The physical music industry is in an extinction race with itself. It needs new artists to become legacy acts since the existing archives are running dry. Will it lose?
Let’s be optimistic. We’re always going to have new music to enjoy. There will always be musicians recording for our pleasure. And that means each new album will come with the possibility of extras — B-sides, outtake songs, session versions of released songs, demos, live versions, and so on — that can be built into deluxe editions straight away if the artist is big enough or later on if the album is a success. We’re not going to run dry of this material.
But at the same time, I don’t think we’re ever going to see a renaissance of music as central to the lives of countless millions of young people who choose to spend their free time glued to an audio device to the exclusion of video, computer games, social media, and all the other distractions of our age. Music used to be all we had, which meant we made an incredible connection with it. It will never again be all we have.
And that means, among other things, that we should not expect heroes as big as the heroes of the past, or with a cultural impact as profound as that of the past. Pop will always reach a new generation with a well-placed song or a well-crafted image, but that’s it. Taylor Swift is a phenomenon but she’s not changing the world the way The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, or even Madonna did. Moreover, music is accumulative, so there’s always more of it to choose from. But I can’t imagine another time in which a significant proportion of the young people of the entire world was united in love of an act, or when fiercely loyal tribes gathered around Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols, and so on.
We’re not just fragmented in terms of our entertainment options. We’re now fragmented culturally, meaning that music has reverted to an array of careful demographics. Soul music originally sold only to black kids. Then it was folded into everybody’s playlist. Now it’s black again. The same is true of folk, jazz, classical, heavy rock, dance music, and everything else. We’ve narrowed our own horizons, and those we haven’t narrowed by ourselves our streaming services are happy to narrow for us.
In this environment, a universal love of the music that binds us all is impossible. And that’s exactly how the market wants it. Compartmentalizing kids reduces risk. Who’d want to be a label specializing in surf music in 1963?
The exciting thing about the legacy we all do own is that it appears to be timeless. You don’t need to have been a teenager in 1964 to understand and love The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Those who were actually there at the time may be dying off — they’re in their 70s now — but a voracious appetite for this music remains, and is self-perpetuating as enthusiasms are passed down through the ears of waves of younger listeners. New generations are tuning in to old music, too, and for many of them there’s nothing so important as having the music physically to savor in whatever format works for them.
The bedrock of what remains of the physical music industry is this legacy wealth. This is what keeps vinyl and CD manufacturers alive, and those who make equipment to play them on. And, naturally, what these interests need to ensure their continuing survival is a constant stream of new old music they can package from the big sellers of the past.
But let’s be blunt about this as a business model. The past is not infinite. Sooner or later the archives are bound to run out of sounds to sell.
There have always been deluxe editions. The very concept of an “album” — a book-like packaging of several phonograph disks sold together for listeners who could afford them — is of a deluxe purchase, just as for teenagers it was always a costly luxury to save up for an LP rather than just buy singles. The history of recorded music of all kinds is liberally sprinkled with multi-disk sets, box sets, limited edition sets such as picture disks, special collector’s editions with extra packaging, inserts, or signed photos, even standard sets sold at a premium such as The Beatles’ Let It Be which was originally sold in an expensive box with a big book.
The most cynical use of these physical items is to sell a fan the same material over and over again. Most of us fall for it. I could probably count how many copies of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon I’ve owned, but the answer would depress me. It’s up in the tens, including one cassette, four LPs, and countless configurations of optical disk. (The album may have racked up 45 million sales but that doesn’t mean it has sold to 45 million different people!)
New versions of The Dark Side Of The Moon are extremely unlikely to add anything substantial to what I already know. I’m unlikely to play them much. But I’ll buy them anyway. It’s what fans do. If nothing else, it marks off the anniversaries in a satisfying manner. 2023 was the album’s 50th anniversary, and of course there was a box to commemorate it. Nothing new sonically. Sumptuous packaging. As the song goes, kerching.
How do the legacy industries support this? They sell the deluxe editions in relatively small quantities, though these may actually run to hundreds of thousands of items, and phase out their manufacture well in advance of the next anniversary and the upgraded product.
Formats themselves churn. The record industry allowed its own premium product to become devalued in the late 1970s. As the decade wore on, manufacturers produced ever more shabbily pressed and packaged LPs, partially the result of cost-cutting (and profit chasing) in the industries and partially a shift in focus back to singles, which the industry (not listeners) had decided was the format to push.
By the early 1980s LP vinyl was so awful, particularly legacy albums — careless pressings from worn-out masters, lightweight and recycled vinyl, reduced packaging, little quality control — that when CDs were introduced they soon found traction among legacy listeners who bought all their old albums again on the new format because of its better sonic quality.
The industry itself had created the means by which it could double-dip. (Triple-dip, if you’d already bought a cassette version for your jogging soundtrack.) Cynically, for sure, but the music industry has never been less than cynical.
And it never ends. Take the “loudness wars” of the late 1990s. CDs were remastered to play ever hotter until they were compressed out of all trace of their original dynamics: just a wall of sound. One reason for this was to try to make them sound better on poor-quality mobile devices such as mp3 players, and the manufacturers simply used the same masters for the CDs. A few years later, all those same albums could be remastered again with dynamic mixes that brought back a little of their original subtlety. Kerching, kerching.
More recently, an astonishingly effective sleight of hand has convinced “hipster” listeners (for which read: this generation’s mugs) to trade in their (inferior!) CDs for (superior!) vinyl, even if those vinyl versions were manufactured from the same digital source encoded on the CD.
All kinds of higher resolution forms of optical disk have proliferated and been superseded in turn, from DTS-CD, HDCD, and SACD to DVD-Audio and Blu-Ray in all kinds of proprietary formats. These formats churn as fast as the manufacturers stop making the equipment. You may well have 3D movies, for example, that you only bought a decade or so back but which you can no longer play. It’s the same with these audio formats — and as each old one fades away you’ll need to “upgrade” to the new. How long do you reckon Dolby Atmos will last before you can’t buy decoders anymore? Here comes that cash register sample again.
Objectively, as if that were a measure of anything, fans buy deluxe editions for their extras, including all those outtakes and unused sessions and demos I mentioned before, as well as songs that were not completed at the time but can now be polished off with new additions by contemporary musicians or vocalists, old multi-channel (by which I mean higher than the original mono or stereo) mixes (and the opposite: mono versions of 1960s recordings most commonly encountered in stereo), radio sessions, TV sessions, live material, and whatever can be scraped out of the vaults.
The more important come in big multi-disk boxes with hardback books. Some are released simultaneously in all kinds of fan-baiting limited sets, such as LPs that come on a range of differently colored vinyl. A single disk of previously unreleased snippets could sell a fan a career-spanning, multi-disk box of many albums they already own.
But all that extra material is only available if it exists in the artist’s vault, and sooner or later the vault will be all used up. It may take some time, but it’s bound to happen.
Let’s think ahead for The Beatles, for example. We’ve had compilations of session highlights such as Anthology, and individual super deluxe boxes for many of the band’s albums containing more session highlights. The insatiable fan — and The Beatles have a huge market in insatiable fans — will not be content until EMI has sold them every single second of session tape that exists in its vault. It will eventually come to this. But then — well, what happens then?
And not all the big-selling legacy acts have catalogs as rich as The Beatles, or record labels that stored all their tapes so carefully. Some vaults are all but empty. Pink Floyd, for example, struggled to find material to fill its The Early Years deluxe box. It seems that the session tapes for its first album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn no longer exist. (And this was an EMI album recorded at Abbey Road at the same time as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for which we have a full session record. All artists are not considered equal by their label.)
My suspicion is that there will always be one cop-out for the industry to flog us: remixes. Endless remixes. Endless reconfigurations of the original multitrack masters and (in an advance we’ve first seen with The Beatles) cunning and invasive technology that can tease out sweetmeats from masters where the multitracks no longer exist, isolating vocals and instruments, enhancing the defective, enabling more and more remix opportunities.
We’ll always have new mixes — celebrity mixes, maybe, or (again like The Beatles) just those created by some bloke who happens to be the son of the original producer, regardless of whatever kinds of ears he’s supposed to have inherited. Mix after mix after mix for all time. It’s not the curation of the archive we might have hoped for, but it is sustainable.
Yes, I’m one of those mugs who buys these things. It doesn’t mean I ever play them. I always go back to the original mixes for my Beatles fix, regardless of how hobbled those mixes were by the circumstances of their creation.
And, of course, we’re going to have endless new formats of surround mix to upgrade to, just as right now we’re all being encouraged to move to the Atmos format even if new surround mixes don’t sound appreciably better than the existing mixes. We may end up buying surround sound systems with more and more speakers. Today the 5.1 format is standard, though in many cases the actual systems we use may be 7.1 or more. In the future, we may all become used to 32.4 systems, let’s say, and woe betide us if we don’t upgrade all our sounds to the super-duper Apple proprietary 32.4 mixes.
As a fan of psychedelic music, I must comment that I am usually disappointed with these mixes. The problem is that 5.1 and all its variations were built for cinema, not for audio. Cinema is a directional experience: you look toward the screen. People speak on the screen. There’s a center-front speaker in your 5.1 dedicated to vocals. And that’s where the vocals in the music usually go, too, making 5.1 music directional. You sit and gaze at one of your walls while you play it.
Period quadrophonic, in contrast, was a four-channel mix often without a front. The vocals could come from any of the four channels, as could each of the instruments, and the sounds could pan around the channels at will. It was an immersive sound with yourself in the center of the action. You’d sit there wherever you liked in the middle of it with your eyes shut and let yourself be transported. Home cinema audio mixes, subconsciously, do not want you to shut your eyes. They do not want to immerse you or transport you. They do not want the music itself to be the center of your experience.
(There’s another, but far less obvious problem. Pink Floyd recorded ‘One Of These Days’ in 1971 with a specific stereo configuration: Roger Waters played bass guitar in one speaker, and David Gilmour played a second bass guitar in the other. I’ve never seen a modern multichannel configuration that could handle this, though I guess 32.4 might manage it eventually.)
And another thing about these legacy surround sound mixes: they’re generally reverential. Even of psychedelic music. The mixers set up a careful sound world where this player is over here and this player is over here, and that’s where they stay. Some of the wildest, silliest, most pan-dimensionally delirious stereo mixes of the 1960s are reduced to static art objects in their new surround mixes. So much for the spirit of their creation. Or for those of us who want to take drugs while we play them.
New mixes aside, what’s the ultimate future for the super deluxe box? Let’s make one sweeping generalization, which is that the purchasers of the really big boxes may not actually ever play them. For example, if you have a box that includes the same album on LP and CD, you may never play the vinyl version — to keep it pristine and mint — and only play the CD. You may well understand that the box is an investment that you can sell for big bucks later.
Is the LP just for show, then? Might the vinyl be blank, for all it matters? Or not the album you bought, like a gold disk that is simply somebody else’s album sprayed gold?
The extreme of this is where a box comes with the music on several physical formats and there’s a download code for a digital or streamed version. Then you don’t play the LP or the CD or the Blu-Ray audio or anything from the actual box, you just play the download. The ultimate super deluxe box will then be one that never actually comes out of its shrink-wrap.
We’re almost there, in fact. I have a Frank Zappa box called Halloween 77 which comes with the usual nonsense (a plastic mask and costume) but no actual audio disks, just the music (totaling about 16 hours) and a PDF booklet on a USB stick. It might as well have been a download.
Can you imagine, then, where this is heading? The physical item all but disappears. New albums are released only as digital downloads or streams, but fans are able to buy a “deluxe” physical version if they like — consisting merely of elaborate packaging with a special code to unlock a higher-quality download or stream if you’re lucky. And the same will be true of the legacy and commemorative boxes. They contain no actual music, simply the book and the poster and the other ephemera.
We’ll buy them. The 2023 commemorative version of The Dark Side Of The Moon contained facsimiles of the art work and original inserts along with lots of new printed material, but no actual new music you’d want to play. The music might as well not be there at all.
Hence, it’s not the music that matters. It’s handling the box. It’s putting it on your shelf where others can see it. It’s indulging your mindset as a fan above and beyond all the others. And the only way the industry survives is by continuously stoking this absurd mindset in us where we will support and perpetuate the very people who stole that music out of our hands.
Photo by Robert Maas of just a few of his Frank Zappa deluxe CD editions. This could have been any one of about 50 artists I buy obsessively. All together now: “You’re an asshole.” And a sucker, too, but I love the things even if I never play them.
active maas 