For even as music takes an ever-increasing place in our lives, it provides less and less income to those who make it. Music is magic. When it’s good, we’re better together. We dance to it, fuck to it, swap it and talk about it constantly... Above all, music seems to succeed where society has failed: in the music world it’s the Blacks who are rich, the women who are beautiful and independent, and the gay guys who are having a ball; even the poor have a chance to become rich.  But the magic of music is giving way to a weird chaos that no-one seems to understand. 

Technological change. 

One problem that so far no-one seems able to solve is linked to the technological revolution provoked by Steve Jobs, the Apple guru. He was in fact the first person to understand the depth of the revolution taking place because of the virtualisation of music: as soon as we have access to the internet, to a computer, to an iPod, we no longer need CDs or vinyl. Everything is stored on servers and the information can be copied virtually cost-free to any computer, iPod, or nowadays just about any device that happens to have speakers or a headphone socket. Ad infinitum. 

The music industry had based its economic model upon the rarity of the physical object. Material resources and systems were needed to manufacture disks and to distribute them via specialised shops. Once a music-file can be duplicated and distributed infinitely, virtually free of charge, what role is left for an industry that was created to manufacture and distribute objects that have no further reason to exist? 

Experts in selection. 

In the industrial system, reaching its peak in the nineties, the record labels legitimacy came from their technical know-how (ie they knew how to press and distribute disks) and through their ability to market (a tightly-linked network of influence covering clubs, bars, radio, t.v., record and cd shops). They wallowed in vats of easy money: Madonna’s makeup artist’s assistant's assistant arrived, with her secretary, in a Jag; Michael Jackson’s latest album was launched at Concorde and backstage nothing was off-limit as long as the money continued to flow. Drugs, sex, and the crazed excessed of the stars were all par for the course, all paid for by the music-cartel. 

The problem is that the DJs who had made a name for themselves due to their ability to choose good music for the masses, were quickly reduced by the industry to mere product marketing tools. So much so that the term DJ nowadays means either a radio disk-feeder who talks fast, yet with his over-compressed voice says little, or a semi-star who raises both arms in a stadium whilst promoting a radio show, a clothing range, or the next great stadium event. Once these people no longer have a role in either distribution or selection what further reason do they have to exist? 

Cheaper and cheaper production. 

Beyond the fall in the cost of distributing music, the cost of making it has also fallen. Honestly, between the million-dollar production of a major star and the home-made album of an inspired artist, it’s become impossible to pinpoint any qualitative difference. To record a track you need a computer, a few easily downloadable programmes and just maybe a decent mic and some cables. The cost of production is no longer the cost of materiel, it’s human: to make good music you need inspired, hard-working artists. 

But you don’t need a label with vast budgets to produce nice sounds, no matter what genre you choose (except maybe classical, and even then...) So the cost of music is no longer material, it’s just human: but what value do you place on the long years of practice and learning; the months of work an artist spends in front of his Mac in order to create a successful song? Nothing? A hundred euros, a thousand, a million, ten million?

If you’re black or Indian, do your years of work have the same monetary value as, say, Carla Bruni’s? If you’re young and cute, does your youth and your genetic luck compensate for your lack of experience? Are they worth the same as someone who has spent forty years playing around with keyboards? 

When you pay 99 cents a song, why should he who has spent so much time and effort creating it receive only a few cents? What justification can there be that the label (that no longer does anything of note) still takes the lion’s share? 

We hear lots about piracy, illegal downloads, the future of music, the way the industry is suffering, but we never hear anyone explaining exactly how the artists, those who are the source of these songs to which we vibrate and dance, will be recompensed by this shortening of the chain between artist and public. Is it really right that we talk of luck whilst pretending to live in a society based on merit?  

Diversity

And why is it that the minorities so present in the creation of sounds, of grooves, of hits, are absent from the Amsterdam Dance Event? Why are the people talking money all white, heterosexual males? Where are the black businessmen or the women we hear singing on the tracks? Where are the queens who manage to make these songs so sad and yet so crammed with energy? 

Lots of DJs have told me of their attempts to book sets, to create concerts, because most of the money they are making is confiscated at the source by their labels. But it’s not something anyone can do: to make a decent record, you also need to not be shattered from DJing all-night miles from home. And to create a concert event, you need money for costs, costs you often don’t even recover. Once you’ve finished paying for equipment and musicians, often little or nothing remains. 

The gold rush 

My impression of the ADE had been that it was a gold rush. “There’s loads of money to be made, and DJing is the future.” Except that in this version of the gold rush, those who are making the money are those selling the shovels: Apple selling songs on iTunes and their iPods, Apple again who sell the Macs used to make the music, an army of agents and lawyers to deal with rights management, and a mass of other intermediaries ready to optimise any aspect of your career, if you’re rich enough to need (and pay) them.

I don’t want to sound like a marxist materialist lesbian, but why is it that only white, heterosexual men (for the most part) of 45 or over, have the power in what remains of the music industry? Why are the most ambitious DJs now young, white, heterosexual males (for the most part) with vast egos inversely proportional to their interest in music? 

I think the future of music is pretty dark, or pretty strange. Pretty dark because there’s a risk that the industry will, with the help of the telecoms giants and sympathetic governments, recreate its old monopoly, forcing a minority to live off a reduced diet of hard-to-access music. Pretty strange because if the system collapses further we’re going to find ourselves in a situation where artists will make their music for nothing - or almost nothing. Will it be like centuries past, where guilds of artists live in famine, occasionally helped by generous benefactors?

Whatever happens, the future of music is anything but assured. I still haven’t seen a single economic model that seems viable in the long term, at any rate, not for the artists. And clearly the industry hasn’t delivered on its promise of emancipation. And that’s the sign of failing health – the failing health that comes just before death. 

(Translated by Nick Alexander. L'original en français)