It is Beautiful Outside the Grasp of the Recording Industry

Earlier this year, I made a short post about a performer by the name of Kate Walsh, an independent musician who setup her own label and took top spot on Apple's iTunes service having the most downloaded song in April. Who would have known that an independent musician could do something like this without the recording industry's marketing and distribution machine.

A few months after posting my last article about this topic, I would stumble upon an essay from the Seminal about a man's 8 hour US cross country move in a rented truck with nothing but a radio for entertainment. His take on music on the radio is similar to how I felt during my morning drives to university while listening to the radio-- the same popular songs played in "heavy rotation" as the essay puts it, with tons of commercials.

I heartfeltfuly agreed with what this man had to say as I went through the same thing. Back in Vancouver we have atleast 4 - 6 main radio stations (3 of which I avidly listened to) and I would always station surf when the station went off through a long set of commercials. It was so hard to find a solid block of music, let alone good music.

This problem, which the above essay notes is the consolidation of the radio broadcasting industry, to which I have found a report published by an organization by the Future of Music Coalition, where they site that the top 10 radio station owners have 2/3's of all listeners. We are talking about owners here, where the same people own most of all the radio stations. This is a problem when it comes to musical variety because it is these few companies that decide what goes on air and it would be pretty obvious that that the easiest route to success would be to play what they think are the most popular songs in respective genres across all stations. The problem with this is diminished musical variety and the growing boredom of current "pop music."

Before the advent of radio broadcasting conglomerates, radio stations were run independently by DJs spinning their own tunes on air--whatever they liked. Lots of independent and orginal material was put on air (though not all great), but there were definately gems to be found. With the invention of radio and music broadcasts, we ushered in the equivalent of a music renaissance. But now, we face a hypothetical dark age with bland radio music, filled with unwanted commercials.

This would all change with the internet, with a resurgence of independent broadcasting coming to life by webcasters, like the DJs of the old, who ran their virtual radio stations over the internet, out of a personal passion to share the music they liked. The earliest webcasters did all of this with no financial incentives, often shelling out their own money to finance their own ideal radio station, something with little or no commercials. The listeners who truly loved the station donated small sums of money to help these stations going.

Eventually, webcasting took off in an incredible way with automated recommendation sites like Pandora and last.fm with software that tailer made music playlists and played songs to their listeners depending on their musical taste. Just tell the site what songs or artists you liked and they'd come back and played a bunch of songs that you might like, sites like these became immensely popular and thrived.

The recording industry took notice by threatening these online sites with copyright infringement and lawsuits for damages. Why? Because they never thought of creating webcasting software and song recommendation services that played music to users with truly little or no commercials? The recording industry flexed their legal muscles and sought out lawsuits to force webcasters to pay royalties everytime as song was played so that the artists (whom they usually ripped off) got paid appropriately.

Right now, many webcasting stations stand to go out of business after the courts ruled in the recording industry's favor, with the recording industry opting to charge exorbitant royalty fees for online broadcasters. Whatever they cannot control, they try to stifle but in the process, variety and creativity take a serious hit and us as the audience, unknowingly suffer because of it. What the radio stations play, are groups of signed artists by the recording labels. And what these large recording labels chose to sign were what they think will be a hit and turn a profit. What you end up with is "more of the same," because recording labels don't like taking risks and end up sticking with the kind of music that works for them.

Just today, I came across a youTube video of a violinist stringing to a DJ playing hip-hop music. The compilation was nothing short of awesome and many people whom have seen the video left comments of high praise and a view count pushing 220,000 views as of this publishing. Would you have ever heard or seen this on the radio or MTV? There is even an immensely popular beat-boxing flutist with incredible skill. None of these people would have ever made it to any mainstream media outlets. YouTube, like webcasters, is wonderful just because anyone can post anything; things that you might never be able to imagine, things that will broaden your horizons and yet YouTube faces a similar fight the webcasters have on their hand-- a battle for media control and money. As you can see this argument doesn't just apply for music, but even to the diversity of media in general.

I cannot fathom why these media companies are so intent on controlling access and distribution of their material to the world. In their minds, it is a privilege to broadcast their material and they realize it by charing the broadcasters for it. Yet I would beg to differ that it is the other way around-- without these broadcasters, the media they control would never have such wide exposure. Like a double-edged sword, the blade cuts in both ways.

I believe that we would be better off without these media conglomerates because we stand to lose exposure to a huge breadth of human creativity which we would never be exposed to, all in the namesake of these companies sticking to their tested formulas to turn a profit. But there is hope, I do believe that these media companies will disappear, because the fundamentals that brought them to life is crumbling away-- as mixing and mastering equipment becomes cheaper with every passing year and the CD manufacturing process, inaccessible to normal people, will soon be obsolete compared to the cheapness and ease of online distribution.

But in the mean time, I would implore you to turn off your radios and shut off your TVs and look elsewhere for music and entertainment, somewhere beyond the control of large conglomerates. I assure you, that the new things you will find, will amaze you.