1. Overtones of special pleading?
I'm assured by friends and colleagues who know and/or have worked with Fergal Sharkey that he's a good guy - opinionated (which is good), non-suffering of fools (ditto) and a combination of smart, insightful and caring when it comes to the current state of the music industry. He also seems to have the ear of a lot of people in the industry and in policy making circles so I felt obliged to read the Register's recent interview with him
Mistake.
Talk about dispiriting... My guess is that Mr Sharkey's overall stated view of the industry, the audience and technology is a highly political one. He is certainly prepared to make some contentious points - never too contentious, mind - and knows damn well things have changed, in many cases irreversibly. And he's not exactly impressed by the behavior of a lot of the record industry. And yes, he recognises that the new technologies have enabled a lot of people to get out there and do things for themselves, while pointing out that not everyone can expect to get rich doing it (although why anyone would assume that everyone does want to get rich doing it is beyond me - beyond a vague suspicion that commentators in the field are so appalled by the seemingly inexorable rise of the modern popularity contest TV format that they can't see the motivations of those beyond that world's appeal... that is, most of us).
It's a view best captured by this:
"Has the internet and technology opened up opportunities for people to go out there and do their thing? Absolutely, no question. And in my book anything that's going to encourage people to be creative in any way gets my bloody applause every single time.
But the reality is this. Is MySpace going to turn you into U2? I'm afraid it's not."
So far, then, so,"fair enough", if hardly revelatory.
But once he gets on to file sharing he gets into some very thorny shit indeed. Here again, I reckon that he's performing something of a political tight-rope act, acknowledging that record companies need to rethink their game - and most especially their pricing strategies - but ultimately insisting that musicians should be paid for their recorded work and that the public need to be "educated" about this.
I quote: "... consumers have to get their head around the idea that they cannot continue to do what they've been doing... What is beginning to come out of some of the research is: some of the educational messages are getting through. I think most people understand that there is a moral issue here - in that you are depriving young musicians, artists, songwriters, and composers from any ability to generate any kind of income."
The language here is really pretty irksome here: "a moral issue"... "consumers have to"... "messages are getting through"... So, in that order: it's about ethics, apparently, the obligation is on consumers (that is, us) to understand this but thankfully we're beginning to get it (I assume it's taken us so long because we're ever so slightly thick).
It's difficult to say which bit of that sticks in the craw the most, but the line about the "moral issue" is a strong candidate. Let's get something absolutely straight: copyright - and everything that goes with it - is NOT about ethics, nor ever has been. It's about (among other things) pragmatics, about building legal systems which make for the best outcome for the most people. The way the history of phonography panned out until it went virtual was that musicians, composers, business execs and, not insignificantly, the audience, benefited from a certain status quo where some "creatives" (and let's be absolutely clear: it was always a minority) managed to make a living (and for an even smaller minority, got stinking rich) by the limitation of audio copying.
I say "limitation" advisedly. For all its daft campaigning (ie the use of LP inner bags to inform those teenagers among us who taped the odd mate's album that, despite spending every last penny we had on music in some way or other, we were committing musicicide) the industry only really got worked up over large scale, commercial piracy - and quite rightly. Now we need a different model or - as I'll argue elsewhere - a plethora of different models to keep some people making music and some people listening to it. And that model will surely evolve, whatever your view of the Invisible Hand. Just don't pretend this is about morality.
The killer line though, and the one which I think summons up Mr Sharkey's position best is "I've never met anyone who's prepared to go to work from Monday to Friday and not be prepared to be paid at the end of the week. But that's exactly what we expect our musicians and our songwriters and our composers to do. I don't get it."
No, I don't get you. I don't know whether Mr Sharkey has ever had to do a job "from Monday to Friday" but I suspect not; it's inconceivable to me that anyone who has could equate being in a band, or writing songs or whatever with doing a job. Yes, it can be extraordinarily hard work, work which can put people over the edge. But being an artist is not doing a job. It actually undermines the very notion of artistry to claim that it is.
Again, it's about pragmatics. It works out well for most of us that artists are able to do what they do more or less full time. There are, of course, honourably groundbreaking amateurs (and yes, I'm going to invoke Charles Ives here) but on the whole we all recognise that people develop their craft, their thinking, their art best when that's all they do, at least professionally. But... we need to accept the new mechanics of music distribution (and for that matter, of all reproducable art) and figure out new ways of making them work for as many of us - producer, consumer, "prosumer" - as possible, not browbeat the audience into doing things more or less like they always have because we're too lazy to think a little.
But to be really blunt here: no one owes anyone a living, least of all artists.
2. Let's Put The Future Behind Us
And so on to the Royal Society of Art's "Future of Radio" panel discussion on Monday evening. I won't go into much detail here, as it's not especially relevant to the post. I will say that, to be honest, it wasn't an especially illuminating discussion, although, to be fair, I think it was aimed at a generalist audience rather than, say, the Radio at the Edge crowd. Certainly my former colleague Ayesha Mohideen was on excellent form, spelling out clearly what the benefits of digital technology are to a traditional brand like Test Match Special, using an amusing conversation with her dad to illustrate them (and scuppering the usual "this is just for the kids" protestations before they were made - although made they surely were; see below). And Andrew Phillips from Channel 4 Radio was amusing and charming, without being able to say very much about what his employers were actually going to do in the audio field.
But it was, I'm afraid, Neil Gardner, Chair of the Radio Independents Group who really got did me in*. Mr Gardner's schtick was a simple one, and one, on the evidence of audience reaction, with a lot of support. It is, in summary that, yes, all this new technology is all well and good and yes - gracious nod to Ayesha here, of course - it can enhance radio output. But, you know, let's be frank, it's all a bit of a diversion and, most of all it's all diverting an awful lot of cash from the real business of radio: making shows.
Now I appreciate that Mr Gardner has to bang the drum on behalf of his organisation's members and, believe me, as a former employee of both <a href="http://www.somethinelse.com/">Somethin' Else</a> and the BBC's (then) Radio division I have every sympathy with program makers trying to make excellent radio content on ever-shrinking budgets.
But many of the things Mr Gardner said really do not help advance either his cause or the general debate about the future of the medium. When one questioner in the audience said how much he enjoyed the choice of radio stations available online - tens of thousands, the questioner said - Mr Gardner grudgingly accepted but couldn't help make an aside about that being alright if you really wanted to listen to "Uzbekistani punk rock shows (what, as opposed to Money Box Live? Count me in!)
And then there was the casual insistence that, you know, all this texting and blogging and interactive stuff, it's alright for the kids but it's really not for a mainstream audience. Tell that to my 75 year old aunt on Facebook, or to my "mainstream" working class mum emailing me every bloody day she's on holiday about what a fabulous time she's having. Or, indeed, try telling it to Ms Mohideen's digitally-enhanced TMS listeners (or, indeed, "users").
But what really got to me - and brought to mind the interview with Mr Sharkey and inadvertantly led to this post - was the line that we (meaning radio producers and, I presume some of their bosses) "have to pay the mortgage, have to pay the bills". There it is again, the "we're owed a living" sentiment. Now again, I don't think that radio producers shouldn't get paid for their work, any more than I want to see musicians starve... but... just as in music, we may have to accept that the new technological paradigm(s) lead(s) to further partial amateurisation of content making. Because, let's face it, there's less and less money to spend on more and more stuff, even if some of that is Uzbek punk. One can bemoan that all one likes (and indeed, one audience member sided with Mr Gardner and accused the radio industry of running scared, bowing in to the pressure of UGC unnecessarily) but, I'm afraid, things change, have changed. I spoke to another former BBC colleague after the event and cheekily suggested that we might be last generation to be able to buy three bedroom houses off the back of a career in content-making; I was being tipsily provocative, of course, but I'm not sure that I didn't mean it.
* Anyone at the event will note that I have neglected to mention Professor Ivor Gabor, but then anyone actually there will know why.
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