On The Perverse Effects Of An Upside Down Music Business

The Great Recapturing

I began reading Mohamed Sadek’s piece A Musician’s White Whale: Perfectly Recreating the ‘Funky Drummer’ Beat with piqued interest as a music maker. As a session musician, composer, etc. I was initially and positively intrigued. But as I read on I became less so and ultimately annoyed with the once nascent and now well established practices within what was once an industry comprised largely of creative players convening to physically perform and record original music.
 

The prevailing process of recording music during that "classic" era was an ideal pursued by session participants; a respectful veneration rightly informed the various manifestations of influences within the cultural canon, consciously or not, before fueling a collectively inspired ensemble effort. Since then, a new laboratory-like process of seek, scan, scroll, review, formulate, emulate and import of existing sounds has become fairly standard and feels antithetical to that group-based spirit. It's cold, devoid of physical expressiveness and overly calculated. It rather resembles someone reviewing a lunch take-out menu over a friend’s shoulder than actual musical interaction, and I doubt that the joy in achieving its aspired result is anywhere near as group gratifying at the completion of "tracking".  Maybe on some other level, but I've witnessed collaborators in these "loop productions", and I sense an absence of the goofy zeal that band members show while listening back for the first time to the "take" they've all just played. I've been a part of both processes and I humbly state that for me there's no comparing these two "celebrations".

Production procedure is steadily and constantly innovative, adapting to styles and trends, propelled and reinforced by larger economic interests and compulsions. But the most brilliant innovators and pioneers (such as the oft cited and quite understandably worshiped drummer Clyde Stubblefield) were bringing their own body, mind, heart and soul to the rendering of something truly original, albeit informed by vast and myriad influences, such as ever was the case. See this interview with Brian Eno.

Rap, Hip-Hop, Avant-Garde brought audio sampling into the process, which led to further “needle-drop” tactics that were-- and are still--exciting within the paradigm of artistic composition, with and to which I truly agree and occasionally subscribe. Digital recording has accommodated further and admirable “democratization” of musical creativity with prerecorded loops that undoubtedly allow more meagerly-funded and otherwise under-resourced artists to create on a higher and, I daresay, competitive level. 

I'm all in for creativity for its own sake, live and let live, live and let play. But I’m also an advocate for righteously corrective legislative efforts such as Fair Play/Fair Pay, and have been to Capitol Hill to assist in grass-roots lobbying for the rights of my fellow musicians who’ve been historically excluded from performance royalties by dint of a legal loophole unchanged since the 1920’s that allows US terrestrial broadcasters to refrain from paying statutory performance royalties for repeat rotations. Those remedial legislative efforts have been marginally successful despite--and perhaps due to--the confluence of transitions in market paradigms precipitated by non-unit based sales, digital streaming and digital subscription platforms. These developments--beginning in the mid 1990's--and the opportunistic measures ushering them to the fore have been the culprit for a tragically decimated income stream for songwriters and musicians alike. Perhaps not as much for deejays, but that’s another story.   

Back under the hood of musical production methods, there is a burgeoning new array of forensic re-conditioning technologies for existing recorded music that has always proved fascinating, as any conversation with a “remastering” engineer will bear out, especially those who technically revitalize or restore older, deteriorating and/or earlier more primitively recorded pieces (hello Smithsonian Folkways) to a new appreciably improved sonic state. The preservation and enhancement of these vintage recorded performances is culturally invaluable, and make this truly a golden age.

But when the current "blueprint the lick" niche market emerges (and I’m surely not intending to disparage anyone’s admirable work ethic here, much less those that are cultural and arts-based) whose very existence was born not from mere healthy scholastic curiousity but from an pursuit of a “more affordable” option to exploit that would enable the "client/buyer/creator" to sidestep higher fees and royalties that would otherwise be paid to the owner of that master recording. Even in that case those royalty payments may eventually trickle down to the artists, players, producers, etc., but more often do not. This “re-creative” process can continue inticately, elaborately, laboriously finding, defining and refining as many nuanced aspects of that original artistic expression as possible, and the line from homage-like dedication is thereby brazenly crossed into the realm of  “just business”, at which point it becomes cultural appropriation and exploitation, all artistic veneration notwithstanding.

There’s a line in the musical film La La Land, uttered by the character played by Ryan Gosling, a high-minded jazz purist whose attitudes toward the cultural mores of a blatantly cynical entertainment industry fluctuates between chronic economic frustration and utter artistic disgust. He laments of the folks in Tinseltown, “…they worship eveything and value nothing.” I concur as applied to the forces behind the “buy the sounds and grooves” within today’s musical studio realm.

I've seen my work as a writer, arranger and player become appropriated into larger licensed income streams for other business entities. I've seen musical notes that required reverent artistic deliberation and many hours formulating, creating and expressively performing end up as commercial sheet music, arrangements in prime time TV shows, monetized for othersYouTube channels and more. These situations aren’t rare. Artist's recording deals are signed and recording sessions (contracted and not) eagerly occur but by the time the lucrative “back-end” is in someone else’s pocket, any efforts to reclaim a rightful share requires paid legal assistance, energy and time. As many struggling (that's most) artist might attest, we’ve more creative endeavors at our desks, instruments and doorsteps. The litigious process of redemption not only saps the muse, but can devour the spirit along with other resources more wisely and gracefully spent elsewhere. 

In light of all this, I read of a fellow musician, surely blessed with formidable talent and craftsmanship glowingly praised for his entrepreneurial spirit and industrious efforts in meticulously recreating/re-manufacturing/reselling what someone else has already created, thus achieving a purvey-able facility that successfully and surgically removes the remunerative rights of those original conveyors of the work as well as those of their survivors. Its lack of authenticity, as seemingly undetectable as it may claim, is surely to be felt on a deeper level of spiritual consciousness, as negligible as one may allow themselves to be convinced.

On one hand, the enterprising culling and (re)production of this music (or musical elements) is quite impressive. Singular instrumental and other sounds have been digitally sampled and marketed for over a half century. But on the other, when entire performances, riffs and licks that originally channeled through the body of a talented individual while in a spiritually high (and collaborative) expressive state are analyzed, reproduced and marketed anew as if it were now another original creation, there is cast a scorching and unbecoming light on this increasingly more normalized but lamentably vampiric age. Whose hands made that nearly exact but always better music in the first place?

~JC