One of the Things I find Shit

More things I find shit – the shock of the moment has to be the winding down of V2 records’ new music operation, in other words, they’ve wound down their activity as a legitimate record label - you know one that signs, records and promotes new talent along with a stable of established artists! They’ve decided to throw in the towel on that financially risk laden, reward starved side of the business, you know, the side that we actually dig, the one that keeps us supplied with new music.

Now, I’m not claiming for a minute that V2 were the best at promoting new music, in fact some would say they sucked, but this label’s roster read like a fucking who’s who of major selling contemporary artists, two that spring to mind are Moby and The White Stripes! Is someone really telling me that V2 were so inept they couldn’t profit from these band’s records? Jack White is probably the most sought after recording artist in the US today, he even turned an old lady platinum without the use of eco-unfriendly hair dye!

The seriously worrying aspect of all this is that we seem to be striding ever closer to the nightmare scenario where that grim virtual reality show they call MySpace, and others like it, will be the only vehicle for consumers (that’s what they call us!) to access new music. But, are we seriously gonna be left to our own devices?

It all sounded great a few years back, music was enjoying a resurgence and we could boot-leg it all for free, not sure anyone really thought, or cared about how it was going to continue, but hey, what the fuck! they could all afford it, they were all rich, weren’t they? Well, no, not all of them, of course you’re right as far as that fat-wanker Sir Elton John and his balding band of badly dressed bum chums were concerned, it probably meant that he and few others would have to cut back on the rent boys for a month or two, which was probably good for their health anyway, but there were many others who weren’t living in quite the same opulence, for starters just about every music loving independent record label and their artists.

You might not know this but independent labels have acted as the industry’s nursery, providing new talent for the past 20-30 years, they’re the ones that take the big risks NOT the majors. The major label’s part in this performance is quite simple, they wait until they see some foolish indie has developed a market for a new artist, then they approach that new artist and convince them that with a little financial fertilization their small, but loyal and appreciative market could grow, to a big, disloyal, unappreciative one, remarkably nearly every artist they approach will follow them.

So now the majors are reneging on holding up their side of this already disjointed deal and are no longer picking up the new bands they feel show potential, and as these eternally-greedy corporations already ate their own young back in the 90s when they aggressively took over nearly every happening independent label and squeezed the ones they couldn’t out of existence, where’s the new music going to come from?

You see the majors have always done absolute nothing in terms of supporting artist development, no surprise really as they’re not run by people that understand or care about music, no, unfortunately the asylum was taken over by the doctors years ago.
Now the industry is run by accountants and lawyers whose sole interest is to turn a profit for themselves and their shareholders. Most major labels are subsidiaries of public listed companies for fuck sake, Bono picks up a coke habit and delays recording on the next U2 album and share prices drop. So margins and making their Gs and Ns combine neatly with their Ps is what they’re all about and who can blame them? they’re self-serving corporations after all, why should they operate any differently from other self-serving corporations? it doesn’t matter to them whether they’re selling music or flange-grommets they’ve incorporated the same methods, just that it doesn’t seem to be working, well not at the moment anyway.

When you see a company the size of V2 wind up the new music side of their operation the writing is on the wall. V2 is officially the world’s biggest indie, but to all intent and purpose it operates just as a major and so it is no surprise that just like V2 the majors are also concentrating on the re-issue market. Music retail space has been shrinking for years, so they need to generate the same profit with less shelf space and they found that they can do it (for a while) with DVDs and what better way is there to fill all that extra DVD memory than cramming it full of Elvis ‘b’ sides, along with a couple of pictures of pretty Priscilla at Neverland or whatever the fuck it’s called.

I’m afraid it’s more than the beginning of the end for the traditional record label, I think the end came a couple of years back but we were too busy bootlegging Neil Young tunes to notice.

The majors are wholly responsible for the position the industry finds itself in today, it has been run by shortsighted, short-term profit driven, poor quality executives for too long. It’s funny really when you think that they’re seriously hoping to weather the storm and ride it all out, but just like Monty Python’s French diner and his wafer thin mint, there will come a time when the market will not take another repackaged Lionel Ritchie Christmas album, with or without the cranberry colored wrapping paper that came with it. The value of these catalogues will begin to depreciate and they will lose money and we’ll be asking, what happened to the new music? And we’re not talking about those manufactured Pop Idols with their trained voices and trained minds bilging out mediocre Americana, we mean The Clash, where are The Clash?