Hey Obama: Reboot the music industry!
Yesterday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a post suggesting that president-elect Obama needs to do more than throw money at ailing industries, but actually needs to "reboot" America by investing in infrastructure and education. In Newsweek, law professor and intellectual property thinker Lawrence Lessig argued for a more narrowly focused reboot of the FCC, which should be encouraging technical innovation but instead tends to favor big incumbents.
But what about the music industry? Yes, the big labels have earned a lot of scorn for their technophobia and suing their customers--a practice which finally ended last week--but music is a multibillion-dollar industry, responsible for employing hundreds of thousands of people, and in the midst of several years of steep sales declines. If we can bail out the U.S. auto industry, and spend at least a trillion dollars saving the global financial system and reinvesting in infrastructure, surely we could spare a dime for the music biz.
Serious economic thinkers might scoff at the comparisons--finance touches everybody, and our entire infrastructure has been designed around the automobile--but music's more than a lark or a luxury. It's a core part of the entertainment industry, which is one of the few areas in which the United States is still an exporter and world leader rather than an importer. Even The Economist has acknowledged the deep biological importance of music, leading off its annual double Christmas issue with an investigation of why we love music.
As with Friedman's proposal to save America, my proposal to save music would start at the bottom--it's not enough to give the big labels and radio stations a few hundred million dollars to stem their losses and encourage re-investment. Instead, we need to create a culture of music appreciation and nurture the talent that will lead to the next generation of musicians. Here's my dream list:
Music education and training. In the U.S. education system, music and art are the last classes to be funded and the first to face cuts. Yet, we always seem to be able to spend another few million on sports fields and equipment. The U.S. government should mandate funding for music education beginning in fourth grade, when most kids develop the attention span and coordination necessary to learn an instrument, all the way through high school. This will not only contribute to a strong base of musical performers, but the kids who lack the talent or drive to pursue music as a lifelong hobby will at least learn to appreciate the skill it takes for others to pursue it--just like youth sports creates lifelong sports fans. And professional musicians should be able to take classes in new areas--theory, audio production--without having to pay the entire tuition out of their own pockets.
Tax breaks. Bars, restaurants, and nightclubs under a certain capacity should be given tax incentives to hire musicians. (I'm not so sure about big promoters like Live Nation or stadium-type venues.) Same with radio stations that play a certain percentage of music from local or unsigned musicians. (Big corporate radio with its narrow audience-tested playlists has done far more to devalue music--and harm sales--than the Internet.) Cities should be encouraged to create music-nightlife zones with less-stringent noise restrictions and the appropriate level of police protection.
Stipends for musicians. As romantic as punk-squatters might seem, being a musician doesn't have to mean a life of poverty. Canada offers grants to non-classical musicians, including emerging artists with "self-training" (read: rock musicians). Yes, they must have shown a viable career for at least two years, but a one-year grant could be the perfect bridge between promising local band and national club tour. If we can give the U.S. auto industry $17 billion, surely we can spare a few hundred thousand a year to give promising musicians a chance to postpone their day jobs while they try and find a bigger audience.
Infrastructure. It doesn't have to be all about roads, bridges, and high-speed data networks. Cities with decrepit or nonexistent classical venues should be given federal dollars for construction. National Public Radio should receive increased federal budget--with a requirement to devote a certain number of hours a day to music, particularly types of music and artists who don't get played on commercial radio.
I'm sure you can think of other examples. My point: we've treated music as a luxury--almost as a joke--for too long. I'm not asking for a national Minister of Rock (although Jack Black might be good), but as long as we're opening the federal floodgates to revitalize the economy, why not invest in something that people naturally love and that does no harm to anybody?
Happy holidays.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
But where would you stop? If kids' school days had to make time for music appreciation, art appreciation, architecture appreciation, dance appreciation, poetry appreciation, sculpture appreciation and so on, there wouldn't be enough hours left for the now-mandatory coursework in multicultural free-range condom application and whatnot, let alone dumb, unglamorous stuff such as spelling and math.
And would you really want some Soviet-style cultural apparat doling out tax breaks and stipends to individual musicians and venues? Inevitably you'd wind up subsidizing musicians who were good at politicking, at the expense of musicians who were only good at music. Since those two kinds of talents are somewhat mutually exclusive, the end result would be that overall, music would get worse rather than better -- as the real Soviet Union, and most local and state arts council grant programs, demonstrate all too painfully.
Yeah, that was sarcasm.
Happy Holidays!
I think I will have a cookie, and pie. Have a Merry Christmas (That's right, I'm not afraid to say it, but don't fret too much with a reply, you might contribute to carbon emissions in some way.
If the government invested money through the RIAA it would only serve to stifle the independent artists who have figured out how to make money in the digital era and who are actually producing a product worth buying. The major labels deserve to die a not so painless death. Maybe then we can actually have music worth paying for. I buy exclusively from independent artists these days.
Like everything else, music is probably going to have to get a lot more local.
Bail outs should be left to only crisis aversion, or you're constantly rewarding failure.
But the essential issue is that these guys treated technology as the enemy for a long time and are justly being punished for that stupidity.
Music (along with other arts) will survive and quite honestly, the industry needs to rebuild itself based upon the digital era. Until they truly do that, I will have no sympathy for them.
BTW, the RIAAs campaign did not end, it just changed targets to one that is less of a PR disaster.
Also stop producing ****** music. I think we are sick to death of Britney Spears pop crap and we are sick to death of CDs containing only one or two great tracks with 10 mediocre filler songs. It's rare to stumble upon a disc where every song is quality! Stop focusing on that one big single and focus on just a solid great album.
But Obama only is really looking to invest money into sources where it will be repaid to the taxpayers. The auto makers will have to abide by this. So I doubt he'd give money to bands and such.
And for the record, if art/music training in this country wasn't such a joke, there wouldn't be posts like this in the first place. sheesh.
If your serious... You have issues about what runs the economy and the actually realities of the music industry in general. Take a few days to research the history of the entertainment industry from the great depression on, you might learn something.
- by lorcro2000 December 25, 2008 1:59 PM PST
- No, no. Step one will have to be to take out one of the underlying factors that cause poor music sales and kills musical diversity - re-regulate radio to the way it was before the Clear Channel days. The rule used to be that any one entity could only own a few radio stations and that was even regulated based on area covered and so forth. Payola still happened then, but not the institutionalized and ritualized version that goes on now where the studios pay the so-called independent promoters who in turn pay the radio behemoths for airplay.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (31 Comments)Since pay-to-play is not only alive and well but booming, the studios go for "sure things" that in reality are just warmed over old leftovers... re-regulate radio and take out the darn middlemen and maybe music as a whole could recover again, radio play of music is an important factor.