Now that we’re far enough into the new millennium to get a sense of what the future holds for the music business, there are patterns emerging. The Internet is playing a huge role in moving musical information from place to place and also providing new avenues of expression. The use of computers is becoming so sophisticated that often it is virtually impossible to tell a band-in-a-box from a band. Licensing music for film and ads has become expected.
In his New York Times article entitled "Where Music Will Be Coming From," Kevin Kelly paints a rosy picture of the future for music product, but not for the composers and performers, i.e., the creators themselves. Now that music has become, in his words, "liquefied" by being converted into digital information, it can be captured and disseminated easily, cheaply and quickly. Almost anyone can then manipulate it for fun or profit.
The economy is now facing a whole generation of business execs and agency staffers—not to mention musicians—who have become used to downloading music, art and ideas from the Web for free. Indeed, this generation does not think it is stealing; it feels entitled because using the Internet is so effortless, and it has forever changed people’s perception of intellectual property rights. Newspapers used to be sold exclusively in hard copy form. Now you can get the same news from the same source, the online newspaper, for free. The record companies’ efforts notwithstanding, this is happening to music—without the creator’s consent, of course. Just log on to Limewire and type away.
Copyright infringement cases are the bane of the ad business because record companies and publishers are losing money in the old economy marketplace and are more aggressively pursuing copyright violations. So the harder it gets for an agency creative to tell a composer to rip their favorite CD, the more appealing licensing that music becomes. In addition, due to the Internet’s global village of musicians, there is also a growing source of original music not connected to the traditional copyright/licensing system, and when music can be acquired without standard protections, a big financial obstacle has been cleared. Internet sites now exist that allow the user to download and "edit" (read re-arrange) fully mixed tracks or midi files from a cyber archive and, with clearance from the originator, do what ever they like with the edited track. How will a musician in a home studio in Oslo necessarily know that his track is the basis of a U.S national spot underscore?
How do music pros deal with so many alternative sources for their product? Made possible by computers, music houses can routinely submit multiple tracks for a single project. A great many music companies and composers have also resorted to converting their inventories of unsold demos and songs into music libraries. Licensing well-known and not so well known existing pieces has become the norm in TV ads, eliminating the need to collaborate with any musicians at all. Music houses now regularly advertise themselves as the purveyors of "custom and licensed" tracks.
If the trend continues, these shops will become more brokers than creators. The person with the best database will prevail and that’s where many music pros will excel in the sophisticated use of computer driven music retrieval, organization and manipulation. The sheer gross tonnage of music available in our society at any given moment from digital sources—CDs and the Internet—has reached such huge proportions that media producers will need, and pay for, the services of a research department as much as a composer. You may not have the budget to pay someone to write music for your spot, but you will need to have someone filter your thousands of choices. Indeed, agencies and music companies are working with radio programmers and DJs to stay on top of the latest sound. And new bands, not to mention established artists, are making licensing deals with advertisers they would not have dreamed of as recently as five years ago.
The services for individual composers will always be sought after for specific projects and certain kinds of advertising, but instrumental music especially can be so easily manipulated that any computer jock with an ear can take any existing music and cut/paste/process it into something that sounds fresh. If this process is streamlined and cost effective enough, which in reality it already is, then real composers are under more pressure to work faster and cheaper. At the same time, the uniqueness of their background and training and what it brings to the table has been devalued, and the process of making music through specialized collaborations, i.e., with agency creatives and/or other performers, is devalued as well.
Having said all this, it’s an exciting time to be in music production because new technology has opened up our ears, revolutionized the creative process and provided easy access to many new sources. One caution: the technology has also given us so many speed-of-light choices that there’s a risk of losing a firm artistic point of view and that music could become just so much editing fodder. Find the right person to collaborate with until you have a shared vision—Williams/Spielberg, Neihaus/Eastwood, Burwell/Coen Bros., Newman/Mendes, et al, can make for a powerful end result. It’s a process that seems to be fading from the advertising business.
