Photo Credit: Monroe Gallery, 1991

Wired just ran a fantastic article from former Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne, regarding his thoughts on the present state of the music industry. Last SXSW, he gave a speech, reported by Billboard, (below) that I clipped and archived. I’ve been following his insights and sensibilities since that time, so I was extremely eager to read and share his further thoughts on the current state of things. Wired is also running a great discussion between Byrne and Thom Yorke, delving in even further.
David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music.

Below is an excerpt from Byrne’s Wired article
Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists and Megastars

What is music?
First, a definition of terms. What is it we’re talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn’t take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that’s not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).

We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

All this is what we talk about when we talk about music.

Continue reading the full article online at Wired.com

SXSW: Byrne Asks Record Labels For Help
March 15, 2007 - Digital and Mobile
Billboard Magazine by Todd Martens, Austin, Texas

Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne called on record labels to remove DRM on digital files and shift from manufacturing and distribution companies to more closely resemble marketing firms in the face of increasing digital album sales. Byrne gave a presentation entitled “Record Companies: Who Needs Them?” at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, today (March 15).

Byrne offered a slide show that predicated digital sales would outstrip CD sales by 2012. He said that year will be the “tipping point,” much like the mid-to-late ’80s when CDs overtook cassette sales. Once download sales became the norm, Byrne said, it will allow manufacturing and distribution costs to approach zero. “That is a fact,” he said.

He said at that point, record labels will be faced with a sort of choice — to ramp up marketing services to use music as a loss leader for tours and merchandise revenue, or aim only for international stars of the ilk of Britney Spears.

“Artists need help,” said Byrne, who said he’s in the final stages of negotiating a new contract with Nonesuch. He said the idea of artists working completely independent of a record label is possible, and pointed to the success of Aimee Mann. Yet Byrne noted that such a model won’t work for smaller or developing acts, who need a team to provide marketing and tour support.

But Byrne seemed to imply that labels are not changing as rapidly as they need to be. He pointed to the royalties artists receive on each CD sale, and put the number at about $1.60. He said the royalty rate is essentially the same with an iTunes sale.

“There’s no manufacturing or distribution costs,” Byrne said, “but somehow the artist ended up with the exact same amount.”

While conceding the marketing costs in the digital era won’t be cheap, Byrne noted that sites like YouTube offer more possibilities to artists than MTV. He called up a YouTube video of a man standing in a cavern. “Nobody is telling you have to make a million dollar video,” Byrne said. “You can make like this guy — stand in a dangerous place and everyone will watch.”

But first, he said, labels will have to remove DRM. He said he purchases most of his music online via eMusic, or obtains it illegally, due to the file constraints on files sold on iTunes. Byrne predicated that once DRM is removed, iTunes will no longer “have a monopoly,” and labels will be better prepared to deal with Web sales.

An audience member suggested that such an idea was depressing, largely due to the decreased sound quality of a digital download. “It’s kind of sad,” Byrne said, “but I think of it as a boost for live music. As long as it doesn’t get to too horrible — the sound quality — they’ll go for convenience and accessibility. He added, “It doesn’t have to sound good to move people.”

* While on the Talking Heads website, I read an interesting bit on LCD’s James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s Fabriclive 36 CD

From Talking-Heads.net

Beginning of the Heartbreak on FabricLive .36
Posted Saturday, 3 November, 2007 by Francey

Back in 1980, Arto Lindsay, Peter Gordon, Ernie Brooks and David van Tieghem released an album and a 12″ single as The Love of Life Orchestra. Both tracks on the 12″ single, “Beginning of the Heartbeat” and “Don’t Don’t”, feature David Byrne on guitar and have never been released on CD before.

James Murphy, aka “the fat guy in a T-shirt” behind LCD Soundsystem, used both tracks on his compilation/mix CD in the FabricLive series which has just been released.

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