Digital Music: What Revolution?

In the summer of 2000, Courtney Love kicked up a minor fuss with a speech complaining about the state of the record industry, which she likened to a "plantation." This was not surprising. Was there ever a time when musicians, recording companies, and fans coexisted in happy harmony? What was new, or seemed to be, was the sense that big change was in the air — a digital revolution poised to reinvent the process of making, listening to, and buying music. "Now artists have options," Love declared. "We don't have to work with major labels anymore, because the digital economy is creating new ways to distribute and market music. That means the slave class, which I represent, has to find ways to get out of our deals."

At the time, plenty of people figured the music industry would be the first (of many) get wholly made over by unstoppable power of the Internet. The peer-to-peer music-swapping model of Napster seemed capable of redefining distribution and copyright standards. Not only that, but a slew of lavishly funded startups seemed poised use technology to make "talent scouts obsolete," as Forbes thrilled at the time. Bottom line: the bad old record business would get shoved to the sidelines, and we'd finally have access to all that great noncommercial musical the industry suits had denied us.

Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way. We're still waiting for the rise of new recording who, freed by the magic of technology find success independent of the major-label system. The net-music revolution, two years on, looks like a dud.

Finding (and building) new hit artists is the essence of the record business: The people who work in artists and repertoire (A&R) begin the process of connecting the artist with fans. It’s easy to see why the Internet sounds like a perfect medium for improving that connection. The obvious part of why the dream hasn’t come true is that some of the early schemes were based on the wishful thinking common to the "New Economy" generally. But the rest of the answer is not so obvious, and involves getting past the seductive promises of the digital zealots, and the knee-jerk criticism of The Way Things Are.

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The startup that had Forbes so jazzed in the summer of 2000 was called Garageband.com., and that company is worth another look. For starters, unlike some of the most high-profile, and big-spending digital music challengers – Riffage, FarmClub, MP3.com – it’s still independent and still independent. (But just barely — at press time its future looked particularly shaky.) Garageband was never really designed as a vehicle to overthrow the existing order, but to carve out a nice within the current system. What Garageband did want to challenge is what co-founder Tom Zito has referred to as the "big ears" theory of A&R.

"Along with the fashion industry," Zito says, the record business is "probably the only business that really doesn’t use empirical research as part of the product development. It’s really based on this notion that there are high priests who can tell what the trends are gonna be, and what’s gonna be popular and what’s not gonna be popular, and they just go forth and do what they do. I would argue that traditional A&R is essentially informed guessing. Then the record company spends a huge amount of money trying to prove that they made the right guess."

Here’s the Garageband idea in a nutshell. Bands are invited to submit songs to be posted on the site. Users of the site are invited to review any and all tracks, uploaded by more than 50,000 bands. Garageband tallies whose music is getting the most positive feedback, and those bands get various levels of support, climaxing in a $250,000 recording contract. Instead of one set of big ears picking the winner, thousands of little ears do it – let the market decide.

Zito is a former rock critic (for the Washington Post) who later reported on Silicon Valley and then became an entrepreneur himself; this is his fourth startup. His co-founders are Jerry Harrison, formerly of the Talking Heads, and Amanda Welch, formerly of Netscape. They’ve rounded up a "board of advisers" consisting of various name producers (Steve Albini, George Martin, etc.) who for one reason or another are interested in working with bands "discovered" through some process other than traditional A&R. From Harrison’s point of view, most A&R today isn’t done with ears at all – it’s nose-based. "You smell that other people are interested in something and then you go for it," he says. "And, um, I’m not so interested in that."

It’s a fascinating experiment, because it sounds like it ought to work. After all, it plays directly to our faith in letting markets make decisions, and to the tendency (especially among many music fans) to distrust experts and "gatekeepers" of any stripe. We particularly distrust record business experts and gatekeepers. Or at least, we think we do.

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In the beginning — in the beginning of the New Economy, anyway — there was disintermediation. This was two-dollar word for "get rid of the experts." The early version of MP3.com was premised on this notion: Bands posted their music, fans sorted through it themselves. No need for radio, no need for marketing, no need for record labels. A variety of others tried similar setups, supposedly clearing the way for the grass roots fans to create their own stars, and reject the homogenized, disposable pop that the record labels had been for year forcing on a public that essentially had no choice in the matter.

Nothing of the sort occurred. No real stars sprang from the Internet to become the Blair Witch Project of pop, and no one seems to have abandoned Britney Spears. Even the various hyped-up experiments of well-known artists shunning the labels (think Prince here) came to very little. Why?

The answer, I would suggest, is that gatekeepers and experts are actually pretty useful. There are many, many bands out there. And if you eliminate those who do no think they deserve your attention, you will find that your number of choices has not changed. What the purest form of disintermediation meant is that every music fan had be his own director of A&R, her own head of programming, and a music critic to boot.

The highest of the high priests Zito referes to above might well be Ahmet Ertugen, co-chairman of the Atlantic Group, the founder of Atlantic Records, and a man whose A&R prowess is both legendary and long-lived. To say that he is not enthusiastic about a Net-enabled musical free-for-all would be an understatement. "What that will do is," he says, "is it will kill music."

The 78-year-old Ertegun walked me through the existing series of filters that stand between hopeful musicians and restive consumers. "There are would-be artists everywhere. Every city, every town, every college, every school, there are young people who would like to be singers or musicians or whatever. They form groups. They usually play around a little bit in their community. Sometimes, among those, there are some who are clearly above the rest in that area. And they usually get picked up on by somebody who knows somebody – a lawyer, or a manager, or a press agent, or somebody who once worked for Sony, or whatever. And they say, ‘Oh my god, let somebody hear them.’ That’s one filter."

The next filter is that person deciding whether it’s really worth trying to get the band in front of a label. If so, Ertugen continues, "they get to the A&R department of record company. We have like 50 or a hundred people or whatever, listening to all this crap that comes in. But among them there’s some pretty good things." He pauses. "Pretty good. Better than the rest." That's the stuff that makes it to Ertugen or some other honcho, "and we throw out 95, 98 percent of it."

"Then," Ertugen continues, starting wind up a bit, "out of all of that, the remaining tiny percent that we think is good, we record. Between us, the majors, and the independents, somebody records the artist. That recording goes to program directors at radio stations. And they throw out four out of five of what comes in. Right? Of the best of the best! And then what goes on the air is repelled by the public! Most of it goes on the air, is heard five or six times, and is thrown out!"

He settles down a bit. "Now, you take all those filters out, and let all that crap go out directly, and the public will be bewildered. They won’t know what they’re listening to. This whole idea of, 'Oh, let everybody go on the internet' –" Ertugen himself seems so bewildered at the idea that he can’t decide what to say about it. "I look forward to seeing that mess," he finally concludes, in a tone of voice that suggests he has not the slightest belief that it will ever come to pass.

Ertugen has a point. In real life, almost all of us seek out our own gatekeepers and experts to rely on, from the car radio to a know-it-all friend. We all benefit mightily from other people’s expertise. Pure disintermediation fizzled because it’s a hassle. And as surely as nature abhors a vaccum, consumers abhor a hassle.

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Having said all that, it’s no surprise that the experts and gatekeepers at the big labels have many detractors. Ertugen does gloss over a few things. The decision-making of radio programmers, which he offhandedly depicts as an aesthetic process, is more commonly seen as a murky affair involving the payment of large sums to middleman promoters. (This is where payola has periodically flared.) One of the reasons the labels are seen as having such inescapable power is that they have the massive distribution network needed to make a hit record. They can afford to play the radio promotion game, wearing us down with repeated airplay until we finally give in and decide that "Bye Bye Bye" is pretty catchy.

But there's something else, too. Let’s go back to that infinite army of aspiring musicians for a moment. If the record labels constitute a "plantation," as Courtney Love suggests, it is the only plantation in history to be quite so popular among members of its potential work force: The line to be a slave to Big Music stretches from Nashville to the Times Square digs of Total Request Live. And in a sense, this simple supply-and-demand issue may be the most potent source of big-label power. In fact, one of the most surprising moments in the brief history of digital revolution involved a very rare instance of a band actually walking away from a major-label opportunity.

Jimmy & Doug’s Farmclub.club was one of the most aggressively ballyhooed experiments in using the Internet to tinker with the A&R process and give new and different artists a shot. Despite the folksy name, Farmclub was a giant in indie clothing: Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine were honchos at Universal Music Group. Their scheme involved a Web voting mechanism that would, in theory, allow unsigned, outsider acts a chance to appear on a related cable-television show and, perhaps, score a record deal. Rather than graciously accept this chance at the big-time, the Rosenbergs, a New York based four-piece rock band, balked at the stringent contract terms and turned up their noses.

This resulted in a fair amount of publicity, although by now front-man David Fagin is arguably better known as a musicians-rights advocate than for his band’s music. (Although it’s worth noting that the group, whose record Mission: Yo* is on indie label Discipline Global Mobile, has essentially outlived Farmclub.com, which pulled the plug on the TV show; the company's remains have been absorbed Universal.) What’s really striking about talking to Fagin is where he sees the biggest problem on the music-business landscape. Sure he’ll rail about abusive contracts and narrow-minded, accounting-driven execs. But the people he’s really ticked off at are other musicians and their "scared-to-rock-the-boat, cover-my-own ass" mentality. "You’re faced with, you know, shouting ‘Who’s with me!’ and turning around to see nobody’s behind you."

He’s particularly disappointed that most established artists, even those who have raged against the industry machine in the course of their own contract battles, offer little support to musicians’ rights generally, and even less willingness to offer guidance to up-and-comers. "If you’re basically working at Taco Bell, and Sony comes along," he says, "and some A&R guy says, ‘You’re the best, this album is great, everybody loves it’ and blah blah blah, and ‘Sign right here.’ You think you’re looking at the brass ring."

Maybe Fagin is right that a better-informed Taco Bell employee would say no to that brass ring if he understood the implications of giving away rights to his band’s masters and to its URL; that he could easily end up owing his record company money; that he was signing a piece of paper saying, in Fagin’s words, "we’re gonna own your ass." On the other hand, as you may have concluded on your own, the chance to be a rock star is a very, very powerful incentive. So whatever powers the Internet may have, any net-driven label is powerless to alter this dynamic until it helps create a few rock stars.

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Garageband.com would like to create some rock stars. Which brings us back to whether, really, the Internet can change that lifeblood of new artists into the pop arena.

At the peak of the summer of 2000 digital music hype, Garageband.com crowned its first contract winner, a four-piece folk-rock band out of Little Rock, Arkansas, called The Boondogs. They were paired with Jim Dickinson, whose producing credits include everything from Dylan to Chilton, and now they’re one of several bands with records in the can waiting for release.

I spent some time listening to the songs on the Garageband site that have won, and while some are good, I can’t say I heard anything that has radically altered my perspective on the value of a gifted gatekeeper. Then again, my ears aren’t that big. I tend to side with Jim Dickinson, who told me, "I’ve been doing this for forty-odd years, and anybody who tells you he knows what a hit record is, unless that person is Clive Davis or maybe two or three other people, they’re lying. Nobody knows."

This isn’t to say that Garageband can’t find a place for itself in the music-business ecosystem. And some of its Webby attributes might well help. Talk to Boondogs singer Jason Weinheimer, and you’ll hear less about the Darwinian power of the selection process than about the demographic and listening-habit data the site collects from its users. Zito figures this will help convince radio programmers to give the label’s music a few spins. "We can see which regions are reacting to the songs, and use that to target tours and dates," Weinheimer explains. "If we need to go to Canada, we’ll go to Canada. Wherever the computer’s telling us we need to go." That doesn’t sound very rock and roll, but I guess I can see the potential.

Since the Boondogs were signed, Garageband has refined its process, which now involves various tiers of sales targets and so on before a band gets into the studio with a name producer. An interesting side effect is that the company is ending up paying a lot more attention to artist development – which isn’t a futuristic concept in the music business, but a retro one. Harrison waxes nostalgic about his Talking Heads experience, how the band’s label patiently waited through slowly rising sale, instead of going for the massive home run right off the bat. All along, he says, "the record company really believed, ‘These guys are gonna happen.'"

Courtney Love would be pleased to hear that Garageband has made itself a bit more artist-friendly by crafting three-record deals that allow masters rights to revert to the artists. So it's doing a lot of things right, but while I’d like to see the experiment work, I have no idea whether it will. Pop success is one thing that the market really does decide, once and for all. That fact is at the root of a guy Ahmet Ertugen’s dismissal of the popular idea the big record companies like his decide the what the public will buy.

"People say that because they don’t know what they’re talking about," he says. "I wish it were so. I love the way Fred Astaire sings. Do you think I could make anybody buy a Fred Astaire record today? I couldn’t make Ginger Rogers buy a Fred Astaire record." What any record company has to do, he says, is not gauge what the public likes now, but guess what it will want in six months. "It’s a sense of understanding the motion of the emotion," is how he puts it, and he believes this is something that will always be done most successfully by a handful of people who happen to have the taste and the talent to do it.

Zito, of course, believes there is another way – but he too is looking for the motion of the emotion. "We have a chance," he says, "of finding whatever ineffable thing it is that makes a band really resonate with the record-buying public." Well, yes, that’s what it comes down to – the ineffable thing that makes an artist really happen. You’ll know it when you hear it, and you won’t care what the process was the brought it to your ears. The digital world may give artists some new options, but it will never change that.

As for the labor activist Courtney Love, she remains in a protracted tussle with her erstwhile label Universal Music Group, but she hasn't been so vocal about the Internet giving artists the torch to burn down the plantation. However, she did kick up a small fuss last fall when her new band's set, opening for Jane's Addiction at the Hollywood Bowl, was cut short. She was particularly annoyed because the set had been going well, and "the suits had come out for it." Perhaps there some regular fans on hand, too. But these days, even Love, it seems, hates to blow a chance to get back on the plantation.

A similar version of this story appeared in the April 2002 issue of GQ.

Garageband has been bought and relaunched: www.garageband.com

The Rosenbergs: www.therosenbergs.com

Boondogs: www.boondogs.com