Life after the Digital Disruption
Matt Thomas, better known to the dance music community for the past decade as King Unique, is getting stuck into a normal day’s work that is as far removed from the flights, hotels and nightclubs of a touring DJ’s lifestyle that you can get. He’s in what he describes as the “remote location” of a “dilapidated old coal mining village out in Wales”, which happens to be where his studio is located. Thomas says part of the appeal of coming out here to lay down his tracks is that he can make as much noise as he wants, and nobody complains. Surprisingly though, even though all the wider industry seems to be talking about is how you can’t make a living solely as a producer anymore, Thomas is finding himself more and more in this small Welsh town.
“The whole economic thing has hit the amount of gigs going around for everybody, so I’ve been back in the studio a lot more,” he says. “The non-stop DJ thing during 2007 and 2008 just wasn’t quite as much fun as really bedding into the studio. It feels like it’s 2001 again when we weren’t really doing any gigs, because the money in the studio was so incredible. We used to sit here and make records back to back, and doing that again, I’ve had a fantastic time.”
Like many others in the current climate, Thomas had been frantically chasing gigs in an effort to ensure his full-time existence in dance music would remain sustainable. “Funnily enough though, relaxing here and making records… if you’re on the right label, with the right releases and the right remixes, you can actually keep the body and the soul of it together in the studio.”
The positive story that Thomas tells is in stark contrast to the very loud message of wanton chaos we’ve been hearing from the major players in the music industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the major labels it represents, since the early days of what’s referred to as the ‘digital disruption’. It was a revolution, for better or worse, which began with the explosion in popularity of Napster’s pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing service in late 1999, popularising the notion of “sharing” MP3 files in a way that completely undermined traditional copyright laws, with no royalties paid to artists, labels or anyone else for that matter.
There’s little doubt the industry was utterly changed in the years that followed, but the digital distribution of music was finally legitimized on a major scale when Apple’s iTunes service established a cheap and easy way for the industry to sell music to consumers. However, the debate rages on over how to tackle ongoing challenges in the era of copyright controversy, with a canyon opening between the big industry players who want to restore a copyright-protected world, and those preaching the virtues of a more open internet.
The tension reached a boiling point in January when ACTA, the US-backed international treaty aiming for global consensus on copyright protection, was greeted with howls of derision from citizens, internet libertarians and parliaments alike. One of the main areas of contention was that ISPs would be held responsible for cracking down on piracy, potentially cutting off users who illegally share music. Protesters marched in several European capitals including London, Berlin, Helsinki, Paris and Vienna, before the bill eventually stalled in the European commission.
Not surprisingly, the RIAA was far from happy with how things played out, with chief executive Cary Sherman throwing a blistering tantrum in the New York Times. “Policy makers had recognized that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged, and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000.”
Organizations like RIAA have repeatedly shown they are willing to exaggerate the economic costs and threat to jobs of piracy; but while they continue to bellow about the dark days ahead, the activity in the dance music sector tells a distinctly different story, and is much closer to the more positive account given by Thomas.
While it took several years for the dust to settle, with many long-established labels unable to adapt to the digital era, in the years that followed, a huge range of robust independent labels demonstrated they were able to adopt new business models, plug into new distribution pipelines, taken advantage of new promotional opportunities, and otherwise leverage opportunities never available to them before; largely due to the new possibilities of the digital era.
Stay tuned to SoundCtrl.com for Part 2: Protecting the Future of Music
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