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Firebrand Magazine
The Biz with Graham Greene, Then ‘Til Now—Is It Better? Welcome to the first of our regular features. Hosted by Graham Greene (no not the dead one) but the guitar shaman from Australia, the Satriani of the South. Graham has been in the industry since time began and will be contributing the news and views on the music industry. Graham also a seasoned journalist, has a valuable insight into the industry which we hope you will enjoy. So for now I will leave you in the very capable hands of Mr. Greene
Back in 1982, when I was first turning pro in the music industry, there was a standard way of getting your music under the noses of radio programmers and record labels. You transferred your carefully-crafted demos (recorded in a proper studio if you could afford it) onto cassette tapes – normally from a ‘master’ cassette that you made either at home or in-studio – and labelled them as neatly as possible. If you had some extra money, you could have a heap of tapes made at a duplicating facility that could run off multiple copies at once, saving time, energy and tape wear on the precious master. If the tape machines were not perfectly calibrated, the songs might be a tiny bit out of concert pitch, but it was hardly noticeable unless one of the machines was way out of whack, so it hardly mattered. The next step was to type out the band bio – with a typewriter (remember them?) – and took the prepared pages to a post office to get them photocopied – no home printers in those days. Once the tapes and bio sheets were ready, all that remained was to add some 8 x 10 inch glossy black-and-white photographs of the band (professionally done if possible) to the packages, then back to the post office to send them to the recipients. After all of that came the wait to see if the music and images were what the radio stations and record labels wanted for their playlists or artist rosters.
Today in 2012, you can put a band bio and photos in a PDF, put it in a zip folder with a selection of mp3 audio files, and email it – done. We’ve come a long way from photocopies and the humble audio cassette. But is it any easier to make it in the music industry? Are we better off? Maybe, maybe not. The world music industry has indeed changed since the halcyon days of rock and roll, when massive acts played massive concert tours to massive audiences and travelled in their own airliners – this is now the exception rather than the rule. Musical tastes have changed, the world economy has changed, the media has changed, and public accessibility to music has changed. The thing is, it is debatable whether or not all these changes have been for the better. The obvious thing that has had a huge impact is, of course, the internet. The sudden appearance and spread of the World Wide Web caught the music industry – and probably many others – with their pants down. Legally and logistically, there was simply nothing in place to deal or cope with the new deal in entertainment consumption. Songs, movies, games and books were placed online to be accessed and downloaded anonymously by anyone with an internet connection, and there seemed to be little any of the regulating bodies could do to stem the tide of pirated copies and illegal downloads. The original dramas surrounding the Napster download website are now the stuff of legend, and some of the reactions by the industry have been a case of too little too late, or in some cases, too much directed at the wrong people. For a lot of people in the general public, the net seemed like a paradise of everything they wanted, available for free at the click of a mouse button. For musicians and other artists trying to sell their wares through traditional means, this felt very much like the death knell for their established or nascent careers. Widespread panic ensued, and the dust had yet to fully settle on a number of fronts.