Epilogue: Is Rock and Roll Here to Stay?

Epilogue: Is Rock and Roll Here to Stay? Technology has been both the source of the frequent rejuvenation of the industry while at the same time often threatening its long-term economic viability. The music business is undergoing revolutionary change due to the technology of the Internet. For most of the rock and roll era beginning in the mid-1950s, artists needed a record company to promote them and support their artistry. Today, there is some question whether record companies are needed at all. Artists are looking for new ways to promote themselves and their music. All sorts of ideas are being experimented with. Reggae fusion star Sean Kingston’s album “Tomorrow” contained a special image that could be held up to a computer webcam to enable the fan to perform in a karaoke session on Kingston’s Web site. The Beatles broke up more than four decades ago, yet their music has been remixed and used in a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. Though a clichè, the only real constant in a dynamic society is change. In the process of change from the established way of life to something new, something old is necessarily destroyed. As I noted in the Prologue, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter stated that the essence of a capitalist or market economy was precisely this process of creative destruction . Those who bring new things, or innovations, to the marketplace are called entrepreneurs . Entrepreneurial activity has always driven the booms and busts of the music industry and today entrepreneurs in all facets of the music business—recording, performing, and distributing—are usher- ing in change in the music industry once again [ 113 ] . Especially in periods of great technological change and the disintegration of the accepted ways of business enter- prise, it is the entrepreneur who is the progressive force that ultimately raises the standard of living of society as a whole. The entrepreneurs in the music industry include those who invented the electric guitar like Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher, artists such as Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly who created new musical styles, those like Berry Gordy who founded Motown Records, and those who today are using digital technology and the Internet to bring more music to more people. The rise of the new entrepreneurship in music is promising that artists can potentially be better compensated than in the past. R.J. Phillips, Rock and Roll Fantasy?: The Reality of Going from Garage Band 105 to Superstardom, SpringerBriefs in Business 35, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5900-2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 106 Epilogue: Is Rock and Roll Here to Stay? Music and Money In 1972, the rock group Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show sang of their desire to get their picture on the “Cover of the Rolling Stone.” In the 1960s, one important measure of success for artists was whether you got your picture on the cover of this leading music and cultural magazine that was founded in 1967. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the two most prominent members of The Rolling Stones , were on the cover of the magazine many times. However, three decades later Jagger and Richards were on the cover of Fortune magazine with a feature article titled “Inside Rock’s Billion-Dollar Band” [ 127 ] . From the 1960s to the present day, there was a change in the focus of rock bands. The measure of “making it” in the rock and roll business went from being on the cover of a counterculture, politically left-wing leaning publication, to being on the cover of a magazine many view as a bastion of politically conservative free-market capitalism . In the 1960s, there was talk of groups “selling out”—creating music to make money instead of making music for cultural and “social consciousness” reasons. It was the era of the Vietnam war, civil rights, and women’s liberation. Getting rich was not the “in” thing to do. However, some people did get rich off music in the early days of rock and roll, and it typically wasn’t the musician who wrote and performed the songs. Instead, it was the manager, the promoter, the music publisher, or the record company . Everyone is familiar with stories of artists who were not adequately compensated for their music or who lost royalty rights in questionable deals. From Little Richard to John Fogerty to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones —others pro fi ted from what the artists produced simply because of the outdated business model that distributed music revenue to those who did not really add value to the creation. Contrast the experience of the early days of rock and roll with that of the rap and hip-hop artists like Jay-Z or 50 Cent. They not only write their songs, they perform them and record them, they distribute their music through their own record labels and even control merchandizing of all items related to their public image as an art- ist. The fi nancial future of today’s artists is more secure not only because they have both learned from the experience of earlier artists, but also because artists have become more involved in business decisions. The Future of Music Everybody loves to listen to music. Musicians love to create music. So why is the image of a “starving” musician so prevalent? The problem is that while musicians have been creative in their craft, too often their business affairs have been left to others. For one hundred years, the record companies enjoyed a business model that generated lots of revenue and paid lots of people very well. Most of those people were not performing musicians however. What we have now is a situation where technology is radically changing the relationship between those who have pro fi ted Epilogue: Is Rock and Roll Here to Stay? 107 from the music industry who are not musicians and the performing musicians. This will require a fundamental change in the way of doing business. There is the possibility that in the future more of the revenue generated by the music industry will go to the musicians. The costs of operating the record business—the recording engi- neers, the music publishers, the A & R people, and countless others—will undergo a radical change due to the Internet and digital technology. This will also result in a period of great innovation in music as different musical styles and genres from many countries will become known by a larger audience. Record company executives lament the fact that making a living from selling recorded music is a dying business. But in the past 200 years of American history, numerous industries have disappeared and countless jobs became obsolete. This is the situation that faces many in the recorded music industry. It is not that recording will disappear, it is just that musicians will have to rely on live performance, merchandizing, and new and creative ways to earn income from their music. The record executives have also conveniently neglected two facts. First, musicians have always made their living primarily through live performance and sec- ondarily by other means. Once upon a time, the sale of sheet music was an important source of income for musicians and it supported a very large industry and employed lots of people. Recorded music is going the way of sheet music. It will never go away, but it will not be the primary source of income. Indeed, for most musicians recorded music was never the primary source of income anyway. The second fact that has been forgotten is that the separation of recording and playing music came only after the realization that selling recordings of established opera singers could be lucrative and because recording and record production technology required a complex and costly process. This is no longer the case. Indeed, one wonders what the evolution of music in the twentieth century would have been like had phonographs continued to have the capability of recording and playing back as did the earliest cylinder phonographs. This was true of Thomas Edison’s fi rst phonograph in 1877, and though Edison thought his machine would have a business use, others realized that it could be used for home entertainment. But after others began to develop phonographs for entertainment, Edison’s company also began to do so. A magazine advertisement for an early Edison phonograph showed a family making a recording in their parlor: a woman at the piano, and a man and woman singing from sheet music into the large horn of the phonograph. Thus very early in the history of the phonograph it was promoted as a device that would bring the family together to produce music. Suppose that instead of the record companies domi- nating the production and consumption of music as they did in the twentieth century, everyone after 1900 had a home recorder. This was what was implied by the Edison phonograph advertising. Would we still have had great singers that dominated music consumption like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley , or instead would we have mil- lions of people making and consuming their own music? This is the future that the record companies are afraid of. Today, we have the possibility of actually realizing what was glimpsed for a short time in the early part of the twentieth century: not an industry of superstars , 108 Epilogue: Is Rock and Roll Here to Stay? but rather one where everyone who wishes to produces and consumes his or her own music and then exchanges that music with others and even pro fi t fi nancially.

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