Fake Artists – the next staging post in the demise of music as art ?
When is a musician not an artist? When they make music to order? The current debate over Spotify’s ‘fake artists’ cuts to the heart of a process that has been ongoing for over a decade.
For at least the past ten years the mantra within the music business, driven by first Itunes and then streaming, has been that the album is a dying format. Driven to the margins by Itunes refusal to lock albums leaving bodies of work as disembodied scatterings of ‘tracks’ and further marginalised by the streaming companies love of playlists and new music highlights that cherry pick from the album, the long-playing exposition of an artist’s craft, umbilically linked to the very idea of the artist, was cut adrift by many who make the key decisions within music. Better to focus on the track, drive the downloads and streams via profile hits and offer the album as an afterthought.
Of course, there were (and are) artists resistant to this change of focus and cultural shifts and genres have played their part but the lack of steadfastness in defending the album as an artform has been rooted within the very companies that own the copyrights. If the beginning was the inability (or lack of will) to force Itunes to present albums as albums, the slippery slope that began with the ceding of control of who presents the music to the consumer has simply moved on apace and coalesced with other practices that have combined to impact on the public perception of music to the detriment of all who care about popular music as more than simply a background to other activities.
Of course, the roots of artists presenting music to order have a long and noble history. The early pop years are littered with songs for hire being passed around the offices of majors and Motown alike, SAW made a career out of matching the marketable to the hit and I (and many others) have been present when artist's albums have been taken over by producers and remixers when the original goods are deemed to have come up short on an imagined scale of ‘hit potential’. The engineering of hits for short term gain is nothing new, I would even suggest it has a place in the wider idea of pop music, the worry now is that suitability of track is trumping all other considerations in nearly all arenas. In that context, Spotify are simply replicating the process that has been underway across the industry for years; manufacturing music to achieve highest returns for controlled investment.
What is missed in the debate as it stands is the role of the consumer. For some of us the idea that pretend artists can become popular through a process that is essentially osmosis is thoroughly depressing, if not downright repugnant. For many of us who have worked with artists to help deliver their vision, to present and augment the totality of their statement as an artist, a situation whereby attention and airtime is being used up by slightly Scandinavian sounding pseudonyms sound tracking a Saturday barbeque rankles in ways that are too legion to list. Yet focusing on Spotify is to fall into the trap that has been the downfall of the music industry for too long now. The medium is not the aggressor, the ‘fake’ artist is not the culprit, what this again highlights is the process by which music has been devalued both culturally and financially by the actions of those who are supposed to be protecting it. With notable exceptions, of course.
A combination of fear and the push for short term returns have blighted UK music ever since Britpop. That cultural shift that saw long term artists suddenly playing on the same level as short-term pop removed the patience and vision that had built the great careers of the 70s and 80s and replaced them with a spreadsheet mentality that saw artists lose the creative protection that built the likes of Island and Sire and be placed at the mercy of the accountants. Throw in the industry fumbling of downloading and fast forward to their sluggishness in recognising the power of streaming and the cart increasingly led the horse. Producing music to fit formats and third-party desires, whether radio playlists, Itunes categorisation or Spotify playlists, this rot has been a long time coming. Add in the industry’s current (and seemingly unshakeable) need to work from metrics and that rot has become the norm. The seemingly straightforward argument that relying on giving people what they want (real or imagined) is ultimately a reductive and destructive strategy for any organisation that is reliant on creativity and pushing new boundaries seems for the time being to be falling on deaf ears.
What this misses is the role of the music industry in creating the conditions for an artist's vision to thrive. When I began to work in music, the conversation would be the label asking if the artist would do x, y or z. The drive to complement and enable the artist to succeed came from the labels, many of us spent many hours thinking and talking about how to sell an idea to the public. We didn't always succeed, but when we did we felt that not just we and the artist, but the public as a whole had benefited. The music community needs to refocus that belief and desire, too often we present ourselves as the victims; of radio playlists, of teenagers multiple entertainment options, of the 'difficulty' of making money from music.
For now, the focus of the story seems to be on the implications, (oh the irony), for returns given Spotify’s pay-out mechanic. That is, of course, important and for all the above I understand music needs to be first and foremost a business, but this moment does offer an opportunity to re-assess radically what music companies really want to achieve and to collectively set about resetting the landscape so that power can return to the content providers and, ultimately, the content makers; the artists.
Throughout my time in music I have often heard my colleagues talk about how they want to create more Radiohead’s, how they want to work with artists that build bodies of work that stand the test of time. The ‘fake artists’ story could become a watershed for that desire. If the rise of grime to prominence tells us anything it is that music made without considerations of demographics, without having edges removed to be more suitable for mass audiences, that is controlled and directed by the artists and creative people around them who get the point will still make it through. Of course, there are independents and folk at majors alike trying (and occasionally succeeding) in following such a path but the current direction of travel is very much against them. For those who want music to mean more than a track to suit a mood on a playlist; a white noise of melody, this seems to offer a moment to push things forward.