The Corgan meltdown—it gets worse
Jim DeRogatis just posted a letter from Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan supporting the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger.
Corgan’s been a fairly popular touring artist for some 15 years or more, now, so I don’t want to dismiss his position out of hand.
But on the face of it it sure looks like he’s carrying Live Nation’s and Ticketmaster’s water, right down to parroting the companies’ contention that the touring market is “broken”:
The ’system’ that was once the modern record business, essentially ushered in with the meteoric rise of the Beatles, is now helplessly broken. And by almost every account available cannot be repaired. Personally I would add to that a healthy ‘good riddance,’ as the old system far too often took advantage of the artists as pawns while the power brokers colluded behind the scenes to control the existing markets. This control often saw the sacrificing of great careers to maintain that control. Look no further than the major record labels’ intense fight to slow down the progress of Internet technologies that more readily brought music and video to the consumer because they couldn’t completely control it. This disastrous decision on their part has destroyed the economic base of the recording industry. It is now a shadow of its former self.
Note, too, that Corgan is talking about the recorded music industry here. The crazy thing is that the reason Azoff and Co. have been saying the touring industry is broken is that it’s broken for them, in that by their lights artists have too much power in the process.
Why Corgan is helping them out of a position they got themselves into is a mystery.
Corgan has been a punching bag for a lot of people for a long time, particularly some other artists and critics in Chicago during his impressive rise. His band never spoke to me artistically, but I personally always sort of admired his determination. The first time he appeared on 120 Minutes, as I recall, he took some tough shots at the scene that sometimes scorned him. I liked the idea of his punching back the first chance he got; it was a very Chicago thing to do. I barely wrote about him, but he was always courteous, even co-hosting our radio show one week when DeRo was out of town.
All that said, he really seems to be taking leave of his senses.
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And let’s be honest: the ‘recorded music’ business was really the ’shiny disc sales’ business. The majors were little more than prolific promoters of plastic coffee coasters.
I think this is one of the issues the industry had - it didn’t care much for ‘intagible’ IP (the labels apparently missed the memo about film/tv/advert licensing until just recently) because it was primarily in the plastics business (CD’s, jewel cases). Licensing was just the *means* to the merchandising. Today, licensing *is* the business (at least from where I’m sitting….today.)
The ‘glory days’ when the labels had monopolized the physics of distribution, are thankfully, gone.
The only physics that can still be monopolized are the live venues, but I think even this has a more abrupt horizon than most think. It was only six years ago or so Microsoft tried to ‘livecast’ some huge ACME-AID concert from the UK. Now several web services (Ustream.tv) offer people the ability to make feeds available on-demand.
Have you seen Daryl Hall’s website (http://www.livefromdarylshouse.com/), where he’s webcasting concerts from his home? *This* is the future for many artists….why bother with promoters and all that crap when you can *completely* control the venue??!?
I could be wrong - many of my impressions about this business have been….. naive, at best.
It’s funny, if you’re right the business is *really* in trouble, because live shows are what they’re betting the farm on.
I was going to post on this later, but it’s relevant here. I went to a Live Nation show recently; it just crystallized a lot of the short-sightedness of the industry. Just standing in the lobby with friends, people would interrupt us to get us to sign up for a contest to win some “free trip to Hawaii.” The lobby had little stands in it, almost like those sad little floating cart stores that now full up shopping malls.
The venue was about 5000, I’d say, but they’d managed to sell less than half the seats. This was for a major, not-quite pantheonic artist who’d had some serious hits, though hadn’t recorded much good stuff for 20 years or more.
The sound was pretty bad—really muffled. As a consequence, the audience was pretty subdued. The sound was so low that you could have a normal conversation without straining. I’m not a sound expert but I’d swear that the venue was using only the speakers at the side of the stage, and not the large bank above it—no need to project to the balconies, ’cause no one was there.
Beers were $11.
Now, the sound was probably the artist’s responsibility, but all in all it was a pretty shitty experience. There was nothing about that show that made me think, wow, can’t wait till I do *that* again.
And I got in free.
The touring market is “broken”? Is he on crack?