Pretty Goes with Pretty

Go Die Addendum

As a p.s. to this week's posts [part I, part II], Catbirdseat notes sales figures for a few recent indie (and/or "indie-esque") releases. Spoon debuted at #10 on the Billboard charts this week, with 47,000 units sold. They were all over the mp3 blogs for the last two months, including the full leaked album quite a while ago. That must say something about the effect of downloading on indies vs mainstream groups, right? Catbird got its data from IndieHQ, a site I've never seen before but am now bookmarking.

Dear Music Industry: Go DiePart II: How Does it Feel to be Sam Walton's Bitch?

[Yesterday: Part I: Cleanup on Aisle 7]

The industry’s allegiance to Wal-Mart has been the case since the 1990s, when Wal-Mart and its ilk began selling music at prices music retailers (indie or not) could not compete with. It remained the case in this decade when, as the Rolling Stone article details, the industry had the opportunity to make a deal with Napster but capitulated to its top retailers instead:

It all could have been different: Seven years ago, the music industry’s top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs—including the CEO of Universal’s parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof—sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. “Mr. Idei started the meeting,” recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. “He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted.”

The idea was to let Napster’s 38 million users keep downloading for a monthly subscription fee—roughly $10—with revenues split between the service and the labels. But ultimately, despite a public offer of $1 billion from Napster, the companies never reached a settlement. “The record companies needed to jump off a cliff, and they couldn’t bring themselves to jump,” says Hilary Rosen, who was then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. “A lot of people say, ‘The labels were dinosaurs and idiots, and what was the matter with them?’ But they had retailers telling them, ‘You better not sell anything online cheaper than in a store,’ and they had artists saying, ‘Don’t screw up my Wal-Mart sales.’”

It’s worth noting this. The record labels were ready to embrace the technology and “their retailers” said “you better not sell anything online cheaper than in a store.” Now, which “retailers” do you think said that? Was it Tower, where a CD cost on average $15.99, or was it Wal-Mart, where the same CD cost half that? This was Tower’s (and, of course, the indies’) own lament years ago when Wal-Mart first decided to start selling music. The record stores ability to compete was impinged upon because the corporate labels saw dollars via quantities of CD-sales-as-impulse-buys. Now that the same threat—vast quantities of impulse buys—faced Wal-Mart, the industry should have stuck to what it knew how to do: screwing over the people and businesses that do well for it. But it bowed to almighty Wal-Mart. Why did it bow this time but not when record stores made the same threat regarding Wal-Mart in the 1990s? Because Wal-Mart doesn't need the music industry, and the industry knows it. Major labels have become the bitch of grocery chains.  And when Napster was destroyed, like a mama spider it laid millions of little illegal downloading sites that the labels had no hope of getting a handle on.

Keep in mind the chronology here, and the choices the majors made. First it tried to make peace with Napster, but the big boxes shouted it down. Then the majors sued its own customers. Bask in the power of Wal-Mart.

So now the industry is wringing its hands over filesharing like never before. A few years ago everyone was filesharing in one place—but the industry sent them scattering and now have little hope of stamping them out. I was talking about this with my brilliant wife and she had great insight on this angle. During the whole boy band era—roughly 1997–2003—the industry was pumping out singles-based artists by the truckload, but it wasn’t economically feasible to buy a CD single—one song and a couple b-sides for $6.99 vs. the entire album for only a few more dollars (depending on where you bought it—great deals at Best Buy!). So album sales went up while CD singles went down. Bully for the majors, since the production costs were essentially the same but the markup was higher for full-lengths. Plus you had the industry cash cow Now That’s What I Call Music—this little piece of plastic that you could throw your best-selling singles on and just make that much more money without having to cultivate new artists. The NOW series was charting at #1 at its peak. Mind you, these are tweens and teens buying these comps—the very kids that today are freely downloading whatever they want. When Napster came along it was a no-brainer; the industry had already bred its audience to prefer the singles and eschew the filler. And now the record industry is bemoaning the dearth of album sales? It’s their own fault for not cultivating artists who knew how to make albums.

Rosen offers her take:

“That’s when we lost the users,” Rosen says. “Peer-to-peer took hold. That’s when we went from music having real value in people’s minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value.”

The gall of that quote. The gall! Rosen is equating “real value” with “economic value,” and that it’s a shame for us all that music only has emotional value. Yeah, pity. The music industry, by their unmitigated support for grocery stores over record stores as their preferred retail venue, has implicitly devalued the emotional worth of music. They are not concerned with the notion of a trip to the record store as sacred pilgrimage. To them it’s an errand. Drop off dry cleaning; buy milk; pick up Fergie CD.

What Rosen and the industry at large are obsessing over is the fact that the “casual listener” has stopped valuing music economically. But that’s what you get when you value the retailer that sells your music two aisles down from Charmin Ultra and contact lens solution above the retailer that cares about music, that hires knowledgeable staff to sell you albums you’ve never heard before and, perhaps, turn you into a fan. But those aren’t the stores the industry supports any more—they left bona fide record stores to wither and die years ago.

The “casual listeners” who no longer value music economically are the same listeners who preferred a NOW comp because the last time they bought an actual full-length is was all sketches and dogs. Half-baked albums by artists that were encouraged by their labels to make a minimum number of radio hits—"we'll only pay for three Neptunes-produced tracks"—this is the shit that the companies are pouring millions of dollars into. That’s millions and millions of dollars spent on maybe a hundred artists who keep the behemoth afloat. These are the artists who are suffering. Again, Rolling Stone:

In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 785.1 million albums; last year, they bought 588.2 million (a figure that includes both CDs and downloaded albums), according to Nielsen SoundScan. In 2000, the ten top-selling albums in the U.S. sold a combined 60 million copies; in 2006, the top ten sold just 25 million.

It's a myopic view to only look at the top ten, or even top 100. Because all signs are pointing to an indie music scene that has never been more thriving. Indie bands are appearing in the top forty with more and more regularity, and a band like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah isn’t even on a label at all. I would wager that there are more musicians making an honest living than ever before.  Their ability to survive is not being impinged upon; the people who are hurting are the select few who are expecting millions of dollars on their bottom line. Those artists, and the machine that supports them, are by and large not responsible for the best music (I’ll grant that there are exceptions to that rule, but not enough to change my point), so if the apparatus that supports them goes under, so be it. But I really don’t think the New Pornographers or Jason Molina are going call it quits because too many people are filesharing. The people with passion, whether they be buyers or sellers, will remain. Maybe I’m just being too idealistic about the whole damn thing, but art has never suffered for wont of luxury.

The real malaise of the corporate industry is its slow realization that it is mere middleman. Artists can publicize themselves, can sell their own music, and manage themselves. Even if CYHSY is a brilliant exception to the rule, it remains the case that a smaller label with less overhead can still support a band to a satisfactory degree. The lower the operations costs, the wider the profit margin. The more streamlined behind the scenes, the more financially stable musicians; the more music.

Dear Music Industry: Go DiePart I: Cleanup on Aisle 7

I’ve had a general distaste for the corporate music industry for a while now—ever since they started suing music fans, basically—but in the last month or so a handful of different stories have made that distaste coalesce into a full-on loathing. The last I saw was this, from Rolling Stone (via a thread at Last Plane to Jakarta), which paints the industry’s fate in the most dire terms.

Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far—and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.

So the music industry is dying. My reaction? Good fucking riddance. Anything I can do to help it along, let me know. Music has never been better nor more accessible, and the majors’ woes are completely their own fault (which the Rolling Stone article also claims). They haven’t cared about actual music for decades. They’ve cared about converting plastic discs into cash, and people don’t want plastic discs anymore. If they’d done anything to foster creativity in their artists, maybe I’d feel more sympathetic.

For the amount of ink spilled on the subject, you’d think it was all your fault. Heartless music fans have bypassed the saintly corporations in satisfying their sinful needs. I think it’s worth taking another look and who really killed the music industry. (hint: there’s a run on Cheerios on aisle 14.)

One of the common refrains you hear when people disdain downloading is the mp3’s inferiority to the tangible object, the CD. Most recently it came from the mouth of Jesse Harris, songwriter behind Norah Jones’s big hit “Don’t Know Why,” when he was interviewed for the Onion AV Club’s “Random Rules”:

I buy CDs. I do. I still like to have the artwork, and see the credits, and have the CD in my hand, and take it in the car. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get over that. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to replace that with mp3s. Besides, I just don’t think mp3s sound that good. They’re definitely of a lower quality.

It’s literally the same old vinyl vs. CD debate, only the CD—once derided for its artwork-unfriendly format and lesser sound quality—has been recast as the virtuous format. Seriously, isn’t this debate corny? Who wants to look at a 4x4” panel of artwork and read the producing credits and thank-you list when you can experience a terrific website, read your favorite band’s blog, and interact directly with the musician? Preferring a tired old CD booklet is for luddites only. CDs have nothing on mp3s—except for the experience of going to a record store, sifting through the aisles looking for some undiscovered gem, interacting with record store employees who can guide you to something better and talk, face to face with actual voices, about music.

That’s no small thing—in fact it’s something I value a great deal—but don’t believe for a second that the powers behind the music industry give two shits about that experience. The industry is concerned about Wal-Mart and its big-box brethren, and that’s it. According to the Rolling Stone article:

About 2,700 record stores have closed across the country since 2003, according to the research group Almighty Institute of Music Retail. Last year the eighty-nine-store Tower Records chain, which represented 2.5 percent of overall retail sales, went out of business, and Musicland, which operated more than 800 stores under the Sam Goody brand, among others, filed for bankruptcy. Around sixty-five percent of all music sales now take place in big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, which carry fewer titles than specialty stores and put less effort behind promoting new artists.

Look at that. Tower accounted for 2.5 measly percent of retail sales. Wal-Mart and Best Buy are the top two music retailers in the U.S., with Target and other multi-retailers not far off. The music industry’s lack of distinction between these stores and Tower or Musicland had far more to do with their closing than illegal downloads ever could. Tower couldn’t compete with a store that doesn’t mind taking a loss on Avril Lavigne if it means you’ll buy your groceries while you’re there. Today, the industry still values big boxes over bricks-and-mortar music retailers: witness the Smashing Pumpkins promotional debacle, in which Wal-Mart, Target, and iTunes get copies with unique bonus tracks, while Virgin—never mind mom & pops—are stuck selling an essentially incomplete album. The industry is actively discouraging you from patronizing an actual record store.

Yet when Tower went out of business, the majority of blame was laid at the doorstep of music fans—the dastardly pirates. It was perceived as a harbinger of the death of the music industry. Tower’s demise signified one thing and one thing only—the music industry turned its back on music lovers long ago. They only care about Wal-Mart. But does Wal-Mart care about the music industry? No. They’re not interested in competing with iTunes and mp3s. When the plastic disc dies, it will fill its shelves with more deodorants and foot cream. Wal-Mart will roll on without so much as flinching. Just desserts for the music industry; the people who lose their jobs at Sony can go get work at Proctor & Gamble.

Tomorrow: How Does it Feel to be Sam Walton's Bitch?

[Update: Mike Barthel is guest posting at Idolator and his post on Kelly Clarkson and the "Death of the Tusk Era" is tangentially related to some of what I'm talking about, particularly as it gets on in the comments section.]

Journey Without Maps Addendum

A day or so after my previous post, I took up Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene, which I've been reading concurrently as I trek through Greeneland. I was pleased to see that both of my assumptions outlined in that post—that Greene's Liberian journey spawned an indeliable link for him between the acts of writing and traveling, and that the form of writing a travelogue informed his overall skill—were validated through a couple of anecdotal passages. Of the latter assumption, there was this passage:

His letters to his mother, to [his brother] Hugh, and to literary agents, his articles, book and film reviews, after he had established himself in London, all reveal a growing sense of confidence, and one wonders whether this was not in part due to the fact that he had, in Liberia, experienced what few of his contemporaries in London had experienced: he had undertaken a journey into the unknown, come close to the primitive origins of mankind, journeyed without maps and had, like those who had survived the horrors of the First World War, come through—by means of his own determination and grit. Certainly, he now had a surge of creative energy which was nothing short of phenomenal.

Of course it's not difficult to look at a list of Greene's books and see, quite simply, that all of his best-known novels followed right after Journey Without Maps—obviously something happened. But I'm encountering most of Greene's novels in succession; I've read a few of the later novels but I've been trying to put them to the back of my mind as I follow his development. So my experience of Journey was really the sense of "hey, the writer of England Made Me was developing," as opposed to the sense of "here's where the writer of The Quiet American got his shit together"—know what I mean? This passage from Sherry let's me know that I'm not imagining things.

As to the other point—that Greene essentially caught the travel bug and, consciously or not, entwined it with his fiction writing—this anecdote was both entertaining and insightful to that end. To set the scene: Greene at this point was still writing Journey Without Maps and A Gun for Sale, while England Made Me had just come out—to lackluster reception. Greene, with his agent Nancy Pearn, was soliciting numerous magazines with short stories and pitches for stories, and not always meeting with success. He was very close to finishing both his works in progress, but he also had a wife and two children and income was an issue. Pearn suggested giving a pitch for a story to the News Chronicle.

With so much on hand Greene might well have let the suggestion of a synopsis for the News Chronicle sleep awhile. Not so. The day after promising to think abut a story he produced a synopsis called “Miss Mitton in Moscow” and coupled it with the astonishing idea that he should leave for Moscow, almost immediately, his urgent deadlines for his two books notwithstanding: “Here is the synopsis of a 10,000 word story for the News Chronicle. If they feel inclined to commission it, could you hurry up their decision, as I want to get in the background and the satirical description of the tourists, as it were, on the spot. In other words, will they make up their minds so that I can book a seat for Moscow to leave in ten days!”

It is strange that on the suggestion of a commission for a serial Greene was willing to drop everything and go to Moscow. It could not be because the synopsis promised a brilliant story, yet he was prepared to follow his star to Moscow, chasing after background for a story about a bored, disillusioned journalist meeting up with an old lady’s naïvety and excitement in visiting Moscow for the first time; of how her absurdities become a topic of conversation; of how he has to help her out of the country ahead of the other tourists as she had tried the Moscow authorities too much; only to discover, when he finds himself to be a central figure in an advertised Soviet Trial that Miss Mitton was a dye expert and had carried out a smart piece of commercial espionage.

The literary editor of the News Chronicle liked the synopsis and asked the see the first instalment, which Nancy Pearn thought encouraging, but this was not sufficient for Greene: “I explained it was dependent on a definite decision within ten days. The boat’s sailed now & there’s not another till the spring. Besides it’s a costly business & I wouldn’t take the trip without a definite commission. So we’ll have to wait for another story to come to mind.

Graham Greene: Journey Without Maps

[A lot of people seem to be finding my Graham Greene posts via Google, so I hope my regular readers will forgive the repetition of this first bit (probably my regular readers just scroll past anyway—be honest, you just want me to keep writing about Feist): I've tasked myself with reading all of Graham Greene's books in succession. If you're curious to read my thoughts on any of Greene's other novels, click here and see if I've gotten to it yet. ]

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Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene's nonfiction travelogue recounting his audacious 1935 trip through Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, is like a wedge shoved deep into his oeuvre. While it is not the book that catapulted him from merely popular novelist to lasting literary influence, it nonetheless signals a shift in his ability as a writer. The seeds of his talent have been present in his last few novels, but the experience of Africa—and the way he wrote about it—feel as if someone has put those seeds in the path of direct sunlight.

Greene has come to be known for novels in which his (usually British) protagonists exist in foreign, underdeveloped—hot—beautiful landscapes: The Quiet American in Vietnam; The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case in Africa; The Power and the Glory in Mexico; The Comedians in Haiti; and so on. All of those novels came later. Prior to his trip to Africa, Greene’s first four (actually six) novels all took place in England or, I suggest, ostensible stand-ins for England. The Man Within and It’s a Battlefield both take place inside the country. Orient Express follows a largely British cast (save the Yugoslavian Dr. Czinner and the Austrian Grünlich), but the novel exists outside of any one country as it travels across Europe. The characters exist in a self-contained bubble. Likewise England Made Me concerns itself mostly with twin siblings Anthony and Kate Farrant, Brits who have taken up in Stockholm; but the majority of the action occurs in the context of the global corporation they work for, Krogh’s, a company which conducts its business in English. The Stockholm setting is largely arbitrary; Anthony’s struggle has more to do with his placement within the company than it  does within a foreign city. And of course, the title alone should tip you off that Sweden is not the country Greene is most concerned with.

It’s no surprise that Greene had yet to bring the exotic locations into his novels—though his tentative fictional forays out of England in those two novels (plus Anthony Farrant’s background as someone who had lived in Shanghai, Aden, and elsewhere) do point to some inevitable desire to place his characters outside of the familiar. No surprise, because Greene was a realist writer; from the very beginning he’s had to experience his locations in order to write about them, whether walking from the outskirts of Lewes into its center for The Man Within or taking a weekend trip to Stockholm for England Made Me; and as of 1935 that was essentially the extent of his traveling experience. Paul Theroux’s introduction to Journey Without Maps (which incidentally is a worthy read after you’ve finished the book—he calls bullshit on much of what Greene writes of) spells it out:

[Greene] had hardly traveled. He had made jaunts out of England, but in a hilarious, weekending way, and had never ventured beyond Europe. He knew nothing of Africa, had never camped or slept rough or been on a long sea voyage or a long hike of any consequence—certainly not a trek through the bush. Probably influenced by the journeys his friends and contemporaries were taking, he got it into his head to hike with porters and carriers through an unmapped part of the Liberian hinterland; he did not know exactly how many miles he would have to walk , or how long it would take, or what his actual route would be.

Much odder than this vagueness—to me, at any rate... was Greene's decision to take his young female cousin Barbara with him. She was twenty-three, she had never been anywhere, she'd had a privileged upbringing, she was not much of a walker.

In other words, Greene really had no business attempting this journey. But he did accomplish it—suffering fever along the way—and he considered it a life-changing experience.

Journey Without Maps is a dramatic act on Greene’s part to bring the far corners—the desperate corners—of the world into his realm of experience, and therefore into his writing. Besides being a realist, he was also a devotee of Joseph Conrad, and many other contemporaries (Waugh, for instance) were making similar African pilgrimages in Conrad’s footsteps. On one level, at least, Greene’s trip is a naïve rite of passage—more an attempt to acquire a level of “experience” any novelist worth his salt should have than a conscious act to “change” his fiction. In fact the Liberian trip didn’t factor into his fiction at all, other than a short story, “A Chance for Mr. Lever.” Nevertheless Greene’s subsequent travels, often as ambitious as the Liberian episode, did factor directly into his novels. Within three years he was riding a mule through Mexico, which resulted in the nonfiction Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and the Glory. Soon he would return to Africa, to Sierra Leone, where he lived for a year; here he set The Heart of the Matter. Later in life he would return to Africa a third time with the express mission of researching for A Burnt-Out Case, which takes place in a leper colony.

But I think what may separate Greene’s pre-Journey novels from those that came after is more significant than mere scene setting. Looking back at the pre-Journey novels, all but Orient Express are flawed; they each seem to occupy themselves with a preconceived theme that stamps its way across every page at the expense of realism (in The Man Within), character (It’s a Battlefield), or form (England Made Me—which includes odd forays into stream-of-consciousness interior monologues)—in other words, much of what Greene is best remembered for. Journey, by its very nature, could not suffer in the same way. Greene didn’t know what to expect. All he could do was record what he saw and reflect as went. Thus the heat of Africa and its lush greenery, the natives’ nakedness and alternately strange, stoic, or childlike behavior, became the bulk of the book’s content, colored at every turn by Greene’s very real emotions—anxiety, anticipation, exhaustion, homesickness. After reading the pre-Journey novels, where melodrama frequently forced its way into a scene to derail its believability, Journey Without Maps reads to me almost like a disciplinary exercise for Greene—he couldn’t insert melodrama; he was forced instead to rely on its more subtle cousin, tension. I’ll bet that its no accident that, regardless of their settings, Greene’s string of best-regarded novels followed nearly one after the other directly after Journey Without Maps (not including the noir thriller A Gun for Sale, which was written simultaneously with Journey)—Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American. The fact that England-set Brighton Rock was the first in that succession indicates that exotic scene setting was not the first or only lesson Greene learned through his trip or through the writing of Journey Without Maps.