A decade or so ago, I was interviewing the singer Clarence Carter, one of Soul music’s greatest voices and natural gentlemen. During the late 1960s and early 197Os, he had such hits as ‘Patches,’ ‘Snatchin’ it Back’ and ‘Getting the Bills (But No Merchandise).’
When I asked him why some of his hits (specifically “Strokin’”, the most requested song on my radio show The River of Soul) weren’t available on Compact Disc (CD), he was surprisingly honest. He said that when a song was digitised, you essentially lost control of it. Once it was out in the ether, anyone could take advantage of it.
In other words, people could get the merchandise, but no bills.
But Clarence Carter wasn’t really bothered by music fans acquiring his music surreptitiously. He was really talking about the music business having unlimited access to his digitised back catalogue. He was right to be concerned, though for the wrong reasons.
CD forced upon us
By digitising music in the mid-1980s, the music industry had, to use a popular cliché, ‘let the genie out of the bottle.’ And of course, once a genie is out of his bottle, it’s damn hard to get him back in.
Yet it’s been a little difficult to feel sorry for the music business while it grapples with this particular genie.
Perhaps some of you will remember the arrival of CDs on our musical landscape 20 years ago. They were an answer to a question nobody had asked.
In fact, nobody has asked for CDs at all. They were pushed on us by the music business itself. There was a reason for this and it was financial. CDs cost less than one sixth of the cost of a vinyl album to manufacture; yet they could be sold for nearly double the retail price. Additionally, artists’ royalty rates remained static, which meant the record companies got to keep even more of that money. Retailers loved CDs because their compactness meant that they could carry more stock, as well as achieve considerably higher profit margins. Better still, consumers started buying all of the music they already owned all over again.
Unprecedented profitability
Plenty of people discarded extensive record collections and replaced them all with CDs. That’s why the arrival of CDs ushered in two decades of unparalleled profitability for the music business.
When Tears for Fears became the first band to release an album on CD only in the late 1980s, the accompanying press release trumpeted the fact that “vinyl is dead.”
Although we should hold Tears for Fears accountable for a lot (turgid music and bad haircuts for a start), we can’t really blame them for mortally wounding vinyl – if not actually killing it.
We were told that CDs delivered better sound quality – a point still debated by audiophiles. We were also told that, unlike vinyl records, CDs were virtually indestructible. (One Hi-Fi salesman actually said to me that you could spread a CD with strawberry jam and it would still play. Tellingly, he didn’t demonstrate this sticky claim.) We were naive then, and most of us embraced CDs as the better format, even though a CD makes a pretty poor artifact. CDs have none of the tactile quality of vinyl, their packaging inadequate compared to many of the glorious record sleeves produced during the vinyl era.
Of course, CDs are more convenient. Their size means your collection won’t take over your house. They are also perfect for listening to in the car.
Here’s comes MP3
But CDs did have important characteristic that the music business underestimated or failed to value at
all: the songs on them are digitized. As personal computers, music editing software and CD burners become more and more affordable and thus more widespread, so too does music itself. The recent proliferation of increasingly inexpensive portable MP3 players has compounded this phenomenon, launching the era of downloads. MP3s are, of course, compressed digital music files that offer slightly lower sound quality than CDs in exchange for ease of transfer across the Internet and from machine to machine.
MP3s offer no artifact at all, just a digital shot of music. But they do offer consumers direct and easy access to that music. They also give listeners the chance to buy only the music they want, and not whole albums with one of two good songs a dozen tracks of mediocre filler. This is a bit scary for the record industry, which has traditionally controlled every element of our access to music. More frightening still is the fact that MP3s are giving artists direct access to their customers, in many cases obviating the need for record companies altogether.
The genie is not only out of his bottle; he’s doing the Boogaloo in living rooms and in rucksacks all over the world.
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