The Gline is depressed about the way supposedly creative industries are run by corporate bean-counters.
Every time I read horror stories about Art vs. Commerce I always wonder about how anyone manages to stay productive or happy in any creative industry. I would guess there are at least some pockets of creative happiness, where people are allowed to do their thing without meddling bluenosed dickery-pokery from the guys who count the money. But they’re few and far between, and they don’t last long, because eventually the pressure rolls downhill to produce, produce, produce, and everything that was once fun and casual and footloose is turned into a meatgrinder.
It makes me wish the guys who ran the studios and the record companies and whatnot were actually a little crazier — basically, guys who had lots of money and wanted to cultivate their tastes by creating a stable of artists, the way Ahmet Ertegun did with Atlantic or Berry Gordy did (for all of his flaws) with Motown, or the way Hideo Ike’ezumi does with PSF. Basically, the executive as patron, not as creative director — a role that’s rapidly vanishing as the studios eat each other alive and sponge up all the little guys in the process like so much gravy on a plate.
Instead, we have people like Rupert Murdoch running the big electric train sets, who are vulgar in every sense of the word. They’re not interested in anything except money, and not merely because they’re businessmen. There’s nothing wrong with being a businessman in the abstract, as long as it’s tempered with other things.
Surely it’s Richard Branson who’s got the big electric train set?
But why do we need the big media companies at all? In much of the music business they don’t want actual creative talent; they’re really looking for pretty faces over whom they can exercise total control. Any real talent might get in the way; they might want some of that pesky ‘creative freedom’, and that would never do. It’s all “Do what we tell you because there are hundreds of wannabees willing to take your place”. The end result is of course sausage-factory pabulum.
The significant recent trend in music (at least in Britain) is to recognise that whenever there is actually some significant creative talent involved, the record companies are no more than middlemen. More and more bands are cutting them out of the loop and selling directly to the audience, getting fans to pre-order albums rather than getting advances from cynical record companies. Without all those record executive’s cocaine habits to pay for, many bands discover it’s possible to survive economically with relatively modest sales.
Over time I think we’ll see a bigger and bigger divide between demographic-driven corporate music and an eclectic independent scene. And with a bit of luck, the corporate sector with shrink as their more discerning customers desert them.
