Bye Bye "art."

[HolyMoly]

Record biz no longer nurtures art

By Tom Moon (Knight Ridder Newspapers), Thursday, January 01, 2004

If you had to reduce all the bad news hovering over the record industry this year to two headlines, these would be the choices: "Warner Music to Be Sold to Group Headed by Former Seagram's Boss Edgar Bronfman," and "DreamWorks Records Swallowed Up by Mammoth Interscope."

Forget about file sharing or the steady erosion of CD sales to DVDs and video games. Those two developments, announced in the fall and awaiting governmental approval, represent a tipping point - the moment when, with swift decisiveness, the patient, long-term approach to recordmaking that prevailed at major labels through much of the rock era bit the dust.

Here was Warner Bros. Records, the best cauldron for artist development the industry has ever seen, cut loose after becoming an economic albatross to its corporate overlords at Time Warner. And over there was the tiny operation DreamWorks, transformed into low-hanging fruit, an opportune bauble seized in the majors' relentless push for market share.

Bottom line rules

Ry Cooder, the guitarist and composer with dim prospects for commercial success when Warner Bros. signed him in the early '70s, sounded disgusted the other day just thinking about it.

"The quarterly-earnings thing has changed everything," he groaned, talking about the freedom he had to make early recordings such as "Chicken Skin Music," and how so many of his favorite works by others were a direct result of the tolerant Warner idea to let artists be artists. "Music is now reduced to the level of shoes, or hubcaps. The corporate system has done it in."

Rick Rubin, producer and proprietor of the Universal-distributed American Recordings, put it this way: "The industry's in such a bizarre state right now. It's like a completely different business than what Mo Ostin, who is my hero in life, used to do." Ostin, the longtime head of Warner Bros. Records who founded DreamWorks in 1996, "cared so much," Rubin said. "He loved it so much, was so supportive. And now that kind of approach isn't welcome. It's so not about the art."

Of course, Warner Bros. hasn't been the old Warner for a while. Its market share has dwindled, and though it still retains the services of artists it helped launch (Neil Young, Madonna, Linkin Park), it no longer discovers boundary-shifting artists, much less lets them develop over several albums.

The demise of DreamWorks, which is being sold for a reported $100 million, is more distressing. Since its inception, the label has achieved a rare balance between commercial and artistic success and is revered by artists as one of the few imprints where a crazy musical notion could flourish. Its roster proves the axiom that Ostin and veteran producer Lenny Waronker lived by at Warner Bros. during its peak: that if artists have time to develop, they eventually blossom in unexpected ways.

Cultivating talent

One illustration was the late Elliott Smith's left-field Oscar-winning song "Miss Misery" from the "Good Will Hunting" soundtrack. DreamWorks' executive ranks, which included former Band founder Robbie Robertson, was known for championing talents who were undervalued elsewhere.

Among the artists who thrived in that environment are country singer Toby Keith, pioneering hip-hop-R&B duo Floetry, alt-rock band Jimmy Eat World, singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, and Nelly Furtado. All are likely to be retained by Interscope, and their recordings will still carry the DreamWorks logo.

But in Interscope's artistic ethos - which, to be fair, has included some artist development - the DreamWorks-style willingness to forgo the instant hit to cultivate more lasting and artistically consequential contributions may not survive.

Few DreamWorks acts have the commercial pull to help shore up Interscope's numbers all by themselves, the way an act such as No Doubt can in the first week of a release. But collectively, they obviously do have some power. Raised under Ostin and others for whom the quality of work was at least as important as units sold, these artists have become a perverse corporate commodity, valuable precisely because they were able to grow in an environment far from the prevailing mercantile wisdom.

More important, DreamWorks serves as an illustration that no matter how much emphasis is placed on sales charts, the music industry still needs people to advocate for the art. The success stories that characterized DreamWorks might have been more midlevel than stratospheric, but each represents another little tribe, a slice of audience.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,3...1863335,00.html

[DudeAsInCool]

Ry Cooder has summed it up aptly--its ALL about numbers--and the problem is systematic of all corportate thinking, not just the music industry. I'm less critical of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, because at least they care about the industry they are in. Most corporate fiefdomes are ruled by people who weren't nurtured in the same industry.

[HolyMoly]

Ry Cooder has summed it up aptly--its ALL about numbers--and the problem is systematic of all corportate thinking, not just the music industry.

Well, I'm a believer in the Yin/Yang theory ... that what comes around goes around. This might be the catalyst for forming an Artists' Industry Association to wrench as much control from the RIAA as possible. If I could use an analogy, it would be as if Hitler's Nazi Party found themselves fighting a two-front war ... one front being at war with their own consumers, the other front being at war with their artists ... both telling the RIAA "We don't need you anymore!"

[DudeAsInCool]

Problem with artists is that they have never been that business minded--the experiment has been tried in the movie business a number of times and usually succumbed to egos (Chaplin/UA; Zoetrope; Coppola-Bogdonavich-Friedkin, etc). But it does make you wonder why artists havent tried to do this in the music industry....

[HolyMoly]

Problem with artists is that they have never been that business minded--the experiment has been tried in the movie business a number of times and usually succumbed to egos (Chaplin/UA; Zoetrope; Coppola-Bogdonavich-Friedkin, etc). But it does make you wonder why artists havent tried to do this in the music industry....

Right. Heck, "writers" seem to have more power over the movie/TV industries than actors do. It would seem only logical that "writers" of music would have similar power. And the fact that they "play" what they "write" gives them a dual-stake in the business ... as if they were not only a screenplay writer in a film but also an actor in it as well.