Where Have All the Good Times Gone?: the rise and fall of the record industry
Louis Barfe Atlantic, 395pp, £17.99
ISBN 1843540657
When I first began writing about rock music, the record industry seemed to possess an opulence that verged on the surreal. Its larger companies, usually based in perfumed offices in west London, seemed to be somewhere between mail order toy shops and up-market travel agents, forever sending out their records accompanied by preposterous trinkets and transporting me and my colleagues around the world on the flimsiest of pretexts. All we had to accept in return was a daily volley of calls from their PRs, asking us what we thought of the latest releases from their charges and inviting us out for lunch if we appeared to be in need of any persuasion.
A decade on, with CD sales on an ever-downward slide, things have gone rather quiet. Promotional novelties are pretty much extinct. Beset by panic about internet piracy, the big corporations instead send out their product accompanied by scarily worded confidentiality agreements. Where once there were week-long sojourns in Los Angeles, now you're lucky to get invited for a drizzly night out in Glasgow. Those who are lucky enough still to be employed in those fragrant offices always seem to be fretting about where the axe might fall next.
Much of the explanation lies with the millions of computer-literate teens and twentysomethings who, despite being as fixated with music as were the generations before them, have been liberated from the obligation to pay for any of it. Getting to grips with file-sharing software now seems to be as crucial a rite of passage as one's first snog, meaning that many young people have unlimited access to just about everything that has ever been recorded. "There are a lot of people who will never pay for music ever again," the author Nick Hornby told me recently. "Why would you? I was talking to a 17-year-old recently and he said he didn't think his little brother had even seen a CD. He didn't actually know that music 'came' like that."
Although spokespeople for the music industry might give the impression that these developments happened without warning around a fortnight ago, there were clear signs of a shift in the mid-1990s. I can remember visiting corporate conventions around that time and hearing endless assurances that people would always want their music in the form of a physical product, along with claims that the internet was a fleeting fad. Giddy with the success of Brit pop and the subsequent feats pulled off by the Spice Girls and Robbie Williams, the British wing of the industry followed the example set by the US, failing to bring the nascent down-loading subculture within its control. In both countries, the belated response has been grotesque: legal action has been threatened against randomly chosen "song-swappers" (including a 12-year-old girl in New York).
Much of this is dealt with in the closing chapters of Louis Barfe's 120-year history of the music business, which bravely attempts to link Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph to the latter-day download wars. Inevitably, it doesn't quite come off. Any book that can flip from June Whitfield's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" to Miles Davis within three pages can't be all bad, but Barfe would have benefited from building his narrative around his story's supporting cast of visionaries and misfits rather than plunging into the kind of dry business detail that can resemble impenetrable hieroglyphics: "At one point, EMI and Vivendi Universal were threatening to sue Bertelsmann for its involvement in Napster, at the same time as EMI was preparing, along with Sony, to sell content to Roxio."
None the less, there is plenty of amusement. Just as the pioneers of CDs disingenuously suggested that a compact disc could survive all manner of mistreatment (Barfe's chapter on the CD era is titled "You can spread jam on them"), so Edison made ludicrous claims for the scope of the early phonograph. "You can start the clockwork and have a symphony performed," he wrote, when in fact it could barely record the voice of one person.
Similarly, there are echoes of the industry's sneering view of the internet in the initial responses to the notion that the compact disc might supersede black vinyl. At an early CD-pushing conference in Greece, one crowd of appalled execs chanted: "The truth is in the groove! The truth is in the groove!" Not so long ago, other outraged voices - doubtless fuelled by expense-account bourbon and the odd line of cocaine - were heard to comment that the internet "was the new CB radio".
The consequences of such nonsensical thinking have only just started to grip the music business, though its personnel still seem alarmingly complacent. "There will always be music," one of Barfe's interviewees says. The point is incontestable, though whether the world will continue to benefit from the services of record companies is surprisingly unclear. From unspeakable riches to the prospect of irrelevance - back in the 1990s, clutching that morning's free tat and looking forward to yet another transatlantic jaunt, I would not have believed the industry could ever be in jeopardy.
John Harris is the author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the demise of English rock (Fourth Estate)
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