This coincides nicely with a lecture I gave this evening at Westminster University to a group of MA Music Business Management students.
In an interview with Paul Morley, Brian Eno says:
“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going.
“The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.’’
(Via Pete.)
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What Brian fails to mention is that people don’t go whaling as much as they used to (unless they happen to live in Norway).
The record age will end when people stop making recordings.
It’s a silly point of view anyway, because there is ample reason why people made so much money from selling records: people wanted recorded music and were prepared to pay for it. They weren’t paying big sums either – not compared how much it cost to make the records. All those pounds and pennies add up.
Now, guess what? People still want recorded music, more than ever and are overjoyed that there’s a million helpful souls who will give it to them for free. The fact that their favourite artist gets screwed over in the deal is a non-question. Everyone knows that artist make no money from record sales, right?
Oh wait, didn’t Brian just say otherwise?
I’m glad he likes it this way, he already made his pile. This is another one of those stupid analogies that I wish people would stop repeating. It doesn’t get any more true through repetition. No one wants blubber, tons of people want recorded music – see, it’s not difficult at all.
Having known Brian back in his early years, I’ve always enjoyed following him and his thoughts. But this is complete bollocks. Isn’t he talking about the physical carrier (LPs, CDs, etc.) and getting his descriptions wrong? CDs will pass, definitely, but people are going to stop recording music?? And do what? Go back to playing synthesizer in the parlour while the family gathers ’round for a sing-song?
Amen to the previous posters… I think this quote is, at best, poorly framed and sensationalist.
Folks may find it more difficult to earn a living from recorded music… but that’s not because the form is an evolutionary dead-end… it’s because supply has out-paced demand… but demand is still as strong as ever.
People haven’t given up on listening to recorded music… quite the contrary… but they have reconsidered how much they are willing to pay to fulfill their appetites.
I think if you are fairly generous in your interpretations, you can extrapolate that this is his point: Earning money from selling recordings is getting harder… maybe much harder.
If you aren’t feeling generous then it’s just another case of an ego maniac making the case for their own gilded legacy.
indeed. what a silly quote. i thought the man was smarter. not only are people still interested in recorded music, in no way you can compare fuel for cars (economy) with culture – even if culture, and especially the traditional view of the record industry – has an economic aspect.
At the risk of stoking a fire…
I wonder how defensive people were about stuff like this when we shifted from the print age to the electric age.
“What a silly idea – people are always going to want dots on pages. You can’t compare an idealised performance of some international artist to the cultural experience of live professional musicians – or the joy of playing the music yourself at home. That’s always going to be important.
“People haven’t given up on the idea of printed sheet music, regardless of what new technology comes along to ‘replace’ it.
“Sure, paper might not be around for ever as a medium, but people will always want printed dots on staves. That’s just how people like to publish and consume music…”
“The sheet music age will end when people stop composing using musical notation.”
etc.
Personally, I don’t think the man’s as nuts as you all seem to think he is… and it’s pretty much exactly the observation I offered to the MA Music Business Management students at Westminster last night.
In a nutshell: Five ages of media so far: Oral, Scribal, Print, Electric, Digital. Each with its own characteristic main way of making money from music – Troubadouring, Patronage, Sheet Music, Recordings, and now… well, I think we’re still figuring that out, actually. But it’s likely not to be any of the previous ones.
Don’t get me wrong – you can still buy sheet music, but it’s just not the MAIN WAY that money is made from music, and hasn’t been since the electric age kicked in properly.
I’d be extremely surprised if recordings of music continued to be the main way in which money is made from music in the digital age. Eno’s a media ecologist. The media environment shifts, and the organisms within it have to adapt and thrive, or specialise (like the people who make good money selling sheet music today).
It’s not such a fanciful leap of the imagination to assert that when the dominant mode of communication shifts to a new form, that the industries that make money from culture might also change. There is nothing holy, permanent or natural about recorded music.
Don’t really know if whale blubber is a particularly strong analogy – but the point he’s making is actually a pretty sensible one.
I think you and Eno might be right if you value music from an economic perspective. But to me that’s only one side. I would have responded the same way when this discussion would have taken place during the switch from print to recorded. As I don’t think of sheet music as worthless, it just has a small audience.
I don’t doubt that at some point in time cd’s will be something like band stickers or buttons from today. I’m even pretty convinced that in 10 years or so music will be mostly consumed through streaming. But to say recorded music will be replaced by something else, that’s in my mind plain silly. At least silly enough to see it change in my lifetime.
I always liked the sheet music/recorded music analogy, but that’s just what it is. Some things are similar, but that doesn’t mean everything is. I doubt a lot of people get a thrill of writing some sheet music, and i’m pretty sure a lot of people find nothing more fun than recording some of their compositions, regardless of people buying them or not.
I actually think Eno makes a decent point. The way I see it is that the music industry probably won’t ever make the same amount of money that they did in towards the end of the 90′s, and that does take some getting used to. People will always consume and appreciate music. Music as a viable product has however lost it’s value so the recorded music industry will and are as far as I know doing some restructuring. So what does it matter if the demand for music is stronger than ever when their is a million supply chains and most of them offer the good for free or at a price that does not recoup the production cost? Music lost it’s value when technology made professionalism obsolete.
I think its a bit depressing for a guy like me who has always strived to be apart of the music business and now with a degree on the subject, suddenly discovers that he is probably going to end up in the advertising industry instead.
I rarely find popstars, or former popstars, a reliable source of wisdom.
One can do any number of “Recorded music is like a” analogies with any kind of random objects – it’s a fun parlour game but little can be done wth the conclusions.
Recorded music is like a fridge magnet, a hatstand, a fish – …complete these for yourselves and come up with more.
The problem for me with Eno is that he always sounds as if he’s trying to be wise. Something the truly wide seldom seem to need to do. I
I’m reminded too of one of Piet Hein’s Grook poems…
True wisdome knows it must comprise
Some nonsense as a compromise
Lest fools should fail to find it wise
more grooks
http://www.chat.carleton.ca/~tcstewar/grooks/
Brian Eno is absolutely correct!
There is a major difference between the record industry and the music industry.
The records industry does not work anymore, because it is based on systems created in an industrial age. We are now officially in the Information age and all systems that require industrial age business models are obsolete. That’s why the world is currently in a ressesion and thats why the music industry seems so uncertain right now, because Information Age business models/systems now need to be created from scratch. Retail stores are an example of an industrial age model – everything can be bought online, faster, cheaper and easier. Thats why so many of them are going out of business. Our educational system is Industrial age, thats why so many people are graduating with no work prospects ahead. Having an MSc, Phd, etc.. does’nt matter, a poor african, living in a shanty-town with nothing but an internet connection and a creative mind can now become a millionaire overnight – that is Information Age thinking, and thats the way the world is heading. Like it or Lump it, its time to wake up and forget about the old way of selling records!
Soseod.
While this is an intereseting concept, I think Brian Eno sounds like an idiot here. The economic characteristics of “recorded music” are nothing like that of an economic bubble. The industry has shifted for certain. It appears to have shifted to a more independent artist – direct to fan type of industry/market. I am totally with those who say that demand hasn’t slipped in the least. In fact there was and is so much demand that the recorded music audience effectively busted down the doors of the major record labels and stormed the archives. In a lot of ways it is really great. It means that if your music is good (i.e. something that people want to hear) and you can make some good moves on the internet, use the right tools and drive enough traffic to your music, you too can gain traction with your music career. All on your own! I hear the argument all the time that it so hard to make any money in music. It always has been. Now at least it is up to you, not some A&R guy who could have his head jammed up his backside.
This doesn’t spell out the end of recorded music to me. This just spells the end of the way it was. In my opinion… that’s fine. It is still recorded music that the fans are after. However, this doesn’t mean that you are going to make money off of the recorded music. You may make your money with other related revenue streams. But you will likely still need the recorded music.
Tom Siegel
I do agree with Eno, that the money has gone from recorded music, but I seen it in turns of an economic downturn that has been coming for 30 years or so, since the early 80′s partly in thanks to punk. The rise in small records labels & bands since the 80′s, starting out in the underground punk & hardcore communities of the United States & then spreading around the world, has meant that our music choice now is massive. And with the resurgance of artists back-catalogue’s & the increased speed of the internet, allows the potential consummer access to much more music than ever before. So in terms of what we are seeing, this an overcrowed market place for the majority of artists & bands – this type of envoirment will mean that the sales of recorded music will drop overall.
Those that have grown up with the internet (& its websites) see it as not only a free access point to all different types of media & knowledge but also to share information to others around the world – why should music be different?
Recorded music is a means to sell gig tickets, merchandise, a project or idea that can be used by others (intectual copyright), technology & other forms. Eno himself has made a partion of his money not through his own music, but producing others – U2 being the example.
What I believe we are looking at is a redefining of the market place & its consomers needs & desires, that recorded music in its current form is not enough, that possibly a visual experience is required – youtube being an example. Or that recorded music is now just the new background noise to people’s daily lives? Maybe this is just a blib in the fiscal sales of recorded music & in the future, its sales will rise again, only time will tell.
But I make this point – this will not effect the sales of “garage cd’s – compilations brought in newsagents & garden centres, only the rise in supermarkets & alike can change this market.
@ Christian Martin
“a redefining of the market place & its consumers needs & desires, that recorded music in its current form is not enough”
My interpretation of Eno’s rant is that he’s just trying to keep people from being utterly attached to a specific medium. Time and technology changes things. It’s inevitable.
Is it so impossible to believe a 192kbps MP3 won’t cut it in the near future? Is it impossible to see technology leading us into more tactile delivery methods for our art? It shouldn’t be. A streaming MP3 and a 80×80 album graphic already looks so “2000′s”…
We tend to lose focus on the music itself and give too much consideration to the medium upon which it is delivered. The fact is people have been making money from music for millenniums – and someone always will. HOW they accomplish that has evolved over time, but that’s a separate matter.
Technology is running ahead by leaps and bounds, especially in the realms of interactive entertainment. Who knows what the future will bring? Those that put in the hard work to master their craft and to stay on top of innovative delivery methods for their art will be ok.
That’s my quick two cents. I’ll probably read this later and renege, but, oh well :)
JC
…oh and Christian, I meant that I liked that quote.
I find it interesting how defensive everyone gets. Eno specifically says the “record” age and speaks of records. The general flow of what he is saying is that something new will replace it.It already has.
Most of the money in the “record” age was made by a very small group of people who made a disproportional amount of money. The industry around it and it’s economy were specific to certain physical realities of distribution and reproduction and proprietary access to technology. That has now changed. Artists are now able to interact with there audience directly and if they get organized and get the business side of their music business equation making money will be work like it is for everyone else who runs a small business.
I am always struck by the fact that in this sort of debate, the arguments centre around irrelevancies and totally miss the central point. Whether Eno is right or wrong is of no consequence whatsoever. Whatever your views of the iniquities of the record industry (and mine are pretty strong it must be said), the fact is that business to all intents and purposes is ancient history. In the 10 years since the peak of the record business in 1999, it is dead. Not dying, dead.
This however should be a cause for celebration for anyone who cares about music as an art form and as a business, because it means that the whole process of making and discovering music is back in the hands of the people that matter – the artists and their audience. Clearly the few remaining people in major labels would disagree, but frankly I cannot get too upset about them – they who spent much of the last decade spending millions and millions of pounds on terrible records that never saw the light of day (Jo Lean and The Jing Jang Jong anyone?).
So why is it such a cause for celebration?
First, it is much easier to make “records”, but this can be both a blessing and a curse. The upside is that people who have talent are able to express it far more easily, and with far fewer distractions, and thus more great music gets made.
The downside is that all of those people from the “unmade bed” school of inspiration who think all music is art no matter how lacking in talent the perpetrators may be, or how awful the noise is, a clog up the digital pipes with a lot of that sort of nonsense.
Secondly it is far far easier to make money as a musician. Now I realise that this may sound counter-intuitive, but that fact is that there are more and more simple ways for music creators to connect with music consumers on a commercial basis, and the process is truly democratic. If what you create is any good, people will want to listen to it, and you will find an audience. If you have an audience de-facto you have a business. For an example of what I mean take a look at http://www.topspinmedia.com
Thirdly as the traditional music institutions crumble, so the artist is able to retain and “collapse” his own copyright. Now this is where it starts to get really interesting commercially. Best way to explain this is to give an example. I work with a new band who have the beginnings of an audience. The band made it’s first single available to anyone who wanted it as a free download. At the same time via their website (using Topspin) they offered a digital EP featuring the single plus a live track and an acoustic track for £1.99. Crucially they also offered the digital EP with a T Shirt as a bundle for £14.99 and over 30% of the transactions took the t shirt option, giving us more than £6 per transaction. Within days we had generated £1,000s of pounds of income for the price of printing a few T Shirts. This may not be as sexy as lear jets and fancy hotels (which was always a nonsense anyway), but you do not need to go much further along than that before the artist is making a living doing what they love Also, as I said earlier, the democratic nature of the web means that the more people like what you do, the more money you will make.
It is true that it is now immeasurably harder to achieve global commercial success, but that is not such a bad thing in my book, as hopefully now all the idiots who become artists dreaming of the rockstar lifestyle will bugger off and become hedge fund managers instead. What we are however seeing is the emergence of a musical middle class.
It is of course utter nonsense to say that bands will stop making “records” or that their audiences will not want to listen to them. You only have to pop into your nearest Apple Store to see what utter tosh that is. What has changed forever is the entire physics of the commercial relationship between the artists and their audiences. This is excellent news for both the producers and the consumers, and the end of the road for all of the middle men and rights owners, and frankly – good riddance.
I saw Eno with the original Roxy in London 12000 light years ago.
He looked swell as did Brian(Ferry) Since then he has rode on a perceived wave of musical/philosophical meanderings.As far as making a buck in music Eno cashed in recording pop mediocrity such as U2. He has done his share to devalue the state of music and natted on about nonsense he really is not qualified to answer.
The man who can define this answer in modern music is….Scott Walker! “”And Still get my dime”
Eno should get back to moog noodling and feather boas.
People value music for its impossible and imaginiative qualities, not its practical value.
Whale blubber, as far as I know, has no aesthetic, life affirming or trascendental qualities that are beyond the economic value of it’s extraction…
Fact remains that the period of selling music as a unit is/was relatively short compared to the entire history of music. If vinyl hadn’t come along, the whole thing wouldn’t even be a topic. The switch to CD not even worthwhile to mention. This is a different kind of rock’n'roll.
Fact remains that the period of humans as a living species is/was relatively short compared to the entire history of the universe. If life hadn’t come along, the whole thing wouldn’t even be a topic. The switch to life not even worthwhile to mention.
I hope this proves your comparison is a bit silly. For a lot of people recorded music in an album format was there when they were born, and is/will be there when they die. Everything is relative, but don’t exagerate…
How relevant is Mr. Eno to the future success of the music business anyway? Hmmm just about a relevant as whale blubber that’s how!
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