WHO STACKS THE CHIPS?

This is the foreword to my next book to be published in spring 2024 (writing under way). "LOVE, MONEY & LUCK - THE MUSIC MANAGERS"

The music industry’s principal conundrum has always been the same - how to get people to listen to a new song they don’t know. Whether the public will like a new song or not is always luck. Other ‘luck’ businesses – the gaming industry for instance - make their money by giving the public a place to gamble. But in the music industry things are reversed. It's the corporations who place the bets and the public who provide the casino.

Like anyone else who earns a living from gambling, the big music corporations have devised a system. To operate it, they need a steady supply of chips. These are the artists.

Artists come packaged in various shapes and sizes but most of the top-of-the-range products are surprisingly similar. The energy that creates their success comes from within, an emotional discomfort that forces them to create music for the love of an audience, usually as the result of an unsettling childhood. Their art is a symptom of mental disquiet. And it’s the primary product with which the music industry creates its $60 billion-a-year turnover.

Behind these top-of-the-range artists come a whole collection of lesser ones, some with equal emotional complexity but lesser musical talent, others with excellent musical ability but not as self-driven. Many of them are far too well-adjusted to be called artists in the real sense of the word but are still good material for turning into stars. Along with them come hundreds of thousands of good, competent, personable musicians for whom the music industry is their source of income, though the work it provides for them is not its principal focus. The music industry is a hit song/hit artist industry, created to monetise the public’s need for addictive tunes and inspiring artists. And it's designed specifically to allow corporations to turn moments of luck (hit recordings), into a regular flow of share-tradable income.

To have built a system that allows a multi-billion-dollar industry to function on a groundwork of luck is like building a skyscraper on quicksand. But unlike a skyscraper, the music industry’s system couldn't first be planned and then executed, it came about by constant small changes to the status quo. It’s a composite of all the money-making, luck-increasing, risk-reducing, value-adding ideas that the marketers of popular music have come up with over the last two-hundred years. Nowadays it’s primarily overseen by the four major record companies that have become conglomerate controllers of copyright in everything connected with contemporary popular music – Universal, Sony, Warner and BMG.

Eighty per cent of the people employed in the music industry are there to operate the system on some level or other. The A&R men and pluggers are pre-system, as are songwriters, producers and unsigned artists. They’re the people on the front line, looking for the luck. When they find it, they turn it over to the system to monetise.

When artists or songwriters sign agreements for songs they record, they cease to be artists in the pure sense of the word and become businessmen, suppliers of chips (their songs, their recordings, themselves). They join the system. And with the chips they supply the music corporations gamble with public taste, splitting their winnings with the artists and songwriters who supplied them.

The major music companies have always denied they’re a cartel yet for over a hundred years there have been regular meetings between them at which they jointly agree on rules that will govern, for instance, the way the charts are devised, or what will or won't be considered fair ways to obtain radio plays of records. They then run back to their individual corporations and sit with their accountants and lawyers devising ways to get around the rules they've just agreed on. In other words, they find ways to game the system. It's always been part of the fun, and as often as not these tricks are legitimsed and incorporated into the system.

None of this has ever been done with any thought for the well-being of music as art. Only for profit. The industry is a money-making construct founded on the public’s need to hear hit songs and see inspiring performers. Which is good. Because money is neutral. An industry driven by profit is not there to judge or choose which music we like; that’s for us to decide. The industry is there to offer us choices, then to supply us with whatever we choose.

The industry sucks in artists and regurgitates their art as buyable music. It’s a service industry. For the artist it’s a funnel through which their music can find a public; for the public it’s a supplier. But the process isn’t simple. The system is complex, competitive and cutthroat. Unsurprisingly, to find their way around it, artists need people to help them.

These are the managers.  And their primary job is to game the system on their artist’s behalf.

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