The demise of the record industry has become something of a hot topic over the past year or so, and suddenly there seems to be a lot of people interested in the emerging opportunities for indie artists. While things are bubbling away deep down in the depths, a number of major artists, of which Radiohead are just the best known example, have been experimenting with different ways of selling their work. Things are changing in the music industry and I get the sense that there are plenty of people who are willing to try experiments of their own. While all of this has been going on, I've been busy laying the foundations for our own record label, 5 Finger Discount Productions. Much of the methodology we've developed at 5 Finger is a response to the wider cultural changes happening within the industry. We are aware that artists are gradually waking up to the importance of copyrights and so we've made it a matter of principle that every artist we work with should retain 100% ownership and control over theirs. Again, instead of the usual outrageous royalties system that gives the artist maybe 15% and only after everyone else has been paid, we have come up with a system that cuts out all the middlemen and weighs the royalty shares heavily in the artists favour, with the label practically being run on a non-profit basis. It's my theory that record labels must become subservient to the artist's interests if they are to survive. After all, it is rapidly becoming clear that artists don't need labels in order to make a living. The DIY approach has never been an easier or more attractive option. The chief problem for indie artists though is the lack of resources for promotion and distribution. That is the one field where the major record labels still have a clear advantage. The main avenues for promotion tend to be very expensive: whether it's advertising or shooting videos or bribing the music press for publicity. The internet is of only limited use by itself because out there on the interweb, all artists are of basically equal stature: it's a whole galaxy of tiny twinkling stars. To get noticed requires either some fiendish viral marketing gimmick, or fat wads of cash to pay for net advertising. The net is rapidly becoming more like the existing media in a lot of respects – notably the levels of greed and corporate control. In view of the imbalance between the resources of the indie artist and the multinational corporation, I think it makes sense for artists to combine and pool their resources. This is where I think the new indie record labels – labels like 5 Finger - come in as the focal point for organisation... *** read the full article and others at www.5fingerdiscount.co.uk/guff.html ***

In recent years, record labels have taken to complaining vociferously about music piracy and MP3 freeloaders. According to figures being thrown about, the industry is losing around $4 - 5 billion a year due to piracy. (Note that the RIAA claims the global music market generates $40 billion per year, yet the the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry – a global organisation set up by the RIAA - claims piracy accounts for fully a third of the market.) I don't intend to argue about the accuracy of those figures – even if the maths obviously doesn't add up. My concern is with the assumptions they're based on. First of all, we need to distinguish between music distributed for free via P2P networks or home CD burning, and music being sold. It's an important distinction to make, because the music industry has a bad habit of lumping them together and treating them as the same when they aren't. In it's 2006 report on music piracy, the IFPI depicts P2P networks and bit-torrent sites as agents of piracy, despite the fact that they have fundamentally different purposes. Doubtless you have seen some of these dumb propaganda adverts put out by both the record and film industries which try to link piracy (and implicitly, filesharing) with terrorism. Well.... perhaps piracy does fund terrorism.... but filesharing? The whole point of filesharing is that it's free – there's no money involved anywhere, so how can it possibly fund terrorism? It's a simple point really, but the record industry seems to be deliberately confusing the two. Despite their claims, a kid downloading tracks for free from Limewire isn't remotely similar to a multinational criminal cartel. I know there are plenty of websites out there selling MP3s for next to nothing. I know they can do this because they didn't pay for the actual production of the music and they aren't paying any royalties, so they have no real costs to recoup. I know this gives them an unfair advantage over record labels and that by undercutting them like this, they are depriving artists of their income. I don't deny that this is morally and legally wrong. The record industry is quite right to try and stop it. But it is also dead wrong to prosecute people who download tracks for free. That is a stupid and heavy-handed approach which has achieved nothing other than revealing that the music industry is run by quasi-fascist greedheads.... *** read the full article and others at www.5fingerdiscount.co.uk/guff.html ***

The record industry is fucked up. It produces crap, boring, stupid music which challenges nothing and it's only apparent purpose is to make money for the swine in suits. Yet music is a wonderful thing: it's ability to communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas is perhaps unrivalled. It is one of the key elements in our culture; it's something that helps define our personal identities in a way which no other art form does. It's the basis of the lifestyle and even world view of tens of millions of people round the world. It means something. But the music being churned out by major record labels doesn't mean anything. It is all style and no substance. Meaningful content is systematically removed and replaced with polystyrene packing material. Punk is stripped of it's anarchist / anti-capitalist tendencies and it's social awareness, and what's left? Busted. Similar processes happen with other forms of music: rave, hip-hop, metal... The root cause is commercialism. Record labels exist primarily as businesses; their purpose is to make money, not great art. In order to make as much money as possible, the music must appeal to the widest number of people – something that in practice boils down to what the Dead Kennedys called "the lowest common denominator". It must be simple enough for the dumbest person to understand and appreciate; it must be short enough to hold the average person's attention; it must not contain any idea that might offend or alienate the potential audience. It's these sorts of stresses which create the "pop song" formula. This is why the music in the charts is so god-damn bland. Admittedly, the music industry has made some effort at adding more variety; but only because it finally dawned on them that bland, sterile sounds alienate large segments of the market. It's a realisation which really began with Nirvana, but which has accelerated over the past 5 years, so that the character of pop music appears to have changed. We don't see much of the nauseatingly saccharine crap any more; in its place is pop music with a harder, dirtier sound. Britney Spears' "Toxic" is a prime example of this. The aim now is to churn out pop which says "sexy", "sassy", "attitude"... Just compare, for instance, Destiny's Child with Eternal. There are other new watchwords for different styles of pop; even the grungy misfits have their own pop idols now in the likes of Nickleback, Greenday and Evanessence. On the surface, things appear to have changed for the better, but actually this blurring of the lines between pop and underground / alternative music is nothing but a more efficient method of exploitation. The underground is having it's identity co-opted by the corporates. It's all still reducible to a formula for making rich men richer still.... *** read the full article and others at www.5fingerdiscount.co.uk/guff.html ***