“Confusion will be my epitaph”

King Crimson
Smells like…medicine.

This is the feeling I get when I read reports about copyright and “legal” music battlefields.

Over the past twenty years far more than one industry were called home due to the onslaught of technological innovations.

The most intelligent and successful ones has been cured and made a profit on this
transformation.

Others have just died simply, quietly and without all of that noise in vain. They will be for sure forgotten very soon, nevertheless, some people will keep good memories about them.

But the most awful are those, who are screaming like slaughtered pigs while dying, and in their fever attack, they’re smashing all medications on the table. Medications, that might have served of some improvements of their disease, if they had paid any attention to them.

But instead of this the shattered bottles make the room’s full of that heavy fragrance – and it smells like medicine.

One can judge by patient’s behavior that the action’s taking place in a psychiatric clinic. Those actions of the patient are illogical, absurd and damn clumsy. So, on the one hand, you want to come closer, and help him, even by simple talk. But on the other hand, you feel fastidious and awareness. And due to this nuts’ behavior, you are completely discouraged from taking part in his fate even a bit. And you’re left looking at this ugly picture, you know what? – I prefer leaving the room. Let’s make the patient’s best years (which he, without a doubt, had plenty of) comes back to our memory instead.

I’ve been asking myself for far too long about that moment when the record industry lost all of its charm and attraction, all of that belonged to it in the old days? Good old days, when each record label had its own recognizable face – a bright personality, which was expressed not only in design of vinyl records’ labels, but in everything the label were doing.

What happened to the record industry on the road from the “Beat” era to the “Bit” era?

There are many articles written on the topic, mostly nonsensical, referring to the “business model” and “market share” concepts and other abstractions.

They remind me a placebo – a dummy pill that you place on the patient’s table. The patient looks at the pill and put it into his head that everything will be fine, everything goes as expected, everything will come back to normal…

I would like to talk about abstractions of another level, the ones not directly related to the business itself, but directly related to its death – Charisma, Illusions and Energy…

Charisma

What is the main difference between record labels of the golden “Beat” era, namely the seventies of the last century, and their today’s followers of the “Bit” era?

Indeed, there are plenty of differences, but one catches the eye.

In those days, little record labels were led by great people. Personalities!

Today, huge record labels are headed by small people from the category of “no-body, and no-name”.

The majority of them has no relationship to the music whatsoever. They are either accountants or lawyers. Sometimes at heart, which is particularly awful.

That is, in classic’s words – “office plankton”.

Even if it is a very well paid and glossy plankton, it is still plankton, and it would be a great mistake to think that the quality of music depends just on the musicians themselves.

People like Richard Brenson (Virgin), Stig Anderson (Polar Music), Berry Gordy (Motown) and Daniel Miller (Mute) had huge charisma just by themselves. And yet it is not clear who had more of it – record labels’ artists or record labels’ leaders. Brenson’s charisma certainly did outweigh the one of all his musicians, and it still hovers over his 200 companies, no matter what they were doing.

Only an idiot would confuse Motown’s vinyl with Virgin’s vinyl. They were carriers of a specific culture. They had both style and drive.

Their product outlived both the record labels themselves and the artists they were recording. Today, 30-40 years later, their products is still being sold, changing hands several times and, the most important, with price going up.

Sold for real money, despite the fact that the music from these records is available on millions of websites. Despite its free availability, people spend 30 dollars for the same thing on vinyl.

This is not because vinyl records sound in some special way.

The reason is charisma, which is present not only in people, but in inanimate objects too, despite what organized religion would make you think.

But this holds under one condition: only if the inanimate objects were created by people who had that charisma. Only if the creator put his soul into the product it is possible.

Charisma creates added value. And in our times, where everything is becoming free, it creates simply value. Not added, but simply value, which is amazing just by itself.

Charisma is the key to success of computers with the ‘bitten’ apple logo.

Charisma sells The Beatles vinyl records with the “incised” apple. These two companies Apples– musical one and computer one – are the most remarkable examples of charisma. No one needs to be persuaded to buy their product. People fight for it, despite of the millions of seemingly free of charge alternatives.

What I would like to know is that when has all of this become mass production of piles of faceless plastic, that needs persuasion to be bought?

This moment is actually well-known. It is the moment by which all brilliant and interesting music labels have been bought out by transnational companies, beginning full depersonalization of music products.

A mere acquisition of one company by another has little meaning by itself. It doesn’t happen when it has brought some real benefits to justify the acquisition cost. Especially when a huge accounting firm acquires a little creative and effective team in the hope to buy its creativity and charisma. However, the only thing they can achieve by this is killing all of the creativity and bringing their former charisma to zero, sinking it in the muddy puddle named “corporate culture”.

But one way or another, acquisition cost needed to be recouped. And then a new format in the form of questionable-sounding but low-cost and convenient compact discs appeared.

Vinyl records, being also a result of pressing plastics at the same time still had great individuality. Let’s start with the fact that the same record, released on different labels in different countries, sounded absolutely differently, and had a bunch of other fine details. But greed and desire to re-sell the recording material bought from genuine record labels in a new form has led to mountains of inanimate plastic. That put a first nail in the coffin of the record industry.

Despite the euphoria about huge initial sales of CDs, it may only be compared with an injection of a last dose of a strong drugs. You will feel very good, but not for long, though.

In the meantime, charisma of artists was suffering equally dramatic changes. The era of musicians whose life could fill a book was replaced by the era of musicians, one could only write an article about.

And then, one could only write a paid advertorial, because there was really nothing to write about the artist. And only journalists’ and PR managers’ creative thinking could help to get the public to know the artist, whose disc they had to sell.

We all know how it ended. Music press has come to naught almost everywhere all around the world because of the absolute lack of basis for its activity. Cheap scandals and attempts to “make up” a bright personality do not work for the new generation, who feels it’s all fake. While Amy Winehouse scandals look comical, in the case of some B. Spears they are just abject.

Charisma is charisma because it attracts people. This attraction works for the benefit of the charisma-possessor and those, who are close to him all the time.

Even when things go universally free of charge, charisma would generate money for its possessor – one way or another.

There is only one issue (problem) with charisma. It cannot be created artificially. It either exists or does not. And those who preach pop psychology and claim they will teach you to be charismatic through various NLP methods – well, they can all go to hell. As everyone knows, the only benefit of an NLP training is NLP instructor’s salary.

One last difference of the old record industry from the new one, which is though unrelated to charisma but deserves to be mentioned, is functionality.

What were the historical functions of recording labels?

Here are five basic functions:

- Find an artist

- Record the artist

- Promote the artist

- Distribute recordings

- Deceive the artist

Until a certain time, all these tasks were performed pretty well, especially the last point, where highest levels of instruments have been achieved.

But with the advent of the Internet (it is even indecent to say now) the only one task that the label can perform better than the artist has been left to it, and this is the last one. Artists, though, can also deceive themselves well, especially in their expectations.

Otherwise, artists find themselves by themselves, record at their own expense (thanks to technologies, who made the process cheap, and the recording quality that appeared not be worried about

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