No Label, No Problem

This is old news, but here it is for posterity. 

Originally published in MacMedia Magazine

No doubt many of you have heard about Radiohead releasing their new album In Rainbows online as a digital mp3 download for whatever price you thought it was worth. To many this seemed to be a marvellous step forward in combating both tyrannical labels and music piracy – simultaneously catering to the age of digital music distribution. Of course, little did anybody know that the band had secretly planned to release the album later through a major label on CD (presumably for the usual high price determined by that label). What appeared to be an honest ‘eff you’ to the system, turned out to be a marketing ploy, and perhaps even a case of cheating fans out their money (some poor people paid hundreds of dollars as a sign of support).

Then, Trent Reznor (you know, that NIN guy) and up-and-coming spoken word/hip-hop artist Saul Williams did the real deal. They released their (amazing) collaborative album for free with higher quality than Radiohead’s downloads, no strings attached, and giving the option to pay 5 dollars in support of the artists. I think there are two main reasons why artists have turned to self-distribution in a digital format.

The first reason is probably somewhere near you right now: your mp3player or iPod (I’ll just call them all iPods from here on, for convenience’s sake). It is clear to me that we have reached a stage at which it is impossible to live without digital music. Since Napster, we’ve been using our computers as jukeboxes, and with Apple’s help, we can carry those jukeboxes around. However, a large problem was created by these technologies: piracy. Sure, we had the mix-tape problem in the 80s, but once it came to CDs and the Internet, the sheer scale of the problem made the blank-tape tax seem like a drop in the bucket. Now that the damage is nigh irreversible, it’s only logical that the fumbling record labels would join us after failing to beat us.

In this age of the mp3, we face a burgeoning frontier of music marketing. The labels want to keep you from stealing music so they can make huge bucks, and the artists want to get heard by as many people as possible without losing money. After recognizing that money could still be made on the Internet, the labels and Apple got together and formed the iTunes Store as a way of allowing the music industry (mostly the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA) to make you pay for songs that you would otherwise have acquired illegally. Of course, this helps the labels more than it helps the artists. A much larger percentage of the money you spend with iTunes is going to the label, than to the artist (more than is usual, I’d guess, though I couldn’t say specifically how much).

The reason is this: you are not paying for the music; you are paying the label for the ability to hear the music (note that due to copy-protection, many songs are subject to harsh limitations, in terms of sharing and backups). Were you to pirate it instead, you could be sued by that label for sums well outside of your price range– regardless of whether you were someone’s dead granny, or someone’s nine-year-old grandson.

Obviously, some artists are not pleased with the way this system works. Allegedly the Zappa Family Trust had all of Frank Zappa’s material removed from the iTunes store. The action certainly follows from a quote by Frank Zappa himself: 

“The manner in which [people] ‘consume’ music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie– it’s consumed that way without any regard for how and why it was made.”

I’d venture to say that many artists feel this way. The pop-single mentality, which seems not only to be supported, but also endorsed by iTunes, is the kind of mentality that completely disregards the artistic process, and the effort that goes into making a cohesive album. So, if we are to continue living in an age of digital music distribution, and we want to support the artist, it seems that perhaps we need a better business model than what we have right now.

The second reason for self-distribution follows from that poor model. Artists would love to be heard, and by many, many people. Obviously, they can’t very well distribute their physical albums to the entire world efficiently. They must pay a label to distribute it, allowing the label to set a price (in some cases, unnecessarily high), and further delay their albums without good reason in order to somehow satisfy their label’s wishes. The Internet provides the kind of global market they want, without the money-grubbing middlemen. However, the digital age poses the problem of losing the physical aspect of the album, including the artwork, the lyrics, and obviously the disc itself. However, if the music is all that’s important, maybe people like Trent Reznor and Saul Williams can still get by. Without releasing their album through iTunes, and without going through middlemen, they have released an album with lossless quality, for as much money as an overpriced cup of coffee, or alternatively, for free! Such a low price potentially allows that the casual music pirate might actually consider paying for the album, as a sign of support for the artist. Certainly this is the best way we have to support the artist, and only the artist, in return for giving us some great music.

That said, I do have problems with the self-distributed model. For one thing, I like having the physical album. Here’s a little fact for you: the blank CD-Rs that are sold to us are missing something crucial. Whereas on commercial CDs, there is a lacquer finish over the burned music, increasing both the duration of its fidelity and its durability, blank CD-Rs do not have this lacquer finish, which significantly decreases both. This means, that if I don’t have an iPod, and I want to listen to digitally distributed album in my eight-year-old discman, then I’ll have less chance of maintaining the quality of that recording. I also like having the artwork, and the little booklet with all the lyrics in it. Sure, they can give me a .jpeg or a .pdf file with all of that stuff and more, but there’s something to be said for having an album and its artwork; appreciating it in the context it was made for.

In order to reconcile the physical album with the digital age, I propose a method that I’ve borrowed from Rob Sheridan (artwork designer for Nine Inch Nails). Basically, if we want to support the artists who aren’t ready or able to innovate to the level that Radiohead pretended, or that Saul Williams succeeded, without supporting the greediness of the RIAA, we should simply not buy CDs released by labels under the RIAA. Sure, you’ll be deprived of some good music, but maybe they’ll learn a lesson if enough people try, and maybe, just maybe, the labels and the artists can cooperate in creating a marketable system, that will benefit both the label, the artist, and most of all, the consumer of the digital age.

Addendum: For the record, I did buy the physical release of In Rainbows, and it was worth it. Saul Williams’ Niggy Tardust saw a physical release with added tracks, which made me feel somewhat betrayed, having written this big honking article about how revolutionary the method was. That said, I will buy it. The importance of the physical album is too great to hold grudges about the 5 bucks I spent. That said, I also coughed up five bucks and fourteen more bucks for both the digital and physical versions of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts (but there were no secrets about that physical release). To some extent, my desire for the physical album far outweighs any impulse to hear the music as soon as possible, and wherever I am.

Furthermore, at the risk of revealing myself as a hypocrite, I ended up getting an iPod (and later, an iPhone!). It has many flaws (iTunes is crap software - especially on  a PC). That said, it makes for good listening when it comes to albums I’ve downloaded because they’re out of print or unavailable… or simply not bought yet. I still carry a box of CDs with me everywhere I go, for stationary listening.