Is This It?

Well guys, it’s the end of the decade. It was a decade that started with a fictitious computer bug meant to topple the civilised world and has come to a close with our lives meticulously entwined in with iPhones, Facebook and Spotify. We’ve come a long way over the past ten years. When asked to sum the decade up in a recent interview, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia responded with three simple words, ‘We got online.’
This short but profound sentence neatly sums up the reason behind every major change in the cultural world over the past ten years. Never has one single thing had more of an influence on society than the internet and subsequently, never has anything had such a huge impact on the music industry. Over the past ten years, the internet has destroyed it, rebuilt it, given it a new face, new outlets, new tools, new sources, less money, more money, the list goes on, and on and continues to this very day. We are nowhere near a culmination, a catharsis, anything that presents a clear idea as to where we’re heading. No-one knows; it’s exciting for the listeners but terrifying for the investors. But just what has the internet accomplished in the last ten years to revolutionise our world of music? In the pre-internet days of the early 1990’s, record companies had monopolised music. They had control of which bands they signed, how much they paid them, their artistic direction and which songs they released. Artists had little choice, and neither did we as listeners. But, in 1998, as the internet eased it’s way more and more into people’s daily lives, rap artist Chuck D released a single via his website, without his record label Def Jam. When asked why, he explained, ‘Our whole notion was to come into the music industry and destroy it.’ His actions at the time provoked little interest, but his pioneering ideals would provide staggering long-term effects.
Shortly after this, a university student created a programme that allowed it’s users to share MP3 files between themselves. This effectively bypassed all the conventional methods of attaining music. Shane Fanning’s now infamous site Napster was unexpected, and the music industry was unprepared. At it’s peak in February 2001, Napster boasted 26.4 million users, trading music, and not paying a penny for it. After being sued by various high-profile artists such as Dr Dre, Metallica and Madonna, Napster was forced to shut down but it was too late, the damage had been done. The public now knew there were other ways to get their hands on music rather than heading to HMV. For the next couple of years as more and more people began to turn to downloading-both legal and illegal-sending the CD industry into serious decline, record companies began to sit up and tug nervously at their collars. Unfortunately for them this was just the beginning. The internet was already formulating a new tool that would bring their whole being into question. And by 2005, thanks to Myspace, they were no longer the only ones in charge.
Everyone knows the story of the Arctic Monkeys, they were the first band to use Myspace to gain the hype that recording companies would normally pay their PR teams to engineer. Signed to the relatively unknown Domino Records, the simple act of putting their Myspace address on the few demo CD’s they gave out ensured that their music was available to anyone who wanted it, streamed straight to people’s computers, whenever they wished. I struggle to remember a time before this, but trust me, it did exist. If you heard something on the radio, you had to buy the CD, if you read a review, there were no thirty second snippets on Last FM to aid your choice in purchase, you bought the CD and hoped for the best. If the CD wasn’t out yet, then tough luck. As one confused Myspace-less reviewer at an Arctic Monkeys gig at Reading 2005 lamented, ‘How does everyone know the words?!’ The most important thing about Myspace however, apart from the introduction of streaming, is the sheer number of bands it introduced to our peripheral. Before this time, we could only get hold of bands that the record companies or the head honchos at the BBC wanted us to listen to. Now, you could listen to any random sods who posted their Garageband recordings, and we were subsequently introduced to a lot of utter crap. 2005/6 was a musical nightmare, nobody had ever heard of each other’s ‘favourite’ bands because we’d all spent hours on Myspace for this very reason; to find the most obscure act possible to out-cool our friends, and God knows it really didn’t matter if they were any good or not.
The pretentious attitude that now cripples the anti-mainstream music industry can be directly linked back to this era. This is the single most damning aspect that the decade has had on music. Snobbery has always existed, but thanks to the laziness the internet has taught us we now live in a convenience obsessed world. Rather than give an artist a proper listen, we are apt to determine our opinions on them in a 15 second snippet of a song-there’s no need to listen to a whole album, and especially no need to stick around for the second album, when the internet will provide us with more options instantaneously, thus actively encouraging a pretention that is easily achieved with disposable artists. All your friends like one band? Give them up and move onto the next. So what’s next for music? Where can it go from here? Attitudes are hard to change and it’s even harder to do so with no money. Is there a future or will the industry implode? Robert Cronberg, a professor at Chicago’s Colombia College sees a future where no major talents will exist, a future when, ‘Content is issued individually by artists on their own websites.’ If this is true, then the dominating forces that currently blight our pop charts will be gone for good and we’ll be free to choose music simply on our own merit, hurrah! A more likely and rather more depressing reality is something that is already happening in some cases-the advertisers will step in.
In March 2008, Groove Armada left their record label to sign with, not another record label but to international corporation Bacardi-Martini. The company pay for their tours and release the band’s records and in return have exclusive rights to their songs for use on their adverts. Groove Armada in turn gain more artistic freedom as Bacardi aren’t dependent on record sales. Toby Lewis, director of a music consultancy firm has said "What is to brands a sum that they could lose very easily within their marketing budget is a very significant amount of money in the music industry." What with Starbucks, Toyota, TAG Body Sprays and Red Bull hot on the heels of Bacardi, branding may soon be the very real future of music. In a way this isn’t a wholly negative point. Artists will be given freedom and time to that develop they could never have expected had they been picked up by Sony BMG. Also, it can give exposure to smaller bands that would otherwise not have the money to get out there such as happens with the Levi’s ‘Ones to Watch’ programme. But we have to be careful warns journalist Scott Puckett, as there is, ‘a profound difference between culture and the culture industry. The culture industry segments and divides people into groups for easier marketing and sales; culture struggles against this process.’ Argh, back to the beginning we go.
In truth, no-one knows what the future of the music industry is. There will always be a steady stream of young talent itching to get out there, get their music heard and change the world. But will there be money enough to enable them to continue? In the same way the internet has opened doors for us to choose what music we listen to and to provide us with a song at a moment’s notice, it’s also means we’ve shot ourselves in the foot. The industry we rely upon to bring us what we want is now floundering, unsure of how to proceed, thanks to the greedy appetites we’ve acquired courtesy of the convenience of the internet. I think if we’re honest, we’re all actually more unsure than we were pre-internet about the direction we’re headed in. For something that’s still so relatively new to us, the internet has changed our world indescribably, but what changes it's still yet to make, remains to be seen.

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