Measuring the Measuring

In late 2017, UK Music published their latest Measuring Music report. UK Music is a lobbying group for the ‘collective interests of the recorded, published and live arms of the British music industry’. Measuring Music is one of their campaigning documents and it therefore contains headline-grabbing statistics. One of the most eye-catching is that live music is worth £1bn to the UK economy, while recorded music is only worth £640m.

            This phenomenon has been reported in turn by media institutions, such as the BBC and the Financial Times, and by industry players, such the Music Publishers Association, Ticketing Business News and Billboard. It is also noted in the recent UK Live Music Census.

            What these news reports miss out, however, is that that the live music statistics and recorded music statistics are not directly comparable. UK Music admit as much in their separate ‘methodology’ document, albeit only in terms of their calculation of the Gross Value Added (GVA) Contribution, the figures that illustrate the contribution of each music industry sector to the British economy. UK Music state that GVA ‘is most simply understood as the value of sales minus the cost of bought in goods and services used up in the production process’, but also admit that calculating GVA is not straightforward at all. As a result, ‘This means that it is likely that the ratio of GVA to Gross Output that we apply may vary between the different elements of the core music industry. It is bespoke to the core as a whole, not to the component parts of the core’.

            GVA is nevertheless only one of the factors that help to make any direct comparisons between live and recorded music questionable. In fact, the figures are more profoundly skewed by other elements of the methodology, notably decisions about what makes up the ‘core music industry’ and what makes up the ‘wider music industry’; about what to include within each sector of the music industries; and about what to exclude from these sectors. Recorded music suffers in comparison to live music in each of these methodological respects.

            ‘Core music industry’ occupations are counted towards the trade figures; ‘wider music industry’ occupations are not. The core includes live industry revenue from ‘ticketing agents’ and ‘concert venues and arenas’, but it does not include recording industry income from ‘music retail (shops)’, ‘music retail (digital)’ or ‘other music-based digital services for consumers’.

            This discrepancy becomes more apparent when we look at what is included within the ‘recorded music’ sector and what is included within ‘live music’. Recorded music is restricted to the wholesale income of sales of physical formats and downloads, as well as the money that record companies make from streaming (of both the ad-supported and subscription varieties). It does not include the money that the retailers and streaming companies make from selling these goods. The Live music figures, meanwhile, include ‘Total ticket sales for all kinds of live music events’. In contrast to recorded music, they feature the share of income that goes to the retailers of the tickets: ticketing Agents are included. This makes a significant difference. If the retail income from recorded music were included, its totals would rise by at least 30% in the case of the streaming and downloading trade and by around 40% in respect of physical sales. Conversely, ticket agents earn about 10% of the income from ticket sales. On top of this, the live music figures include ‘food and beverage sales’, ‘merchandise’ and ‘venue parking’, as well as ‘camping fees’ for music festivals. It could be argued that recorded music generates similar ‘ancillary’ income (record shops generate merchandise sales and many also now sell food and drink), but these are not included in the figures. The list of trades included under live music is also more expansive. The figures incorporate music festival organisers, music promoters, music agents and production services. Recorded music does include ‘design and production of physical product and packaging’ alongside those employed by record labels themselves. Nevertheless, it does not include the money generated by ‘music producers, recording studios and staff’. These could be considered intimately connected to recorded music, but they are given a separate section within the Measuring Music report.

            There is a more significant omission, however. The live and recorded music figures are concentrated upon those who make a living because of the work of musicians and composers: the record companies, manufacturers, ticket agents and venue workers. The income of the musicians and singers is not included under the headings of recording or live. The policy, instead, is to subtract artist income from these totals and to place it in the combined field of ‘musicians, composers, songwriters & lyricists’. This makes a difference in three respects. In the first instance, it enables the Measuring Music report to argue that artists are the biggest income generators of all. Their total GVA contribution is calculated at £2b. This is double the live income figure and more than three times the amount calculated for recorded music. Secondly, because the figures for composers and performers are combined, we do not get a picture of how much money they are each deriving from recording and how much from live music. This is significant, as we need these figures to get a more accurate picture of the money that is being generated in these two fields. A third factor results from the fact that Measuring Music does not drill down into its figures. We do not get to see how much record companies are earning from recorded music in comparison to recording artists and composers, and nor can we assess the distribution of income in the live music field.

What can be assumed, however, is that the majority of income reported under ‘recorded music’ will result in related income for musicians and composers. They will receive royalties from each sale, download, stream, radio play, public performance or licensing deal. Moreover, while there are variations in the amounts that artists will receive, these are within parameters: approximately 15%-20% of the income from sales and streams will go the recording artists, 8.5% will go the songwriters and their publishers; performing rights relating to the sound recording will be divided 50/50 between record company and musicians, while songwriters will receive at least 50% of the performing rights income for the composition.

            In contrast, there are several income streams reported under ‘live music’ that will not result in corresponding income for performers or composers. In the majority of cases this will include the sales of food and beverages at gigs, the parking income and camping fees, and also the money that venues charge to put on events. Other income figures for live music can be widely variable, including the shares that artists receive from ticket sales and the money that they make from merchandise. The general tendency, however, is that the gap between the rich and poor is wider in live music than it is in recorded music. Live music income is oriented towards star performers and heritage acts, as well as to artists who perform cover versions of these performers songs. Performers down the lower end of the scale may earn nothing from live music or even operate at a loss. Recorded music, in contrast, has a more equal basis. The stars here obviously do make more money than the obscurities, but they do so from generating multiple sales and streams, rather than by charging higher prices than their competitors or by demanding higher fees.

            In one respect UK Music’s decision to separate the income of composers and performers into a category of its own is justified. Although these artists have different income streams for their recorded and live work, the profits and losses in these areas are intertwined. The report depicts a sequential process whereby it is songwriting that enables the creation of successful records, and successful records that prompt successes within live performance. This sequence moves in various directions when it comes to revenue, however. Live performance drives the sale and usage of recordings, and recordings drive the sales of tickets for gigs. Beyond this, as Measuring Music argues, the most successful artists are not just selling their music; they are selling themselves ‘as a brand, reputation or image’.

            At the same time, the categorisations employed by UK Music are of tactical use. As stated above, Measuring Music is a campaigning report. It seeks to gain the government’s support for the UK music industry as a whole. In doing so, it has a dual task. One objective is to point out the value of music. Therefore, the report documents the vast amounts of money that are being accumulated and the large numbers of people who are being employed. At the same time, the report calls for aid. It wants the government to intervene so that yet more money can be made and so that jobs in each sector can be secured.

            UK Music is a coalition between record labels, publishers, artists, managers, songwriters, collection societies and the live music industry. It aims to promote a unified front. It does not want to identify injustices amongst these industry sectors. Therefore, despite the widespread criticism of streaming royalty rates for musicians and songwriters, this report will not show you whether record companies and publishers are profiting at their artists’ expense. Similarly, while prices for tickets have risen sharply in recent years, Measuring Music provides no clues as to whether the live music industry could be more altruistic towards smaller venues or to nascent performers.

Instead, it locates responsibility for low rates of pay outside of the core music industry. As with virtually all industry documents from last year, its main beef is with the ‘value gap’: if there is unfairness in music it is due to YouTube and Facebook and their pesky ‘safe harbours’. Michael Dugher, the CEO of UK Music, stresses that ‘these platforms offer little adequate reward to the investors and creators of the “content”. As a result, their safe harbours must be removed.

The report also suggests that the closure of this value gap within the recording industry will help all parts of the music economy. In doing so, it absolves the live music sector from any responsibility for the distribution of its riches. Dugher notes:

Live music did have another great year as millions of people poured into festivals, stadiums and venues to see and hear their favourite acts. And live music is a fantastic driver for growth. But future talent will never get the chance to shine if we continue to see cuts in music in schools and closures in venues where artists need to learn their craft in the first place. To reach the big stage you need to have a hit record and you need to be able to pay the bills. That means that those who create music and invest in it must be properly rewarded. That’s why we must urgently address the ‘value gap’, particularly on the new and exciting platforms that many people now use to listen to music.

This would appear to indicate that, despite the headline figures about live music’s dominance, when it comes to artists’ recompense it is recorded music that is primary.

Success Ratios, New Music and Sound Recording Copyright

The journal Popular Music has recently published my article ‘Success Ratios, New Music and Sound Recording Copyright’. This piece draws upon several posts that I have featured on this blog, including ‘There’s No Success Like Failure’, ‘Should the Masters Own the Masters?’ and ‘The Loser’s Standing Small’. The abstract is as follows:

This article addresses the uses that record companies have made of two rhetorical tropes. The first is that only one in 10 artists succeed. The second is that they are investing in new music. These two notions have been combined to give the impression that record companies are taking risks both economically and aesthetically. They have been employed to justify the companies’ ownership of sound recording copyright and their system of exclusive, long-term recording contracts. More recently, the rhetoric has been employed to combat piracy, extend the term of sound recording copyright and account for the continuing usefulness of record companies. It is the argument of this article that investment in new music is not necessarily risk-taking; rather, it is the policies derived from risk-taking that provide the financial security of record companies.

Tantalising stuff, eh? If you have access to the Cambridge University Press database you can access the article via this link. If not, I hope to have more material published on this subject in the not too distant future.

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).

Sounds Revolting

Big data is big news. In Spring 2015 two reports about popular music gained worldwide attention. The first came on 22 April, when Ajay Kalia posted his blog entry, ‘Music Was Better Back Then’. It was followed on 6 May by a report in the journal Royal Society Open Science. In their article, ‘The Evolution of Popular Music: USA1960-2010’, a team of academics from Queen Mary and Imperial College London used data to investigate ‘the evolution of popular taste’ and determine periods in which there had been ‘rapid change’. I have written about Kalia’s research in a previous blog entry. This second article has much in common with it. The public was drawn to the reports for similar reasons: their eye-catching and over confident use of data; the way this data can be contested; the focus upon ‘new music’.

The academic researchers believe that their data forms ‘the basis for the scientific study of musical change’. They have analysed 17,000 American chart hits from 1960 to 2010, classifying their ‘harmonic and timbral qualities’. The resulting data has then been employed to chart the rise and fall of these qualities through the time span of their study. Their conclusion is that ‘musical evolution is punctuated by revolutions’. There are three years in particular in which they posit rapid change: 1964, which saw musical developments in rock and soul, 1983, which had advances in new wave disco and hard rock, and 1991, which witnessed the break-through of hip-hop.

Although the researchers believe that ‘Those who wish to make claims about how and when popular music changed can no longer appeal to anecdote, connoisseurship and theory unadorned by data’, there are several grounds upon which their quantitative analysis of musical qualities can be challenged. The first is that it does not include enough musical data. Where, for example are lyrics within their analysis? Moreover, where is the music that lies outside of the Billboard charts? Many would suggest that musical revolutions first occur within the underground. Secondly, although the researchers have taken genre into account, they have not made any allowance for different rates of progression. While change is the hallmark of some genres, others are relatively static. In the former case, wild diversions can be the mark of stability rather than change; in the latter, mild alterations to the form can be of great significance. Thirdly, their research can be criticised for not including enough non-musical data. Genres are not about music alone, but also about the ways that music is articulated and presented. Finally, the research can be criticized for not considering a wide enough range of statistical data. Two of their peak years – 1964 and 1991 – can be explained, in part, by changes to chart rules. Billboard did not have a separate chart for black music between November and January 1965. As a consequence, there was an influx of soul music into the Hot 100 in 1964. Similarly, it was in 1991 that Billboard first used the sales information from barcodes to determine its chart positions. Hip-hop consequently gained a greater chart presence, as it was selling more records than had been previously been quantified.

The academic researchers are media savvy. They have pointedly come up with three revolutions, thus tapping into the ‘rule of three’ beloved by storytellers, politicians and joke tellers alike: if you want to make a list stand out, then give it three items. They have also come up with three curious years. 1964, the year of the Beatles invasion of America, might be the most obvious of their dates for musical upheaval, but the researchers excitedly report that the Beatles were the result, rather than the cause, of this revolution. They also stress that 1991, the year of hip-hop, represented the most revolutionary phase of all. This revelation has prompted headlines, such as CNN’s ‘Hip-Hop is More Important than the Beatles’. The musical revolutions are not, in fact, the main emphasis of the scientists’ paper. They are instead more concerned with publicizing their data methods as a whole. The team has nevertheless latched on to the fuss they have generated and have re-branded their material for more popular media. In The Conversation they boast: ‘How We Discovered the Three Revolutions of American Pop’.

The two big data reports are both concerned with age and new music. They come at their target from different angles, however. Kalia analyses new music in purely quantitative terms. For him it represents the latest releases by the latest artists. He seeks to determine the age at which we lose interest in these new forms. ‘The Evolution of Popular Music’ adds a qualitative dimension. The academics want to know the eras in which music was at its newest: were there times when it was more revolutionary than others? In doing so, they address a widespread belief, particularly amongst the old, that there is ‘a relentless decline in cultural diversity of new music’. The two surveys could be said to answer each other: one reason why older people are not interested in ‘new music’ is because it is not, in fact, new.

Things aren’t quite that simple, however. The team from Queen Mary and Imperial College retain a faith in newness. For them, ‘musical diversity has not declined’. I agree with them. As I have argued before, the music of the modern era has a distinct timbral quality and it features particular ways of singing. Does this mean, then, that Kalia is right: older people no longer have the appetite for newness?

Well, it all comes back to which meaning we want to wrestle from that word ‘new’. The word can have qualitative meanings: it can point towards things that are ‘unfamiliar or strange’. It obviously has quantitative meanings as well, but these are complex. The OED defines ‘new’ as being ‘produced, introduced, or discovered recently or now for the first time; not existing before’. It also states that the new can be ‘already existing but seen, experienced, or acquired recently or now for the first time’. In addition, new can be ‘superseding and more advanced than another or others of the same kind’. It is therefore quite possible for an old person to lose faith in the new because they feel that is already exists. On the contrary, they may turn away because they find the new too new. It is strange. They think that it’s revolting. 

The Sound of the Overground

When an old pop lover looks at the state of pop today the reaction is often one of despair. The music isn’t doing what they want it to. There is a venerable army of protestors who say that modern music is not modern. Simon Reynolds shouts loudest amongst writers, having devoted nearly 500 pages to the subject in Retromania. But there is also Jaron Lanier, who asks: ‘Where is the new music? Everything is retro, retro, retro’. And David Stubbs, who sees music ‘debilitated by its state of thrall to its increasingly distant yet seemingly inescapable past’. Older musicians are also concerned. Tracey Thorn has claimed that ‘pop music is exhausted’. Even Noel Gallagher, who many view as the harbinger of the retro age, has moaned that there is no longer ‘anything genuinely new’ happening in music any more.

            This isn’t the only concern. Older analysts are also worried about the sound of modern music. Simon Reynolds complains about the ‘super-compressed, MP3-ready, almost pre-degraded’ tonality of pop; recordings that are ‘engineered to cut through on iPods, smartphones and computer speakers’. He is also concerned that the ‘glistening and majestic’ recordings of Aerial Pink, which are made to sound like the chart hits of 30 years ago, won’t ‘make the tiniest dent on today’s radioscape’. There is particular anguish over the state of pop singing. Mark Ellen has despaired about the ‘hollow vocal fireworks’ popularised by X Factor and its ilk. Tracey Thorn believes that this type of singing, although supposedly about self-expression, ends up being far from ‘individualistic’. She’s not alone in thinking that soul has become soulless. David Hepworth pithily describes the modern style as ‘lungs of a whale, tears of a crocodile’. Greil Marcus goes further. Beyoncé’s take on gospel, he says, is ‘a form of blasphemy.

            Pop has many musical characteristics, but most people would place vocals and timbre as being among the most important. Today’s pop has a distinct sound, one that is determined by a broadcasting ethos and a compressed musical file. There is also a particular style of singing that defines the present time. It has even brought with it new performance conventions: audiences clap in the middle of vocal acrobatics in a way they would never have done before. Modern pop might not be modernist in its intent, but it’s not overwhelmingly retro either. For the most part it is doing what pop has always done: being here now. 

War at 33 and a Third

There has been some major popular music news. The headline: people stop listening to new music at 33. At this age they no longer make an effort to keep up with popular music. They retreat, instead, to the music of their youth. Although the data behind this revelation is American in origin, the story has been reported globally. It has been covered everywhere from Fox News to the NME.

            It has also been subject to some criticism, mostly from older listeners who are claiming they are still hip. Among them is the Guardian’s Tim Byron, who is one of the few journalists to address the source of this news story. It’s not that hard to find: the data comes from a blogpost by Ajay Kalia, who is the ‘taste profiles product owner’ for Spotify. Kalia has analysed these taste profiles – the personal data of Spotify users – to find out which artists each user is listening to and how often they are hearing them. He has then coupled this data with each artist’s popularity ranking, as determined by the Echo Nest. At present, according to their ‘hotttnesss’ rating, Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in America. Finally, Kalia has quantified the results in a demographic manner. He has looked at each age group of Spotify users and worked out whether they are listening to popular artists or not.

            The results are perhaps to be expected. Kalia has found that young people are ‘almost exclusively streaming very popular music’; their listening experience seldom travels beyond the latest Billboard charts. In contrast, as people get older, ‘mainstream music represents a smaller and smaller proportion of their streaming’. According to Kalia, they stick with what they already know: ‘they are who they’re going to be’.

            Tim Byron has two main grounds for complaint. The first concerns the dubious methodology. He points out that ‘Kalia uses the popularity of an artist on Spotify as a proxy measure for the newness of that music’. Quite rightly, Byron argues that just because an artist has a low popularity ranking, it doesn’t follow that they have been knocking around the block for a bit. After all, isn’t this supposed to be the era of the long tail, in which new niche artists can beaver away in successful obscurity? Conversely, just because an artist has a high popularity ranking, it doesn’t mean they are new. Kalia even cites examples in his article that suggest as much. Eminem, he tells us, comes in at around number 50 in the popularity charts. This is an artist whose first album was released in 1996. Muse hover around the 250 spot. They have been with us since the late 1990s. Alan Jackson is ‘about # 500’. Jackson was born in 1958.

Byron suggests that the data can be looked at another way. Rather than old people being behind the times, they are instead adept at searching out niche subgenres. In support of this idea, he points towards the Australian radio station Double J, which is aimed at older listeners and has a more diverse playlist than its sister station, Triple J, which is targeted at youngsters. And so, whereas Kalia depicts a ‘coolness spiral’ that we spin outwards on as we approach death, Byron instead posits the idea that we spin towards coolness. The elderly are experimental. I’m not sure that he’s right. Surely one of the reasons why Kalia’s data has received such widespread coverage is because he has tapped into a common understanding. As we get older, we do feel our grasp on popular music slipping away. On the other hand, Byron is correct to point out flaws in Kalia’s reading of the data. For example, Kalia’s taste profiles indicate that men stop listening to popular artists earlier than women. In Kalia’s opinion, this means they are subject to a ‘taste freeze’: they have stopped searching for new music. Surely, though, the issue at stake is the escape from mainstream music. Men are more snobbish about the charts than women are. They are consciously trying to avoid popular artists in their need to identify with the edgy and the unknown.

There have been many previous studies of demographics and taste.  Kalia’s, though, has received more attention than any of them. Why is this the case? One reason is that it puts a definite age at which our move away from the popular becomes terminal. What’s more, it is a pertinent musical number: 33 is the speed at which a vinyl LP plays. This format, lest we forget, was originally targeted at adult listeners. What is curious, however, is that at no point in his article does Kalia use the number 33. This leads us to Byron’s other problem with the research: he takes issue with the way it has been reported. The coverage of the survey has a repetitive quality. The internet is now populated with articles titled ‘People Stop Listening to New Music at 33’. A news agency somewhere has taken Kalia’s information and condensed it. They have also highlighted what they want to see.

The age of 33 in fact comes from a link in Kalia’s article. This takes us to a separate blog, in which 33-year-old Steven Hyden tells us that his peers ‘are married with kids, mortgages, and lots of other important real-life stuff that takes precedence over finding new bands to like’. Kalia’s own work features a similar age at which interest in popular music declines, but it is the less memorable and less specific demographic of the ‘average listener’ who is in their ‘mid-30s’. Byron takes issue with the fact that, whereas the original article has qualifications (notably the number of times Kalia says ‘on average’), this hedging of the data is removed in the media reports. Consequently, a less nuanced picture emerges. That said Byron is also guilty of only seeing what he wants to see. Although Kalia’s main focus is on the way that older people ‘stop keeping up with popular music’, he does suggest a separate reading of his data. He believes that some adults will deliberately search out ‘less-familiar music genres . . . from artists with a lower popularity rank’, at which point his analysis looks much like Byron’s own.

There is one final quirk in the way that the data has been reported. Byron notes that the original analysis is not specifically concerned with new vs. old music. He’s right: the term ‘new music’ doesn’t appear once in Kalia’s article. And yet it is there in the headline of every re-run of this story. The term is used in the Fox News report, it is there in the article in the NME. In fact, even Byron uses it. His piece is titled ‘I’m 33 and Still Listen to New Music’. And this is what interests me most of all: when did new music become such a cult?

I was at school in the 1970s. At this point the taste battle wasn’t between young people, who liked ‘new music’, and adults who liked the past. Youngsters were instead supposed to progress beyond juvenile pop music towards an adulthood spent listening to classical music, MOR and jazz. What’s more, most of the musical landscape was new. It was the arrival of the compact disc that started to change things. The CD vastly increased sales of back catalogue. Consequently taste could now be split between those who listened to pop music of the present and those who listened to popular music’s past.

In the 1990s people started to use the term ‘new music’ strategically. BBC’s Radio One signalled its intention of aiming for a younger demographic by adopting the policy of ‘new music first’. This sponsoring of new music helped to justify the licence fee, as does the BBC’s more recent slogan, ‘in new music we trust’. The 1990s was also the era in which the record industry started to court government. There were numerous official reports, which sought ministerial backing for anything from the high price of CDs to the extension of copyright. In these reports the term ‘new music’ can regularly be found. The industry campaigned for its restrictive policies by suggesting that it took risks on untried artists and untested sounds.

More recently, people have started to use the term ‘new music’ as if it were a genre. It is used as such in the Fox News story, in which panelists are asked if they like new music? ‘I think it’s totally over-rated’ one of the representatives replies. But what is ‘new music’? If it’s simply the music that is released by newly signed artists, how can it all be bundled up together with people either claiming to be for it or against? If it is music that is supposed to be at the cutting edge, how does this square with the fact that today’s young artists are frequently described as being uninspired and retrospective? If it is music that the listener hasn’t heard before, does it matter whether this music was released last week or early in the last century? Maybe what the whole war at 33 is really all about is whether people are into new new music: are they listening to sounds that qualify as being modern when it comes to the artist’s age and their approach? If this is what is at stake, we’re going to have look somewhere other than taste profiles and hotttnesss ratings if we want to find out the true novelty of the new. 

The Brit Awards 2014: There's Got to be a Way to Blockbuster!

In theory, the Brit Awards are about the recent past. To qualify for an award, an album or single must have been released in the previous 12 months and an artist must have released a recording in that period. In practice, they are all about the future. One aim of the televised ceremony is to maximize album and single sales. The awards presentations are leavened with live performances, and it is the latter that are more effective at promoting releases (following Adele’s performance at the 2011 ceremony, sales of ‘Someone Like You’ increased by 785%). Another aim is to promote new artists. The British Phonographic Industry, which operates the awards, has orientated them in this direction. In 2008 they introduced a ‘critics’ choice’ award, whereby a panel of industry insiders designate a forthcoming star. More recently, they have dropped their ‘outstanding contribution’ award, which used to be given to industry veterans, and replaced it with a ‘global success’ award, which seems to be the exclusive preserve of One Direction.

In theory, the Brit Awards are fair and open. The official website claims ‘The Brit Awards operates a completely transparent procedure’. It details the qualifying criteria: all albums and the 1,000 best-selling singles released by British artists in the preceding sales period are eligible. Industry figures then put forward their personal top fives after being sent a list of these titles. In practice, the awards are closed and unclear. There is no information about who chooses the eventual winners or how they are chosen. There is also no explanation of why, despite the multitude of qualifying artists and records, such a small number make it through to the final shortlist. This year, nine separate awards were available for British artists, with winners chosen from 46 shortlist places. However, only 24 acts shared the nominations between them.

In theory, the aim of the Brit Awards is to celebrate British music. In practice, they are reliant on foreign talent. There are three ‘international’ awards, and in order to maximize viewing figures (and sell the latest tracks and concerts by the artists concerned) there are live performances by major global stars. This presents an awkward balancing act for the British Phonographic Industry. The nascent British acts that it is promoting – last night Disclosure, Bastille and Rudimental were among the artists to perform live – have to measure up against seasoned American performers – Beyoncé, Katy Perry and Bruno Mars all appeared, and the show was stolen by Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers.

The Brit Awards are evidence of a culture of blockbusters. In her recent book of the same name, Anita Elberse argues, ‘The highest-performing entertainment businesses take their chances on a small group of titles and turn those choices into successes by investing heavily in their development’. This is the opposite of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory; rather than the ‘future of business’ coming from ‘selling less of more’, the focus of media corporations is concentrated on a few stars and a few key releases. Time is concentrated, too. Aside from talent shows, there are now few opportunities to promote music on British television. The record companies have to focus much of their promotional activity on this single annual event.

As a result, the Brit Awards have to ensure that the critic’s choice is right. These are the future blockbuster acts who they hope will sit alongside the American stars. So far, they haven’t done badly. The first winner was Adele, who was the best selling albums artist in the world in 2011. The second was Florence and the Machine, whose two albums topped the UK charts. The third was Ellie Goulding, who has sold over 10 million singles worldwide. The fourth was Jessie J, whose first single ‘Price Tag’ debuted at number on in the UK singles chart. The fifth was Emeli Sandé, who had the UK’s biggest selling album of 2012. The sixth was Tom O’Dell, who perhaps has the lowest profile of the winners so far, but has still achieved a number one UK album.

2014’s critics’ choice is Sam Smith. He has already proved his worth via the music industry’s version of an apprentice scheme. He has been ‘featured’ on a number of singles by other acts. The first was ‘Latch’ by Disclosure, which reached the UK top 20 in late 2012. His next guest spot was on ‘La La La’ by Naughty Boy, which reached number one in Britain, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Italy and the Lebanon. Confirming the concentrated nature of the Brit Awards and the British music industry, Disclosure were nominated for four awards this year and ‘La La La’ was shortlisted for best single and best video.

Back in 1973, the British glam rock group Sweet released a single which asked ‘does anyone know the way, there’s got to be a way, to blockbuster?’ They found the answer. After the group appeared on Top of the Pops wearing make-up and German army uniforms their record went to number one. In 2014 there is a new response: get your act nominated for as many Brit Awards as possible. We’ll need to look at next week’s charts to find out who the real winners were.

N.B. An edited version of this article is available, with academic rigour and journalistic flair, at The Conversation.