege is mine take me home, tonight take me anywhere, i don’t care

Morrissey wrote those lines a long time ago. I’ve been listening to this song, covered by somebody I don’t know, on a Rough Trade compilation I bought in London in the spring of 2006. It hits home. I came to the Smiths in college in 1988, a few years after I had bought my first cassette tapes: Never Mind the Bollocks, The Cure: Standing on a Beach, and VU & Nico. All purchased in Greenwich Village in 1985. Shortly thereafter I made the tennis team in high school listen to Catching Up With Depeche Mode, played on a crappy boombox on a concrete court.

I think there’s lots of people in my generation, born in the early 70s or late 60s, with money to buy decent music and an unsatisfied thirst to find it. Why are we unsatisfied? Because nobody can figure out what albums or singles to buy. My generation, now approaching or just passing 40, stopped reading Rolling Stone more than a decade ago. We have no interest in trolling through social networking sites like MySpace to find music. Nor are most of us paying attention to music journalism (dying art form that it is). There’s a very simple explanation for this. Music journalism isn’t worth reading. In fact, for the most part it’s disgraceful. I make a modest exception for the folks at Pitchfork and a couple other places, but the mainstream of music journalism is a joke.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s an opportunity. More precisely, it is a huge opportunity for record labels, most of which have been ridiculously slow to respond. People like me don’t have excess time to read a bunch of crap in order to find new music. But if you help me sift through the thousands of releases out weekly, I’ll buy music hand over fist. I’ll buy it in two formats: MP3 or vinyl. I’ll buy it as a 7” with an A and a B-side, or I’ll buy an LP if I believe it won’t suck ass. I grew up with bands like the Talking Heads, Blondie, Clash, Depeche Mode, Joy Division/New Order, Ministry, Big Black, Minor Threat/Fugazi, Nirvana, Pixies, Minutemen, Royal Trux, Pussy Galore, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Jesus Lizard, Rage, Pavement, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, NWA, Public Enemy, Metallica, Foo Fighters, Superchunk, Tool, Smiths, Cure, Dead Kennedys. Then I traveled back in time and found some other shit to get immersed in like JJ Cale, Johnny Cash, jazz from the 50s and 60s, blues from the 30s – 40s….and so on. I’m not alone in this journey. And now here we are, ready to buy music yet not finding anybody able to steer us to the right merchandise.

How dumb is that? Tweens, teenagers, and college kids are the market. And I’m not, despite the fact that I spend more on music every year than 99% of the target market. Fine, I don’t want to suggest that the record label marketing machine is broken, it’s not. The record label business model is broken, and the bullshit one sees in the market right now shows an industry desperately reactive with no real ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions. And again, this is opportunity. This morning, writing in the Comment section of the Financial Times, John Gapper suggested that Amy Winehouse punching a fan at Glastonbury “was good publicity that should add a few more record sales to her 10m total.” But Universal gains nothing directly from her interactive performances…That is one reason why the music industry is suffering while music itself is flourishing.” What explains this? One thing that explains it is the record labels’ historical reliance on royalties from master recording rights, i.e. the catalog. Only recently have labels begun chasing a piece of the action in live performances and merchandising.

What does all this mean? Somebody like me will get some capital, open up a record label, and do two things right: diversify my revenue sources and sign up artists with fair contracts and demonstrable support, and give people what they want: a record label that replaces the reliance on the ever shrinking music journalism industry with intelligent searching functionality to let people find the music they want to buy. Then I’ll hire some techie wizbang types to allow people to download all god-damned night and then some.

Think I’m kidding? Move over bitches, it’s time, baby.