The Industry of Music (part one)

It can be argued that when the Beatles exploded into consciousness in the Sixties, they practically invented the modern music industry. They created massive sales, enormous public interest, unprecented viewing figures, stadium tours and the list goes on and on and then some. When the Beatles released a new record, it was an event. It was a reason for saving up your pocket money. For the ordinary punter there was a kind of "tea ceremony" in gaining this valuable new artifact. Heading into town, perhaps on a bus, going into the record shop, maybe asking for it to be played in the shop, asking the assistant for the record and the inevitable exchange of wonga, spondoolies - the cash sale - ker-ching!! Then perhaps, back on the bus, looking at this sacred and tactile purchase, checking out if there were any scratches on the vinyl, the sound of static from the inner sleeve, looking at it over and over again in case you missed some small but vital detail...jeez...even the smell of it meant something! From studio to Dansette in one neat operation. No confusion there then - a direct hit in every way for everyone involved. Today we (annoyingly) call that Win, Win! A purchase made of say the She Loves You single in 1963 here in the UK most likely still exists today, and if it was looked after, probably still does what it was charged to do in the first place, that is ... play! Now that's value for money isn't it? If only things were that simple today.
In this world full of high tech equipment, instant information and the ever increasing demands of the consumer hovering over everything, there is a quite bewildering range of methods in which to "consume" music... (you know even that phrase, "consume" music says something doesn't it?) ...When the Beatles released the Anthology in the mid 1990's, the method of releasing music wasn't too much different from the time of She Loves You, though there were signs that we were on the cusp of something and that things were changing...there was a bit of a preamble with build up promo on radio and magazines, a release date and a physical product (albeit a CD as primary release in that case and not the artform that was the vinyl product) and then hopefully a chart position in, what was and still is fast becoming extinct - the singles chart. A song could take a few weeks to get to the top, then building slowly in the nation's mind en route to becoming a classic. Whilst at the time of Anthology, if a release didn't hit number one in the first week of release, then somehow it had failed?

For me, at the time, this whole thing was quite strange; odd.

Something had changed and looking back now it might be regarded as the death knell for the music industry as we had known it. The personal computer and the internet were both just around the corner for most people. Few people can argue that the advent of the CD changed everything. With it came the word DATA and then data extraction. There you have the problem. When you take the emotional beauty of an artform such as The Beatles music, convert it to a series of 1's and 0's and marry it to a computer connected to the internet, you were surely asking for trouble. Trouble, that in my opinion will eventually and surely kill the music industry as we know it. To briefly go back to vinyl, one must remember that although bootlegs existed, they were harder to come by, nowhere near as easy to reproduce and there certainly wasn't the mass "theft" of product that exists now. The genie was out of the bottle when music ceased to be a physical product and became something measurable on a data sheet. There are some up sides though and it's not all bad....it's just different. In the next column, I'm going to look at what we've gained by these developements and specifically what impact this has meant to Beatle fans in particular. I started this piece by saying that arguably it was the Beatles who started the modern music industry as we knew it and were at the forefront of it's developement even as far up the line as the groundbreaking Anthology in the Ninties, where it was the Beatles who replaced the Beatles as the biggest band on earth. The question is, can the Beatles somehow set a new bench mark and save the industry we all know and love?