Take a deep breath

Conspicuous in its absence today is my report from The Hold Steady/Art Brut show. As I suspected before I left town, I wasn't able to get into the Mezzanine. As per their liquor license, they're not allowed to admit anyone under the age of majority. The story of how I went from being the 32nd person to get a ticket to a show at the Warfield to being turned away at the Mezzanine is one of corporate incompetence, and is all too indicative of how perverted the music industry has become.

Perhaps I wouldn't be so incensed if this had been the only show I had missed for a non-logistical reason. Last Thursday, a free ...Trail of Dead was advertised in Berkeley. What promised to be an excellent chance to see one of my favourite (and recently unsigned) turned out to be a vehicle for promotion of Dethklok, a fictional metal band appearing in a show on Cartoon Network. Rather than joining a smallish group of enthusiastic TOD fans (on a weekday afternoon, much like the free Girl Talk/Dan Deacon show at the same venue last month), I found myself several thousand deep in a line of devotees obviously in attendance for a (now headlining) fictional band. The ballroom used for the show filled up long before I approached the front of the line and by most accounts, TOD were all but booed off the stage. I hear tell that booths promoting mobile phones and a new video game were in-venue as well. All in all, a resounding success for independent music and original culture in general.

I'm willing to chock up last Thursday to one-off incompetence and the inevitable overconsumption of a free good (see Paully, Mark (1968) and Manning, Willard et al (1987) for excellent critiques of single-payer health care). But last night's show exposed the ugliness of the music industry, as the actors pulling the levers had the curtain pulled on them. The root problem with popular music is the lack of experimentation and malaise among listeners, but a problem common to both popular music and unpopular music and the its subset, independent music (pity the unpopular major label bands), is a misaligning of incentives. The existence of a music market is natural. People in general want to consume music and a subset of the same people are willing to provide music as artists. Voila, a market. A regrettable aspect of the last 100 years or so is the increasing separation between the populations of listeners and musicians. Fewer people now than in all of modern history play an instrument and a decreasing number experience live music in the home or even in their home town.

The failure of decentralised music markets has invited talent management, promoters, and ticket vendors to step in, often with skills leart in modeling, circuses, sport, and news media. Music has become, by and large, the charge of LiveNation, Clear Channel, and Ticketmaster, operating in an highly uncompetitive environment bringing all the trappings of monopoly:
-price discrimination (charging different customers different prices for the same good, think seating chart and presale)
-advertising (all those "helpful" e-mails, billboards)
-bundling (overcharging for a product by tying its sale to another, more desired product, the iTunes music store recently started offering Ticketmaster-branded presale tickets and other music stores have done it for a while)
All in an attempt to differentiate Usher from Robin Thicke from John Legend. The problem with music is not so much that it has become "a commodity to be bought and sold" as a Marxist critique rings, but that monopolies try to do the opposite, to make this or that artist special and dictate taste.

Independent music has managed to creep out from under UMG, Sony, and Clear Channel, fuelled by listeners willing to question dictated taste as well as technologies helping to disperse new ideas more quickly: the cassette tape (a tool of the Ayatollah Khomeini, sadly) the CD burner, the mp3, and (of course) the blog. Ticketmaster and LiveNation are striking back, judging by the communication breakdown/clusterfuck that was The Hold Steady show, as well as the presale bundles on the ITMS (including Led Zeppelin, "Communication Breakdown" ha), and the recent signing of Madonna to a music/live combination exclusive contract with LiveNation.

-RJR