Rock & RapOctober 8, 2003By Mike Zwerin (IHT)
PARIS: An article entitled "Just Exactly Why Do We Need the Music Industry" in the August/September issue of the critic Dave Marsh's irreverent newsletter "Rock Rap Confidential" includes an item about the Panamanian singer Ruben Blades offering his songs for downloading on the Web. The tracks are free. Customers are asked to pay whatever they consider a fair price. Blades is quoted: "This experiment will determine whether we will be able to forego intermediaries in the future and offer our work at a lower cost, while preserving for the artist the direct benefits of his labor." His next album will soon be available on his Web site, www.rubenblades.com. He has no plans to sign with a record label.
"As every audit in the history of the music business confirms," Marsh writes, "artists are never paid" royalties (his italics). Advances rarely break into the black, and the recording industry is often accused of "voodoo" accounting. Marsh maintains that the current wave of lawsuits against Internet file-sharers - not professional pirates or counterfeiters, mind you - has little to do with protecting the rights of recording artists.
Some experts believe that customers who get a free sample and like it often go out and buy the complete product; that file-sharing actually takes the place of what used to be called singles. Marsh quotes David Ralis writing in the Aug. 4 Burlington County Times in Pennsylvania: "The Internet has largely supplanted the radio as the primary means to listen to new music, in no small part due to the recording industry's continued manipulation of station play lists with an estimated $100 million in annual payola."
The 21st-century slump in record sales is also partly a result of pricing. A high retail price was originally justified as covering the costs of tooling up for the new CD technology. That was 20 years ago, and prices never came down. It now costs about $2 to manufacture and package a CD, not including distribution, advances or the above-mentioned payola, and depending on quantity. Industry spin goes that since CD's carry more music than LP's, they should cost more.
Which brings us to another, less discussed, question. "Are CD's too long?" Dan Ouellette asks in the October issue of the jazz magazine Down Beat. The answer, says the trumpeter Russell Gunn, is "an emphatic yes." He adds: "Most of the time the music isn't good enough to warrant 78 minutes." Gunn continues, saying, "symphonies aren't even that long."
Mozart's Haffner Symphony comes in at about 22 minutes. Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" is 33 minutes and change. Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," the Beatles's "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Billie Holiday's "Lady in Satin" are all between 40 and 45 minutes - the average length of two sides of an LP, and about the length of a set in a jazz club. This would seem to be a reasonable estimate of the limits of a realistic demand on the attention span of modern listeners.
Reactionary listeners who once objected to any recorded jazz longer than one side of a 78 rpm had a point. Not many saxophone players have played more in 40 to 45 minutes than Lester Young or Charlie Parker in three. Of course there are always exceptions. The length is relative to the quality of the music. It is quantity, however, that tends to be stressed. As with 750-page novels and three-hour movies, the entertainment industry often equates the weight of a padded 78-minute CD - or a double CD when one would have done - with its creator's virility. The quantity of recorded music is expanding to fit into the increased digital space available for it (witness all the alternate takes).
"Music publishing is the gas that moves the music business vehicle," Gunn points out. "It's more lucrative for them to have as many songs as possible." On the other hand, the bassist and bandleader Ron Carter told Down Beat that "maintaining a concept for longer than 48 minutes is difficult." The saxophonist Javon Jackson said: "More power to the guys who can make a 75-minute CD that sustains emotion, but I keep mine below 55." Carter wonders if the advent of the CD format may have contributed to "the downturn of recorded music" in general.
Ouellette concludes by saying that "most jazz CD's will fade after a handful of numbers, especially when the strongest tunes are stacked up front. Shorter CD's, priced accordingly, may result in higher sales."
Art Blakey used to say: "If a crowd applauds you at the end of a set, is it because they like you or are they happy you're stopping?"
