Europa Ending

What defines England most? For Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, the country was:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

In 1941 George Orwell initiated a more prosaic tradition. For him, England was comprised of

The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin tables in the Soho pubs, old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings, these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

T.S. Eliot’s politics couldn’t have been more different, but his own summary of English culture, from 1948, had echoes of Orwell’s:

Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, the Cup Final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.

Eliot advised that ‘The reader can make his own list’. And perhaps this is what defines England most: it is not the contents of these lists that count, but the lists themselves. The English love them. They are the verbal equivalent of standing in queues. Writing in 1980, Mark E. Smith saw through this crap. For him, Orwell’s English scene had become the ‘English Scheme’:

You got sixty hour weeks, and stone toilet back-gardens

Peter Cook’s jokes, bad dope, check shirts, lousy groups

Point their fingers at America

Down pokey quaint streets in Cambridge

Cycles our distant spastic heritage

It’s a gay read, roundhead, army career, grim head

If we was smart we’d emigrate

Although Smith has prided himself on his ‘pre-cognition’, it is immigration rather than emigration that has prompted England’s darkest fears. Xenophobia marks the nation as much as lists do. In recent times, little Englanders have seen their fortress breached. They want it to be rebuilt. And so, the years of European Union have seen the ghost of Orwell rise in the most unlikely places. Speaking in 1993, when he was Tory prime minister, John Major claimed that

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’.

Johnny Rotten has witnessed less permanence. He waxed nostalgic in 2012:

I miss the roses, those English roses, of salad and beer and summer here and many mannered ways of cotton dresses skipping across the lawn off happy faces, when football was not a yawn and clear the bomb sites, and all the days were long. November into winters here, snows would turn my page.

His revelries were shot through with the blues of an ex-pat. In 2011, P.J. Harvey evidenced a different longing for home. She wrote in character as a soldier who had been posted abroad:

Goddamn Europeans!

Take me back to beautiful England

And the grey damp filthiness of ages

And battered books

And fog rolling down behind the mountains

On the graveyards and dead sea-captains.

Let me walk through the stinking alleys

To the music of drunken beatings

Past the Thames river glistening

Like gold hastily sold

For nothing

She is as unromantic as Smith, but these lists are always slippery. It is February 2016 and voices P.J. Harvey would never have dreamed of are chorusing her ‘Goddamn!’ 

The Singer Came Last

When listening to records from the early part of the twentieth century one thing that is notable is the absence of singing. There are a lot more instrumental records, and in those records where there is singing it often does not arrive until we have gone through at least one instrumental verse and chorus.

            This can now strike us as odd, as we have got used to the fact that songs come with vocals up front. It is mediation that has been ringing the changes. Jazz was one of the first genres of music to become known through recordings. It was primarily focused on the timbre and improvisation skills of the musicians. Sound recording could capture these qualities; sheet music could not. It was also recording techniques that returned us – gradually – to singers. Electric recording arrived in the mid-1920s and for the first time singers used microphones in recording studios. New, intimate styles of singing were developed, and with them a more intense relationship developed between listeners and singers. Singers were also pushed to the forefront because of the broadcast and filming of music: these media required a different centre of attention to live performance.

            At the same time, the neglect of vocals should not strike us as odd. Anyone who has played in a band will be familiar with the fact that singers can be an afterthought. It is often musicians who form bands: a gang of mates who play guitar, bass and drums. The singer is often the last to join and they can be something of an outsider. In addition, they are not usually listened to. They will be drowned out in rehearsals and also at some live gigs. It is also the case that at smaller gigs there may be no spotlight; thus the audience’s attention is spread between various group members. It is only when bands turn their focus towards recording that things begin to change, and it is only when they are signed to a record label that the singer starts to be elevated to pole position. This can be a hard dynamic to handle for all parties concerned.

Reformatted Again

My review of Andrew Leyshon’s book Reformatted: Code, Networks and the Transformation of the MusicIndustry is available in the January 2016 edition of Popular Music.

            Reformatted is a decent book but much of it is dated. It is largely compiled from journal articles that were published between 2001 and 2009. This is of interest in itself, as we get to see the preoccupations of the music industries in the recent past. What is missing is as significant as what is present. Leyshon was an early chronicler of downloading. He states that he was fortunate that internet file sharing was brought to his attention ‘when it still remained below the horizon of most economic commentators, let alone social science researchers’. He has not always been a visionary, however. When he talks of the industry being ‘reformatted’, he envisions it being remade in the shape of a download. This book fails to predict the impact of streaming.

            It would be unfair to single out Leyshon in this respect. There have been numerous books written about music technology in the last 15 years, each of them taking pride in their modernity and each of them concentrating on downloads rather than streams. People from the music industry too, seemed to view the rise of Apple as inexorable.

            So did anyone other than Daniel Ek envision that we would be reformatted again? I have been thinking back to my PhD interview, which took place in 2004. My original proposal was for a project that would explore the differences between analogue and digital formats; I told the interview panel that I planned to investigate vinyl and downloading. My supervisor, Steven Connor, responded that I should look at vinyl and streaming instead. In his opinion it clearly represented the future of music consumption.

            Steven Connor is nominally a Professor of English. Really, he is a polymath. Even so, how come he was so prescient about streaming when most of those studying the music industries had less foresight? I recently quizzed him about this and he replied by suggesting that ‘everybody was assuming at the time that anyone who could get the streaming model to pay was going to clean up’.

            I think he is being modest here, but there is also truth in what he is saying. There certainly were people who visualised the success of streaming at this time. And then iTunes came along. Its rampant success had a hypnotic effect. My PhD interview took place in March 2004; iTunes was launched in the UK in June of that year.

Equitable Remuneration! Performer Rights! Making Available!

I spoke last week as part of the Working in Music conference at the University of Glasgow, one of the culminations of John Williamson’s and Martin Cloonan’s excellent research project about the history of the Musicians’ Union. I talked about the evolution of performing rights in sound recordings and the development of equitable remuneration for recording artists, finishing off by considering the implications of the making available right. All of these delights can be found in my paper, which is available on academia.edu.

            One of the great factors of the conference was the presence of Musicians’ Union staff among the delegates. This included John Smith, who is General Secretary of the MU and has recently been appointed as Chairman of PPL. He was present for my paper and in response to my suggestions of record company bias at PPL he noted rightly that there are now more performer members of the PPL Board. However, when I asked him who owns PPL, he did concede that if I were to go to Companies House I would probably be told that it is the record companies. 

David Bowie

I don’t usually comment on personal news about artists, but David Bowie’s death cannot pass without remark. There is no artist in any field who has given me more joy. I cannot believe he has gone.

The Single Goodbye

Ten years ago, when I was working on my PhD, I would regularly bump into Travis Elborough in the British Library. Little did I realise that we were exploring similar themes. I was writing my thesis about vinyl, which in adapted form became my book. Travis was also investigating recording formats. He believed that iTunes was destroying the album as a source of income and a ‘thing’. The fruits of his labour became The Long-Player Goodbye, which was published by Scepter in 2008.

            His predictions have not necessarily come true. 159m albums were sold in 2005. This figure was for physical formats only, as the download album was not yet generating any income. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) published the sales figures for 2015 yesterday. They claim that there were 122m album sales last year. While this represents only three-quarters of the sales of a decade ago, it is probably more than anyone expected. Travis, for example, had suggested that the album appeared to be ‘severely imperilled’. But rather than being at risk, the album has revived. The sales figures for 2015 were up 3.7% on the previous year.

            Or at least that is how the record industry has chosen to present things. When we look more closely at the figures we find that genuine ‘albums’ - a collection of songs that a user purchases or consumes as a combined body of work - are not doing so well. CD sales are surprisingly resilient, but they are definitely not increasing: at 55.8m they were down 3.9% on the previous year. Digital albums are faring worse. Standing at 25.7m, they were down 13.5%. Back in 2008, Travis had glimpsed stirrings of a vinyl renaissance, describing it as a ‘peculiar rearguard action’ in the face of the defeat of the album. It is now more than that. In their report on the 2015 sales figures, the BPI note that vinyl was facing ‘near extinction’ in 2007, but its ‘fairy tale revival’ has seen sales reach a 21-year high. 2.1m units were sold last year, an increase of 66% on 2014. This does, however, still represent less than 2% of music consumption in the UK. In total, these formats accumulated 81.5m sales. This was five million fewer than the previous year, and just over half the albums figure for 2007.

            How, then, has the BPI reached its total of 122m album sales? First, they have quantified all individually downloaded tracks as ‘album equivalent sales’. Each download is only allowed to represent a tenth of a purchase, however, in deference the average number of tracks an album. In addition, each individual stream is counted as an album sale. These are divided by a thousand, in accordance with a ‘standard music industry metric’: ‘100 streams = one track sale and 10 track sales = one album’. Using these calculations, individual downloads were equivalent to the sale of 13.3m albums in 2015. Although this was down 14.7% on the previous year, any shortfall was more than made up by the popularity of streams. These were equivalent to the sale of 26.8m albums, a huge 81.7% increase on 2014.

            These mathematical shenanigans are not to everyone’s taste. Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide, has described them as ‘self-evident madness’. I don’t think that Travis would approve of them either, albeit that they do provide evidence that some of his hunches were right. These ‘equivalents’ have helped to crack open ‘any notion of the album as linear, unalterable whole’.

            The larger question, however, is why should the record industry want to present every use of music as an album sale. Economics surely come into it. These figures help to downplay the popularity of streaming. This is useful in a climate when the low royalty income from streams is widely criticised. There were 26.8bn individual audio streams in the UK last year, as opposed to 81.5m physical and digital album sales, and yet despite this vast traffic streams are only generating around a third as much money (£251m as opposed to £687m, according to the BPI’s figures, which due to the low income from ad-supported services only feature the income from streaming subscriptions). The division by 1,000 makes this income appear just, as streams represent a third of physical and digital album sales when employing the ‘equivalent’ calculation. However, the BPI’s streaming figures are not only divided by a thousand, they are also halved. They fail to include the 26.9bn streams of music that took place through video sites. This includes YouTube, the most popular provider of music in the UK.

            If these figures tone down the popularity streaming, they also boost the importance of physical formats. When the equivalents are in place, the CD emerges as the leading product. In addition, vinyl’s percentage increases enable this format to be widely praised. It remains important for the record companies to promote these products, as this is where their main profits lie. The companies may well be deriving more income from streaming services than their artists do, but those royalties are dwarfed by the money they rake in with the sale of vinyl and CDs. Tim Ingham has calculated that Adele’s 25 would need to have been streamed 16.4 billion times to equal the $115bn it has thus far generated via physical formats and download sales.

In some cases, however, it costs the industry money to describe products as albums rather than as singles. Simon Fuller’s company 19 Recordings has taken their parent label Sony Music Entertainment to court, alleging a number of contractual misdemeanours. Among them is the fact that Sony regard individually downloaded tracks as singles, whereas 19 Recordings believes they should be classified as ‘segments’ of albums. These definitions have financial consequences, derived from the days when all records were physical, as the plaintiff’s case makes clear:

Because of the high costs of promoting the ‘single’ to radio as well as the relatively high costs of manufacturing, and distributing and marketing it to the ‘brick and mortar’ retail stores that then existed in comparison to those comparable costs expended on an Album, virtually all record labels historically paid lower royalty rates to artists on this less profitable ‘singles’ product. In contrast, the Album, with its relatively small incremental additional costs to manufacture and distribute, but with its 3 to 4-fold higher selling price, permitted labels to achieve a substantially higher profit margin in comparison to the ‘single’, and thus the labels were able to pay a significantly higher royalty rate on albums, including escalations in that rate based on sales success since those profit margins only increased as sales volume went up.

Sony has paid 19 Entertainment a royalty rate for singles that is 25%-35% lower than their album rate. The album rate has the further advantage that, if worldwide sales of 1m are achieved, the royalty increases.

Fuller’s company is furious at the treatment they have received in the download world. First, Sony Entertainment has allowed iTunes to ‘disaggregate’ albums without 19 Recordings’ permission, thus making all tracks available individually. Second, Sony have claimed that these individual tracks should be paid at the reduced ‘records other than album’ rate. Third, Sony are not allowing the sales of these individual tracks to count towards ‘the equivalent of the sale of one Album ... for purposes of calculating sales escalations on that Album’. Consequently, 19 Recordings believe they are being cheated in respect of some ‘albums’ whose disaggregated tracks total the equivalent of 1m sales. There is much in 19 Recordings’ argument. In the online world the costs of manufacture and distribution cannot be used to justify a lower royalty rate for singles. Moreover, the fact that trade bodies are keen to report all online activity as ‘segments’ of albums should surely help 19 Recordings cause.

Given these royalty implications, there must be reasons beyond the financial why record industry personnel remain so devoted to albums. One explanation, perhaps, is that they are not so different to Travis Elborough: they admire the beauty of the LP. This is not as fanciful as it may it first appear. The industry’s major awards, whether these are Grammys, Brit Awards or Mercury Prizes are for albums, and these are (supposedly) based on artistic merit, rather than upon sales. The artists that the industry admires most are those who consistently make important albums. It has commonly accorded greater merit to rock than to pop. Simon Cowell, from this perspective, is not an industry mastermind; he instead suffers from the industry’s snobbery – his artists are consistently frozen out from the most important industry awards.

Of course, these values are as financial as they are artistic. One of the reasons why the record industry praises rock artists over pop artists, and album sales over single sales, is because it is here that longevity lies. And with longevity lies profit. Development costs are paid off and break-even points are achieved. Nevertheless, it is not only consumers who value ‘product’ for its aesthetic worth. Industry personnel work best when they are promoting music they admire. They can also appreciate the beauty of the product itself: industry figures are capable of being spellbound by the look and feel of LPs. Tony Wadsworth, who retired as chairman of the BPI last year, left his post to help set up a vinyl-only branch of the record shop Sister Ray.

There is one further reason for the industry love of albums that mixes the financial with the emotional: patriotism. In 2015, seven of the 10 best selling albums artists were from Britain. In 2014, all 10 were British, the first time this had happened. The situation is different for streaming. The ten most popular streamed tracks in 2015 came from a variety of sources, with only a third of the artists hailing from the UK. This is reflective of a longer historical pattern. For the past ten years the best selling album in Britain has been by an artist from the UK, but the singles charts have been more international. The trade figures issued by BPI downplay the importance of singles by only reporting album sales and album equivalent sales. The triumph of international artists in the singles charts has been decimated, and it has been reduced by a thousand when it comes to streams. Meanwhile, the triumph of British artists in respect of conventional album sales is left to stand as it is. Overall, by kissing the single goodbye and recalibrating streams and individual downloads as albums, these trade figures promote the locals and give a lower profile to the foreigners. The British Phonographic Industry is putting British music first.