Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: Crisi della musica? 1 parte

            Cover story: Goodbye yellow brick road: The day the music
industry died
            For nearly 50 years, the rock and pop industry was a gold mine
and UK acts mined the richest seams. But on the eve of the Brit Awards, it's
all over now, say our two most authoritative music writers. Robert Sandall
diagnoses the terminal illness of a global industry, while Philip Norman
laments the demise of Britpop
            In Britain, pop and rock are bigger than ever. So why are we
facing a record slump in sales? Investigation: Robert Sandall
            To anybody watching the show on ITV, and to many of those
attending Earls Court on Thursday night, this year's Brit Awards will feel
much like any other year's. In person or by video link, the brightest stars
in the British pop firmament will all be there for the industry's annual
prize-giving. Robbie Williams, the boy band of the hour Blue, and the new
gods of rock Coldplay are set to dominate proceedings, while upwardly mobile
underground figures like the Brummie rapper Mike Skinner, who calls himself
the Streets, and the garage diva Ms Dynamite will blaze promise. Reminding
us that pop can be a long game when it's played right, the 62-year-old voice
of the Welsh valleys, Tom Jones, is scheduled to receive a Brit gong in the
Outstanding Contribution category. If the Gallagher brothers turn up, there
may well be some appalling behaviour to report. And throughout the
shenanigans, the message from Earls Court will be Business as Usual.
            But it isn't. Global sales of recorded music have fallen in
value by 12% since 2000. So far, Britain's strong attachment to shopping has
helped us buck this trend, but confidence is running out. Not for more than
20 years have record companies shed staff at the rate they did here in 2002.
The departure of Sony Music's flamboyant American CEO, Tommy Mottola, in
January was a chilling sign of the times. If the mogul who made (and
married) Mariah Carey and presided over the rise of Jennifer Lopez wasn't
indispensable, who was? The lucky ones who have seen their artists prosper
here will be pondering the declining success of home-grown acts abroad,
particularly in the territory that accounts for 40% of the world's music
sales: the United States. 2002 was the year when, for the first time since
1963, British artists went missing from the Billboard Top 100 singles chart.
Of the 40 bestselling albums in the US last year, only one came from the
British Isles, and that was by the Irish singer Enya. Of the six UK acts
whose albums scraped into the top 100, half were oldies with retrospective
compilations: Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and, inevitably, the Beatles.
            Number-crunchers are lamenting pressure on profit margins,
brought on in part by aggressive discounting by British supermarkets. These
control a quarter of the market, and believe £10 is about right for a new
chart album, as opposed to the £15 favoured by the labels. Nor is this just
a retailing issue. An industry that, in the name of 'promotion', supports
incessant CD giveaways in magazines and newspapers has unwittingly
encouraged the perception that music is of little intrinsic value. Given
that the price for launching a new act starts around £500,000, it's less
surprising to learn that fewer than 1 in 10 new signings make money for the
major labels. And the vogue for manufactured pop hardly helps. In less
media-tastic times, groups such as the Bay City Rollers ran on grinning
energy and non-designer tartans. Today, bills from hair crimpers, dance
teachers, producers and the rest can be horrendous. A1 and 911 were two
high-profile boy bands who got dumped because, hits notwithstanding, they
were too expensive to run. Britain's favourite girl group, Atomic Kitten,
were on the verge of career extinction before they hit the jackpot in 2001
with what would otherwise have been their last single, Whole Again.
            And don't mention piracy. An estimated $41/2 billion of
worldwide revenues were lost last year in a market now worth around $30
billion. Everyone is aware that the downloading of music from the internet
remains, five years after it began, a problem rather than an opportunity for
those who expect to charge for it. Clobbering the file-sharing service
Napster may have set some fine-sounding legal precedents, but it has failed
to stem the tide of free music. The number of tracks available, gratis, as
downloads, was half a billion last June, up from 350m at Napster's peak in
early 2001. A related headache is the boom in bootleg CDs. Though this isn't
such a big a problem, yet, in the UK, the unauthorised copying of albums
onto blank CDs has done a power of harm to British musical exports to the
developing world. In Southeast Asia and South America - territories once
expected to provide big growth areas for the sale of western music - the
market for legitimate CDs has collapsed. The Beatles' hits package, 1, is
thought to have sold more than 40m worldwide; an estimated half of those
were bootlegs.
            The bosses who have had to explain this to their boards and
shareholders have one overriding reason for going easy with the champagne
order on Thursday night. They are looking back on a year of plunging stock
prices in which equity analysts decided, in the case of Britain's flagship
multinational, EMI, that the part of the company selling CDs was worth, in
effect, nothing. Never mind that it had shed a fifth of its staff, dropped
hundreds of underperforming acts, and enjoyed international success with
Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams, Coldplay and others. By the start of 2003,
EMI, the fourth-largest music company in the world, was valued at £1.4
billion, less than half what was bid for the UK supermarket chain Safeway.
In the view of the City, the business model of the record industry is shot.
            The head of its trade body, the British Phonographic Industry
(BPI), wouldn't put it that strongly, but Peter Jameson is an understandably
worried man. 'The business is not healthy,' he admits. 'The problem is that
the hits don't pay for the misses any more.' He thinks it will take two to
three years for the companies to put their houses in order, and frets that a
generation of customers is in danger of being lost.
            Try telling this to the kids down at the front at the Brits.
Downloading may have put a brake on their singles-buying, but they are
shelling out for even more albums.Pop is as diverse and popular here as
ever. On one hand there's the TV Pop Idol crew, Will Young, Gareth Gates and
Darius, catering for the mass market; on the other there's the black
British-garage movement, headed by So Solid Crew. In the middle there are
Robbie and Coldplay. And signs that our pop culture is instinctively
innovative won't go away. At the start of 2003 a new hybrid, bhangra-rap,
spread from the Asian underground to the mainstream charts.
            Creatively speaking, this is a golden age for wannabe
music-makers. All over the UK, albums are being recorded for next to nothing
on PCs with software programs such as Cubase and Pro Tools. The Streets
recorded most of his Brits-nominated debut album in his bedroom on the
proceeds of his day job at Burger King. If pushed, the kids at the front
would probably agree with the suits in the city that the problems facing the
music business aren't about the music: they're to do with the business. a..
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            Memories are short in this sector of the entertainment industry.
Most of the people now working in it have only known good times: a period of
exponential growth kick-started by the arrival of the CD in the early 1980s.
Not only were consumers prepared to pay twice the vinyl or cassette price
for new albums on CD, they were also keen to replace their old record
collections. Until recently, one in three of every album sold was a
catalogue item - in other words, an existing recording that incurred no
significant marketing outlay and cost 50p to make. By withdrawing from vinyl
manufacture and turning off the tap on cassettes, companies enjoyed a cash
bonanza that, for the best part of two decades, transformed their industry.
            Not all those changes were a blessing. Booming profits attracted
a different kind of animal to a business that during the 1960s and 70s
hardly considered itself as such, and was run by music obsessives, mavericks
and oddball entrepreneurs. Characters like the founder of Island Records,
Chris Blackwell, heir to the Crosse & Blackwell fortune and a huge fan of
Jamaican music. Or Tony Stratton-Smith of the Charisma label, a man who
loved whimsical prog rock so much he backed a group of Charterhouse
schoolboys called Genesis. The Virgin empire would never have come about had
Richard Branson not started a record label in 1973 and made his first
million with Tubular Bells, an album nobody else thought worth releasing.
Branson's cousin Simon Draper, who ran the label for 20 years, says: 'Our
attitude was, we think so-and-so is great, let's persuade everyone else.' As
a matter of policy, in the early days Virgin never employed anyone with
previous record-company experience.
            The majors originally took a relaxed attitude to the selling of
albums. Pop used to be a pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap singles business. To
this day, figures on sales of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album are only
estimates, because EMI did not consider LPs to be important in 1967 and did
not retain shipment details. By the time Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon,
and Carole King's Tapestry altered that perception by shifting more than 20m
copies each in the early 1970s, an air of innocence and unreality still
surrounded their success. LPs were a licence to print money, evidently, but
marketing campaigns in the modern sense were unknown. Artists and labels put
out records whenever they felt like it, and hit singles - the sine qua non
of album success today - were optional. For years, Led Zeppelin and Pink
Floyd sold millions of LPs without bothering to release anything on 7in
vinyl. The recession of the early 1980s hit the post-hippie ethos of the pop
business hard. For the first time since the war, people were buying fewer
records - 15% fewer in 1982 than they had in 1979. The bigger multinationals
began to lose faith in the music men who had been running their companies
like private parties, and called in lawyers, accountants and Harvard MBAs to
oversee things. As record-buying revived and then, with the advent of the
CD, revenues roared ahead, a new generation of executives were in place
whose temperament and training disposed them to view the selling of music as
a business just like any other.
            The uncomfortable truth is, it isn't. Pop music's consumers are
faddish, its suppliers unreliable and often late in delivering. 'I don't
think being a public company, with its excessive budgeting and reporting,
suits a record company at all,' says Draper, who left Virgin and the record
industry in 1992, when it was bought by EMI plc. 'The finance people are too
frightened to wait to get their money back.' This charge of short-termism on
the part of big companies more interested in making their figures than in
developing careers is widely voiced today; but it's strongly rebutted by
Tony Wadsworth, the managing director of EMI UK, who points to a roster
stocked with long-distance runners like Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Kate
Bush, as well as the cream of the modern crop, including Coldplay and Robbie
Williams. He says: 'EMI won't invest in TV-talent-show artists because we
don't believe they have any longevity.' But acts with long-term careers have
become an endangered species. In the 1990s, album sales of veteran
superstars plummeted, while younger replacements became maddeningly elusive.
The Elvis of rap, Eminem, is the exception that proves the rule. The careers
of other international superstars in waiting seemed to end before they
began. Alanis Morissette got off to a tremendous start with her 22m-selling
debut, then mysteriously faded in the public's affections. The rapper MC
Hammer shifted 11m copies of his first album, then sank without trace. a..
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            There are now just five giant music groups, the biggest of
which, Universal, had nearly a quarter of the world market in CDs last year
and nearly a third in the US. The larger independents have been
progressively absorbed. Over a decade ago, Island and A&M went to Polygram,
which in turn merged with MCA to create Universal. Chrysalis and Virgin
plumped up EMI. Last May, Daniel Miller sold his Mute label - the
electro-pop greenhouse that nurtured Depeche Mode, Erasure and Moby - also
to EMI, for £42m. The most successful independent label of recent times,
Clive Calder's Zomba, home to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, was
bought in November by Bertelsmann Music Group for £1.8 billion. The reason
why Sony bankrolled Alan McGee's Creation for most of its life was down to
Oasis. Independents sell out simply because they have to.
            V2, the independent Richard Branson set up in 1995, whose assets
include Stereophonics and Tom Jones, is burdened with losses estimated
around £200m. Discreet attempts to sell it have failed. This is bad news for
Branson and it doesn't help V2's small-to-medium-sized clients either. Big
companies with staff and offices around the world need big stars to justify
their overheads.The hard sums of running a conglomerate like the Universal
Music Group mean if you sell 50m albums by 100 moderately successful
artists, you make far less than you do if you sell 20m by an Eminem or a
Shania Twain. In the first case, marketing and promotional costs on each of
those acts could wipe out the margins on global sales of 500,000. In the
second, most of the 20m CDs sold represent pure profit. It was this brutal
logic that led EMI into their disastrous signing of Mariah Carey. One of
very few performers who could claim to have achieved superstar status in the
1990s, Carey entered a seller's market at a time when EMI was desperate to
shore up its position, having failed to merge with another of the big five,
Warner Music. When your shareholders are clamouring for reassurance and big
dividends, buying an off-the-peg mega-celeb is a tempting gamble. It cost
EMI about £50m and lost the company CEO Ken Berry his job.
            Two years later, EMI was in equally tricky negotiations with a
star it had brought on itself: Robbie Williams. Eventually, he re-signed
last October for a sum that guaranteed him between £20m and £30m for two
albums and in which, for the first time, a record company stands to receive
a 25% share of the revenues from an artist's merchandise: T-shirts, tour
posters and the like. Ever since the Spice Girls let their faces appear on
crisp packets, Polaroid cameras, orange scooters and many other non-musical
products, it has become fashionable in industry circles to speak of pop
stars as 'entertainment brands'. In the case of Williams, this was spelt out
in detail in his recording contract. So, again, an artist with an
international presence found himself in a strong bargaining position.
            How strong it really is remains in question. With global sales
of his new album, Escapology, pushing 5m, Williams is still a relatively
minor player outside the UK. Without US success - and his cheeky-chappie
routine seems unlikely ever to play well in the malls of middle America - he
is not as yet looking to make history. Michael Jackson's 1983 LP, Thriller,
may have set the bar high at 40m; but plenty of acts used to hit 15m-plus,
including, from these islands, Dire Straits with Brothers in Arms, and U2
with The Joshua Tree. In recent years only the Spice Girls' 1996 debut,
which topped 20m, has been a truly global smash. At home, the gap between
the headline-grabbing acts and the ones who do the business is steadily
widening. Of the 11 albums that have won the Mercury prize - British music's
equivalent of the Booker, established in 1992 - not one has made significant
progress abroad. The list of winners is full of undoubted quality and
originality but short on artists with strong commercial prospects. Pulp,
Portishead and M People have virtually given up. Roni Size, Gomez and Talvin
Singh have retreated into cult status, as may the charming but shambolic
Badly Drawn Boy. Suede, P J Harvey and Primal Scream are all becalmed. This
is not a good place to be. To judge by what happened here to three former
superstars whose sales stalled in the 1990s - David Bowie, Chris Rea and
Mick Hucknall - reputations alone no longer command the loyalty they once
did. Each of them was quietly dropped and has since released an album on his
own private imprint. Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page distributes new material
through his website.
            The most bothering phrase now preoccupying the bosses of the
'big five' companies has to be 'local repertoire'. EMI's Tony Wadsworth
reels off a string of international successes, but 7 out of 10 CDs bought in
the world now are by locally based acts unknown outside their country of
origin. Acts like our own Ms Dynamite, who go down a storm in London but
don't sell all that well in Edinburgh, much less in Detroit. Then there are
the real local heroes, the stars of the reality-TV talent contests. Two
years ago, the lucky winners of Popstars, Hear'Say, put out the UK's
fastest-selling debut album. Just over a year later, that same disc was
being remaindered in HMV for £1.99. Although the runners-up in Popstars,
Liberty X, are still going, Hear'Say have disbanded.
            The smart money now says that all Popstars/Idol-type artists are
on the way out. The TV format will continue on the schedules but, to judge
from the sharp slowdown in sales of albums by Will Young and Gareth Gates,
the market seems to be tiring of pretty boys singing saccharine ballads and
cover versions. Which, if nobody can fill it, will leave another large hole
in a shrinking business. a..
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            The irony in all of this is that more people are listening to
pop music than ever. The problem for an industry that sells it principally
on 5in laminated discs is that with its ubiquitous presence on radio, TV,
film and now the internet, getting consumers to stump up for CDs is ever
more difficult. Hugh Goldsmith, who brought you Take That, Billie Piper,
Atomic Kitten and Blue, thinks the problem lies with the companies rather
than with their customers. His label Innocent, one of the creative cells of
Tony Wadsworth's EMI network, has a staff of eight.
            'I give my market what it wants,' he says, citing his monitoring
of the shifting tastes of teenage girls. He thinks the taste for
manufactured pop is fading and 'edgy, melodic guitar bands' in the style of
Pink and Avril Lavigne will take over. It's his job to reflect that, and if
he does it well, no problem.Goldsmith's boss, Tony Wadsworth, sees a bigger
picture in which record companies learn to adapt to a world that loves their
artists more than it loves buying their CDs. He points to the Robbie
Williams deal and talks about new revenue streams and how EMI will resemble
a multimedia company. Beyond his office in leafy west London, the talk is of
how EMI won't exist in a year's time because it is about to be bought by, or
merged, with BMG, taking the 'big five' down to four. Though bigger may not
mean better, it does in the short term mean cheaper to run.
            To Martin Mills, presiding quietly over his flourishing Beggars
Group, none of the above is important. He compares the predicament facing
the music industry to the one that confronted music publishers 50 years ago.
As listening to records eased ahead of the old-style playing of sheet music,
publishers found that nobody wanted their pages of clefs, minims and
crotchets any more. 'The invention of the phonograph abolished that
business, so the publishers got together to license the rights to their
songs to radio, record and film companies.' Comparing this to the drift from
CD, Mills thinks small companies are better equipped to weather the future,
partly because they can survive more comfortably with lower sales: 1m albums
sold around the world by the White Stripes is great for his XL label, but
peanuts to a major.
            All the talk about decline is for losers, in Mills's view, and
for executives who gas about the future but live in the past. 'The doom and
gloom ignores the fact that growth in areas like television ads, films, even
ring tones can easily offset the decline in traditional income. What we who
work in this industry tend to forget is that record companies have been
around for 50-odd years but music has been around for thousands.'

Stai attento agli allegati :-)
--
ciao MarcoS
www.marcosanti.it