Five ways music world will get worse in 2014
Here are a few of the more notable predictions that were being bandied about last year at this time:
French Montana, Becky G and Bei Maejor will become major stars.
There will be major growth in watching concerts on your computer. Justin Bieber is on his way out. One out of three ain’t bad. We’ll see in 12 months if we do any better. 1. People who aren’t Beyoncé will forget they’re not Beyoncé. Springing an album on an unsuspecting public and reaping 991,000 downloads in 10 days is not a strategy. It is, as industry insider/professional curmudgeon Bob Lefsetz is fond of pointing out, a stunt.
That won’t stop some mid-level artists from trying to pull off the same feat in 2014.
As with David Bowie before Beyoncé and Radiohead before Bowie, ploys such as snubbing all advance marketing or trusting your audience to set the price they pay won’t work unless you have not just an audience, but an audience large enough that their collective anticipation translates into actual sales and not just millions of YouTube views (Miley Cyrus, come on down).
More importantly, the Beyoncé gambit, in tandem with the hundreds of name artists trying to raise money on Kickstarter, complicates a relationship that should be dead simple. After all, music fans may be willing to keep track of two or three campaigns for their money, but anything beyond that seems less like fandom and more like tracking your investments. 2. Hey. Over here. It’s us. Canada. As the Wall Street Journal noted on Christmas Eve, scores of streaming-music subscription services are set to make an already crowded field even more crowded. Except, so far, in Canada. Take the category leader, Spotify. Bulgaria, Estonia, Iceland and Liechtenstein all have access to the service. Canada? Not so much. (We’re talking about us non-technical users, not the small minority inclined to avail themselves of certain clever “work-arounds.”)
Same goes for the other big name, Pandora. Canadian visitors to their site are greeted with this seemingly inconsolable message: “We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. . . . We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.”
The yawning gap will grow even wider this month when Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre leverage their wildly successful line of bass-heavy headphones and sound systems into Beats Music, described by the Digital Music News website as “highly curated” and “celebrity-driven.” Did we say leverage? We meant, “leverage in the U.S. but not those poor suckers in Canada.”
In the meantime, Canadians do have access to the well-regarded Rdio and could soon get their ears on iTunes Radio and, with any luck, the potential category killer, YouTube Music.
Until then, however, we’ll continue to have our faces rubbed in the infuriating disparity. 3. The Star Trek approach to music ownership Remember those scenes in Star Trek: The Next Generation when Captain Picard would stride into his dimly lit office and bark at the air something like, “Beethoven. Piano Sonata number 5. C Minor” before ordering a cup of tea — Earl Grey, hot. We hate that. Yes, the elimination of individual ownership is a noble concept and one we’re inexorably moving toward with the streaming-music model, but as anyone who’s ever downloaded an album from iTunes onto their phone or laptop can attest, the music often just sits there, unplayed and unloved, and that probably includes more than a few of those 991,000 Beyoncé downloads. To even the mildly technophobic among us, that’s the monster we fear is lurking just beneath the surface of the always-on collective: a mounting distance between listener and music. 4. The return of the countdown show Television abhors a void. With the fading popularity of American Idol, The X Factor and whatever other singing competitions you’ve probably stopped watching, it’s only a matter of time before somebody revisits the much cheaper concept of the chart countdown. On New Year’s Day, Britain’s venerable Top of the Pops celebrated its 50th anniversary. Dark for the better part of eight years, it lives on, curiously, in the form of 35-year-old reruns on BBC4. But as Peter Paphides mused recently in the Guardian, a show like TOTP actually makes more sense in 2014 than it did in 2004. After all, “Twitter is the enormous student common room where millions of people go to enjoy these shows, augmenting their enjoyment by reading and posting immediate reactions to the events unfolding before them. Doesn’t all that real-time inter- activity seem perfect for a costeffective, viewer-driven, post- Idol chart show? 5. The slow death of simplicity Much of the above points to one thing: infinite choice can make being a music fan less rewarding, not more. Beyond the truism that audience fragmentation can lead to commu- nities that are both smaller and less welcoming lies a hard truth: much of the music we’re listening to now has a shelf life of weeks, if not days.
In fact, it’s downright chastening to consider how little music released last January we’re still listening to this January.
Other than Justin Bieber, of course. jsakamoto@thestar.ca