The end of the decade: a decade of irony or the beginning of the end of the electronic music industry as we used to know it?
How will the years 2000 be remembered in the history of music? This question could look rather evident at first. There were countless memorable excellent DJs, world-over hits, producers, DJs, clubs, festivals and labels that rocked the planet during these ten years, enough anyway to fill countless Discogs and MySpace pages. But if you think about it a minute (or two, as I did), the thing that struck me the most is the way these last ten years lead to the undeniable fact that the big giant wheel of the electronic music industry now has something very wrong with it and it doesn’t roll properly anymore.
The concept was easy for these last 20 years: a new talented artist made music, sold the tracks to a label, that manufactured it on records and sold it to distributors, that then sold it again to retail shops and then, in the end, the consumers to buy it in the shops, with the help of promotion and the media. Every single person or company in this cycle (and that meant hundreds of thousands of people) could find a life in it and somehow make a living out of it due to the ever-growing number of sales. This, in the end, would also allow young new artists to enter the cycle as well, and things could go on the same way.
But, as things never stay easy and like everything that grows to an excessive size, it was meant to burst at some point. This is to my opinion what the years 2000 brought to us and will be remembered for, the start of the collapse of this industry, with the help of the democratisation of new technology such as high speed internet and personal computers. These technological advances became cheaper and cheaper throughout the decade, bringing a new evidence to the artists’ mind: why would they need to have so many people eating on top of their music, while new technologies could just allow to do it themselves at barely no cost? This is basically how the big wheel started to fall apart.
Things like paying a PR guy for the promotion of an album, used to cost 4 or 5 digits numbers and for a good reason: it required a lot of work. Many electronic music labels even used to have their own full-time in-house PR employees. Well, today the widespread consensus is that it just requires a few original ideas, opening free accounts in American-owned corporations, social networks or websites, and post news, videos, previews, charts and comments all over the web. So why the need a PR or a label to promote music? In the last ten years, the system became much easier for any electronic artist to produce music (with barely no knowledge or practice), distribute it to the mass public and, most importantly, at barely no cost.
Why the need to buy expensive studio gear when you can now obtain extremely satisfactory results with a small computer full of plug-ins cracked by the internet warez scene? Why the need to learn how to DJ when softwares such as Traktor will pretty much automatised everything for you? Why the need to sign a deal on a label when one can easily find dozens of digital distribution websites specialised in spreading music to all online shops (those online shops need content above all, so they accept whatever comes, regardless of quality)?
The years 2000 brought the possibility to each and everyone of us to become a so-called ‘professional musician’, through the electronic music industry, as it is a music genre that requires today very little learning or skills to be created, given the technology currently at our disposal (no need of acoustic instruments, recording studios, singers, mixing engineers, etc…). But unfortunately, in the same way as too much information kills information, too much electronic music kills electronic music. These last ten years saw a huge growing number of new artists and labels that had to share a decreasing number of sales. That lead today to a 10 to 1 factor (and often even more) as for how much income a track can generate to the artist in the end, as opposed to 10 years ago. Artists that do not perform regularly are left today with no other choice than to get another job (as you would probably do if your salary was ten times less than 10 years ago) or try to perform live or DJ by any mean, even if they are not really talented for that (and I can confirm to you by experience that the ‘touring DJs’ seats are very, very well guarded).
The irony is that, as much as the artists realised they did not need the labels or the distributors to have their music spread worldwide, the end-consumers also realised, in the form of an easily accessible cheap and fast internet mass piracy, that they did not need services from anybody from the music industry to put their hands on the music they wanted. But in the end, who can really blame the people for downloading music illegally? Having so much music available for free or nearly, and so much of it being of medium to low quality, so easily created, so many DJs using the same software and sound banks to create or perform the same music in the same insipid and mechanical way does not bring any form of value or magic to this electronic music world anymore. So why pay for something without value?
Would you still love Prince if he actually never knew how to play guitar, compose, or sing? Well, several well known DJs use automated syncing DJ software to ‘spin’ (if that word means anything today). In short, they just press play and clap their hands, perhaps because of a lack of effort or as a palliative to poor skills, who knows? Would you still admire Michael Jackson if you knew it was not his own voice on the records?
Well, too many uber-famous electronic artists do not even compose their own music, they just put their name on somebody else’s tracks (I know you all want names!). Would you still like to buy music if you already knew it would be untrendy and useless one month later? Would you go to a restaurant if you knew the food was just microwaved?
I could go one with these questions for many more lines (but, I won’t), even though many of those phenomena were not born during the years 2000, they became widely spread these last ten years. We all lived and left a decade of irony, the hunter becoming hunted by his own chase. For how many more years can this electronic music world survive with such contradictions, unworthiness and precursive signs of a crisis in it? Another decade?
