Vinyl in the Time of Covid-19

 

On Thursday I was interviewed on the fruity American television programme LIT Entertainment News about a turnaround: in America vinyl records are outperforming compact discs. Trade figures for the first half 2020 demonstrate that vinyl sales constituted 62 per cent of the revenues for physical formats. It was the first time since the 1980s that vinyl had generated more money than CDs.

            This is something that had been predicted. Sales revenues for vinyl records have increased every year since 2006. Sales revenues for compact discs, in contrast, have declined annually since the millennium. When 2019's trading figures were announced it was predicted that, if trading patterns continued, vinyl would be on course to surpass CDs. Some people called this a long time ago. In my book Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record, I quote the music journalist Adam Woods, who stated in 2004, ‘it is easy to believe that the format could thrive even as the CD begins to lose ground to the Internet’. I also have a 2011 quote from Lyor Cohen, who was then the CEO of the Warner Music Group, stating that ‘vinyl will definitely outlast CDs’.

It should be noted that vinyl is outperforming compact discs in terms of revenues but not in terms of units sold. One of the reasons why vinyl is generating more money is because each album typically costs two and a half times more than a CD. It is also the case that, in our time of lockdowns, it is more likely that consumers will purchase vinyl than CDs. The former format appeals to collectors and remains accessible via mail order. The latter format is more casually purchased and will be neglected in times of shop closures. Trade figures also indicate that the overall market for physical records is paltry. Vinyl accounts for four per cent of the American market. Streaming, on the other hand, accounts for 85 per cent.

Yet the figures are still remarkable. Vinyl looked on course for obliteration twenty years ago; it is now firmly established as a recording format that both consumers and the recording industry will invest in. Pressing plants have struggled to keep up with demand. Equally impressive is the fact that vinyl sales have continued to increase despite the strictures of Covid-19. In the United States they are up four per cent year-on-year. In the UK the trade magazine Music Week has reported that vinyl has defied ‘coronavirus chaos to post big rises’. Sales for the third quarter were up 41.4 per cent on 2019. This is largely due to the rescheduling of Record Store Day, but is demonstrative of the public’s commitment to this format.

After fifteen years of sales increases and a resolute performance in the face of coronavirus we should probably stop talking of vinyl’s revival. Instead, our focus should be elsewhere. The compact disc has been defeated. Will it now become an object of fetishism for collectors?

 

 

The Story of Sound Recording

On Saturday the BBC World Service broadcast ‘The Story of Sound Recording’, the first part of a series exploring A History of Music and Technology. I’m a featured interviewee, alongside noted experts Mark Katz, Andre Millard, Greg Milner, Nick Morgan, Sophie Maisonneuve and Sean Williams. It’s a great series and for the second time in my life (following on from the Music on the Blockchain report), I find myself being introduced by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason. The episode can be accessed via this link for the next 29 days.

Dún Laoghaire Vinyl Festival

Last weekend a vinyl festival was held in Dún Laoghaire in Ireland, bringing together the likes of Don Letts, Gavin Friday and Terri Hooley to discuss and play vinyl records and consider the importance of vinyl in culture today.

            In the run up to the festival I was interviewed by Liam Geraghty for RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcasting company. If you want to hear me rattling on about the birth of vinyl and the importance of the Dickies' ‘Banana Splits’ you can access the interview via this link: https://cdn.rasset.ie/manifest/audio/2018/1115/20181115_rteradio1-drivetime-enduringap_c21463684_21463689_261_/manifest.m3u8

The Thin of It

In Britain, musical compositions gained copyright protection because they were equated with literature. The 1710 Statute of Anne – the world’s first copyright Act – awarded copyright to the authors of ‘published books and other writings’. This Act sought to regulate the book trade and it was originally conceived as covering the written word only. Nevertheless, it was successfully argued in the 1777 case of Bach v Longman that music ‘may be written; and the mode of conveying the ideas is by signs and marks’. Music could be captured in notated form. Therefore, it was held to be one of the ‘other writings’ covered by the 1710 Act.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this legal argument, however. Music could only be equated with books because literary copyright was no longer being equated with books. Anne Barron has charted the changing theorisation of copyright in the eighteenth century. It was formulated as ‘information technology law’ but became ‘intellectual property law’. The Statute of Anne, according to Barron, had a ‘physicalist’ conception of copyright. She states:

What we find in the 1710 Act, in fact, is the earliest manifestation of a now familiar legal technique for dealing with the definitional problems presented by intangible objects of intellectual property: the products of cultural technologies, and the forms that these products assume when they become objects of market exchange, are taken as real-world analogues of, or templates for, the virtual objects to which intellectual property rights attach.

Here the literary work and the book in which it appears are as one: ‘to trespass on this object, the defendant would have had to copy word-for-word by printing a facsimile edition’.

            Literary copyright expanded beyond this physicalist conception, however. According to Barron, it was eventually viewed in a ‘formalist’ manner instead. This transformation ‘involved identifying the literary object as an entity whose existence exceeded these surface details; identifying it, in other words, as a “work”’. Barron places the formation of this thinking in the ‘literary property debate’ of the 1760s and 1770s, which sought to determine whether there had been a common law property right in literary compositions prior to the Statue of Anne. Lawyers argued that ‘paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey [...] style and sentiment’, and that literary expression is ‘somewhat intellectual’ and ‘detached from the manuscript or any other physical existence whatsoever’. Barron states that:

Here, the object of copyright is imagined to be an expressive form or system of signs, comprising not only signifiers (words, in the case of a literary object) recorded on, or embedded in, a physical substrate, but also the signifieds (ideas) to which these are linked and the manner in which both signifiers and signifieds are connected to form a unified whole; and what distinguishes this entity from other such entities is not only the ‘sentiments’ it conveys, but also its author’s singular mode of thinking and expressing these.

The result was an enlargement of copyright. It expanded in two ways. First, literary copyright was now ‘thick’. Authors and publishers could claim infringement for the theft of the particularities of their style and for the borrowing of sections of their works, whereas in the past they had only been able to prosecute the full and exact replication of a text. Secondly, as the idea of what constituted writing became more amorphous, it became possible to view copyright as encompassing more than just books. The copyright of music arrived on the back of the formalist reconfiguration of literary works.

The copyright of musical compositions was formalist as well. In the 1835 case of D’Almaine v Boosey, Lord Chief Baron determined that:

the most unlettered in music can distinguish one song from another, and the mere adaptation of the air, either by changing it to a dance or by transferring it from one instrument to another, does not, even to common apprehensions, alter the original subject. The ear tells you that it is the same. The original air requires the aid of genius for its construction, but a mere mechanic in music can make the adaptation or accompaniment. Substantially the piracy is where the appropriated music, though adapted to a different purpose from that of the original, may still be recognised by the ear. The adding variations makes no difference in the principle.

Consequently, the copying of musical works does not have to be exact for infringement to have taken place. Composers have protection for both their signifiers and their signifieds.

            In addition, their copyright is ‘formalist’ regardless of whether their works are set down in sheet music or are captured in recordings. This is just. After all, if a musical composition is a form of writing, then so is a record. The terms ‘phonograph’ and ‘gramophone’ both derive from the Greek for sound writing. The analogue groove is an audio trace that is written with the ‘pencil of nature’. In my book Vinyl, I suggest that the groove ‘dissolves the difference between the signifier and the signified’. At the beginning of the 20^th century, composers were arguing that, because the groove is writing, they should be able to derive royalties from sound recordings, just as they were doing from sheet music. In 1905, a French court ruling stated that:

Finding that disks or cylinders are impressed by a stylus under which they pass; that they receive a graphic notation of spoken words, that the thought of the author is as though materialized in numerous grooves, then reproduced in thousands of copies of each disk or cylinder and distributed on the outside with a special writing, which in the future will undoubtedly be legible to the eyes and is today within everyone’s reach as sound; that by virtue of this repetition of imprinted words, the literary work penetrates the mind of the listener as it would by means of sight from a book, [therefore] the rules of plagiarism are applicable to it.

A recording is nevertheless different to sheet music. Contributing to the early copyright debates, J. Drummond Robertson, manager of the Gramophone Company (later to become EMI), argued that each recording has three authors:

(1) The composer who writes the work; (2) the artist who performs it for the purpose of recording the sound waves of his voice; and (3) the inventor and mechanician to whom is due the possibility of registering and subsequently producing in commercial form a means by which these sound waves, the artist’s voice, may be reproduced.

Robertson and the heads of the other British record companies proposed a solution: there should be a separate copyright in the sound recording. This was granted in the Copyright Act 1911, which states that ‘Copyright shall subsist in records, perforated rolls, and other contrivances by means of which sounds may be mechanically reproduced, in like manner as if such contrivances were musical works’. There were various differences, however. First, this copyright was awarded to the ‘inventor and mechanician’ – the record company. Composers, meanwhile, were awarded a royalty on each record sold. Performing artists received no copyright rewards. Second, the duration of copyright was shorter: because it was awarded to the manufacturers, rather than to the composers or the performers, it lasted 50 years from the date of release and not for the life of the author plus 50 years. Third, this copyright was ‘thin’. Sound recording copyright has always been conceived in physicalist terms. You cannot prosecute a record for sounding like another record; you can only prosecute if the sound recording itself is being used. You have to pay for samples; you do not have to pay for interpolations.

For Jason Toynbee ‘the inferiority of the copyright in the recording, its purely physicalist definition’, is a good thing. He believes that it mitigates against a ‘hypostatization of form’. Performers are able to mimic the sounds of other performers, and so the dialogue of ‘phonographic orality’ is able to spread. We can find evidence of this in the blues, Dr Dre’s G-Funk, cover version albums of chart hits, and TV adverts that use soundalike performers. Why, though, should the record companies have sought a thin copyright rather than a thick one? The answer surely lies in the fact that it was good for them. By emphasizing the ‘physicalist’ nature of manufactured product, rather the ‘formalist’ style and sentiment of the composers or performers, it made their claims to the ownership of copyright appear more just. Formalist copyrights, as Richard Arnold has noted, ‘protect the creativity of authors expressed in their works’. Physicalist copyrights, in contrast, ‘protect investment’. This situation has persisted in the UK for more than a century. Sound recording copyright goes to the party that makes the arrangements necessary for the recording to be made. It does not go to the person who creates it.

Live Dead

Live music is called live music for a reason. It wishes to imply that its opponent – recorded music – is dead. The use of the term ‘live’ to describe a performance that is ‘heard or watched at the time of its occurrence’ only arose in the 1930s. Musicians’ unions promoted this usage vigourously, as they campaigned hard to ‘keep music live’. They targetted recorded music, describing it as a ‘grave threat’, a ‘serious danger’ and an ‘ever-present menace’. Their great fear was that records would take the place of performing musicians: ‘The musician may well become extinct and music may cease to be written’.

            To a certain extent their terminology was appropriate. The term ‘record’ has preservative connotations. To record is to embalm sounds that would otherwise pass. Death haunted the earliest phonographic reveries. The first article about sound recording declared, ‘certainly nothing can be conceived more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead’. Thomas Edison, the inventor of sound recording, promised an epitaph that would last through the ages: ‘This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words: and, centuries after you have crumbled into dust, may repeat every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word’.

            And yet the promotion of the term ‘live music’ has been more duplicitous than first appears. By the 1930s records were very much seen as living things. This is because Edison was a liar. His original tinfoil recordings lasted days rather than centuries; they were destroyed when they were removed from the phonograph. Shellac and vinyl offered improvements upon this format, but they too proved susceptible to ageing processes. Consequently, the preservative function of records was downplayed. In its place came a recording industry that focused on a fast turnover of products. It didn’t want you to keep your records forever. It wanted you to buy new ones.

            This had phenomenological ramifications. Records felt alive precisely because you could play them to death. Analogue records aged in step with their owners, acquiring the same scuffs, knocks and dust as they passed through time. Elvis Costello made this point clear in ‘45’, his paean to the 7” single: ‘Every scratch, every click, every heartbeat, every breath that I bless’. This ethos casts the musicians’ unions’ campaigns in a different light. They weren’t attacking records because they thought they were lifeless; they feared them because they are very much alive.

            And were they trying to cover up the fact that it is live performance that is morbid? One reason to see an artist in the flesh is to witness them before that flesh withers. This much has become apparent following the rash of popular music deaths this year. How did people respond to the passing of David Bowie and Prince? By boasting that they had seen them when they were alive. Social media was awash with pictures of ticket stubs, as people sought to prove that they were once in the same room as the recently deceased.

The death cult of live performance increases as artists and audiences grow older. There is a sense of chalking musicians off your list before they pass away. It is not only confined to OAP artists, however. One of the reasons why people pay to see unpredictable and doomed performers such as Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty is in the hope that the artist will die young. The viewer will then be able to speak from the privileged position of having seen them while they fretted their hour on the stage.

Gig-goers are a cruel bunch.

Vinyl in the Digital Age

My review of Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age by Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward is available in the May 2016 edition of Popular Music. It is easy to see why I was asked to review it: it has a similar title to my own book and it covers a similar theme. There are nevertheless few genuine crossovers between the two works. We have the vinyl record as our object of study, but we take it in different directions. And this is a good thing. One odd factor of the Bartmanski and Woodward book that I don't mention in my review is its lack of consistency about what their analogue record is called. Sometimes they talk about 'vinyl', at other times it is 'the vinyl'. They do, however avoid 'vinyls', which is common in some countries and among some age groups. Maybe an international standard should be set?

Love of Labour

These days people hark back to the mixtapes and describe the creation of them as a labour of love. In doing so they emphasise the wrong part of this practice. There has been a large body of writing about the romantic aspects of creating these tapes; compiling them as love letters to the person you wanted to date. In my own experience romance was only a small part of mix-taping practice. Sadly, perhaps, I was more likely to make mixtapes for my mates (what does this say about my sexuality?). Most often I made them for myself (admittedly, I did have a fairly isolated upbringing).

            And I made a lot of mixtapes. In fact, just about every vinyl record I bought, as well as any pre-recorded cassettes or CDs, was reconfigured and re-contextualised as part of a tape compilation. This didn’t represent a labour of love, but rather a love of labour.

            There is a type of listening practice that is idealised above all others: dedicated, motionless listening, preferably through headphones and better still in the dark. This is the pop equivalent of the classical music concert: listening that supresses bodily activity. As with so many aspects of classical ideology this needs to be countered. Simon Frith has made a strong argument for dancing as an ideal way of listening. This is a political move. He wants to overturn the idea that rhythmically-focused black music should be reduced to ‘feeling’ while harmonically-sophisticated white music is the bastion of ‘thought’. He argues instead that ‘dance matters not just as a way of expressing music but as a way of listening to it, a way into the music in its unfolding – which is why dancing to music is both a way of losing oneself in it, physically, and a way of thinking about it, hearing it with a degree of concentration that is clearly not “brainless”’.

            In black culture there is a dynamic cluster of meanings around the word ‘work’. When you are ‘working’ you might be doing your job. The term is also applied to dancing and to dancing’s great correlate, sex. This metaphorical usage stretches from Hank Ballard’s ‘Work with Me, Annie’ through to Michael Jackson’s ‘Working Day and Night’ and beyond.

            Returning to the subject of mixtapes, I want to raise a less titillating equation between working and absorbing yourself in sound. Another great way of listening to music is to turn it into a job. For me, the making of mixtapes wasn’t romantic; it was an industrial process. In my own vainglorious way I was imagining myself as a producer or engineer. I was selecting, sequencing and editing. Like dancing, this changed listening from a passive process into an active one. It was also a way of getting closer to the music. I have written before about the reciprocal relationship between recording personnel and the public: producers mix recordings with an imagined ‘ear’ of the public; one of the ways that the public listens to music is by imagining the scenario in the recording studio. There are all sorts of ways of miming along to the records we play and there various locations that we can picture ourselves in – the air guitar and the live concert are not the only games in town. In fact, one of the best ways of locating ourselves in recorded sound is to configure ourselves as engineers. And this, as much as courtship, is where the mixtape came in handy.  

Just Like Watching Brazil

I have just returned from Campinas in Brazil, where I was attending the 18^th biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). I heard some great papers there, covering a wide range of subjects (from Astrid Gliberto to Metallica, from modernism to the Musicians’ Union). I also gave my own paper, ‘Sounds Revolting’, which was drawn largely from my recent blog entries about big data and new music. I introduced it by asking the delegates if they knew the current number one single, either in the UK, the US or Brazil. The fact that I didn’t receive a single correct reply confirmed my thesis and is a reflection of the lack of centrality that the charts play in people’s lives. Or is it just indicative of IASPM? One of the curious things about the international association of popular music is that it doesn't pay much attention to the most popular popular music. I attended plenty of talks, but none of the papers addressed music that is currently in the charts.

            While I was at the conference I met with Olivier Julien, who lectures in music at the Sorbonne. He has recently written a great review of my book in the French journal Volume, in which he describes its structure as a ‘truly brilliant idea’. He sums up:

Given this clever and engaging formal scheme, and considering it helps organize an argument that is particularly well researched and documented while providing an overall pleasant and stimulating reading experience, I believe Osborne’s book to be one of the best recent contributions to what Amanda Bayley described, back in 2009, as “the increasingly diverse research currently being undertaken in the field of recorded music” (2009: 2). For these reasons, I am certain Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record will soon feature prominently on many bookshelves, alongside such classics as Andre Millard’s America on Record (1995) or Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound (2004).