Music and Discography at the time of Covid 19: Losses and Opportunities!
Data di pubblicazione 31/05/2021
Dear friends, musicians and fans, we write this article to share some thoughts on the current period, hoping it will be interesting and, at the same time, of inspiration for other thoughts.
After 2020, a year that everyone in Italy will remember for the Civil Protection trucks running through the streets with the megaphone warning about the danger of contagion as if it was a science fiction film on Netflix. Here we are in 2021 when a kind of annoying dystopian normality locks us in the house at 22. And right now we want to go and analyze the situation of the entertainment field, trying to give a picture as complete as possible and, perhaps, bring out new perspectives, new points of view.
Fact: thousands of people who worked in the entertainment industry lost their jobs.
Around the world of entertainment, there are thousands of operators. The controversy that made so much debate in early 2020, we do not remember whether it was Titian Iron or Jovanotti (we apologize) little changes, in reality, it was nonsensical. If Tiziano Ferro does not do shows, it is not a problem only for Tiziano Ferro, but for all those who work to make his show a reality, from the ticket-selling companies to those building the stage. And that’s a huge financial loss. Fortunately, for phonics, general staff members and marketers (not for Tiziano Ferro) there are more social shock absorbers than two years ago, starting from the income of citizenship, but it is clear that it is not enough. The same applies to several companies related to clothing or catering: there is not only "Cracco" or "Elisabetta Franchi", the tips of the iceberg are only what is most prominent of an entire productive ecosystem.
Damage to show business, okay. But to understand the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic on the world of Music there should be a unique idea of Music, which is not there at all.
In academies and schools, Music means the art of the musical language (the language, the notes, the great composers) or the live performance (the performative talent, the instrument and its virtuosos). For most people, however, music is just the live performance mixed with showbiz, a mix that really has nothing to do with art. Then there is the discography, or as we want to call all the music that comes with the programming of a sequencer, regardless of a live performance and without any paper in hand. A "new" form of art that in fact is not recognized as such practically by anyone, academic or not.
We have always maintained that the discography or at least the music that goes from Pierre Henri and Battiato to Guetta and Royksopp is a form of art totally different from the live performance or the notational musical writing. We were the first to argue that schools and various living rooms should give a name and identify this new form of art. They should have done it as soon as the music became technically reproducible, that is, at the end of 800. Exactly as it happened for the cinema that broke away from the theatre, for the photography that separated from the painting and so on.
But this has not happened even now that for various reasons due precisely to an unfortunate viral pandemic and its consequences, is the only form of musical art that survived.
The musical language, musical performance, nameless art. We are forced, every time we talk about Music, to specify which music we are talking about!
Today the Eighth Art (if the Seventh is the Cinema.) does not have a name that recognizes it as such: we used the term Discography, but it is a superficial name because it refers more to the business reference than to the artistic experience that is behind us.
The name "photography" took years of intellectual debates to be used. Baudelaire was against it. But then it arrived. Cinema was about to end up like electronic music, but luckily the content took its name from the material used for the vision (the "film", that is, the film) and the art from the place of fruition (the cinema, in fact). So in the musical case, we have the "record" to define the object, but the term "discography" is not perfect, because it is a term that also applies and starting from the historical recordings of the early Thirties, which have nothing to do with what you do today.
Paradoxically, 99% of the music critics who claim to be such are convinced that a good performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is an album of artistic value and Royksopp’s Junior (a random record) a commercial operation when in reality it is the exact opposite. The fourth symphony is a work of art regardless of how it is performed, and a good orchestra well-conducted can make an excellent performance: but the record is only a technical operation. Junior by Royksopp is a work of art starting from the record. Nobody has ever seen the score and the performance is done for commercial purposes to promote the work. Do you follow me?
The New Art, with whatever name we want to call it, is composed of many artistic forms put together, exactly like all art forms born with modernity. Just as the Cinema encompasses theatre, music, photography, sometimes painting, dance or poetry, even a recording work is made by many arts: musical performance, writing, but also dance, painting and photography, in some cases also from the cinema, like some video clips that are actually short films.
Of the three Arts that make up what we call "Music", Musical Language and Eighth Art are behind the Live Performance. A cultural and educational problem but also a new opportunity: is it time to fill the gap?
So we come to the point that will help us to understand what opportunities we are talking about, linked to the current historical period. There are several examples that we can take to tell you how there is, in the world that revolves around the musical experience, a substantial imbalance in favour of the performance (we do not use the Anglo-Saxon term by chance...) compared to other artistic dimensions, recognized as such or not. It is not only the "new art" that is sacrificed by the system but also the good old expensive traditional method, for which music is nothing but a language, is anything but considered.
We start, for example, from elementary school children who are unnecessarily entrusted with musical instruments (keyboards, flutes) without having any theoretical or emotional knowledge of music. As if, to teach mathematics, you go from the first to the fifth grade with a bullet maker without teaching the scoreboards. Increasingly larger and more complex bullets without ever specifying that the reason why they have to learn how to make 12 divided 4, is, first of all, to learn how to share 12 candies between 4 friends. The total lack of theoretical teaching of music seems almost made to make children desist from learning music: we understand that explain to a child that what everyone calls "do" on the piano can actually be a "si diesis", but if you don’t do it right away, the baby will never understand what he’s doing for the rest of his life.
So already in itself, traditional music education is a disaster, not to mention education to what we call "New Art": that does not exist. No teacher will ever be able to explain to a child why Royksopp are great artists and their sound is magic/ science of the highest level: there are no assumptions. There will be old-fashioned teachers who will do a functional theory analysis of "the Girl and the Robot," and they will get that at the end there is better from that point of view, and modern teachers who will give all the credit for the success of the song to Robyn, who is the leading performer.
This is damage to the huge music.
You may wonder where musical education is aimed, not only in the scholastic sense but also in the system. The only education that is made, musically speaking, is about performance. That is why we are witnessing the pathetic scene of the child trying to play for Elisa by Beethoven as a physical exercise, the same child who when he grows up will find himself then to be a happy spectator of X-Factor. Performance as an almost religious form.
Today, who has the most chance to become a good musician from an early age, is not who has more empathy or ear for music, but more motor coordination in the hands. And who has the chance to become the best singer is who has the best structural photogenic condition since birth.
If you put everything on a live performance by misteaching the musical language and ignoring the New Art already from school, you get to produce an empty and arid system, in which can emerge only natural talents in the sense of physical super dots, how can they be the qualities of a sportsman. "Marco becomes tall, he will play basketball / Luca has fast fingers, he will become a pianist". A world in which competition and physical talent prevail over art then does not have the tools to decipher the scene "trap", which is in fact a treatise of sociology "teenagers and submission to the system today". We recommend a book published by Uno Editori "La Musica e I suoi nemici" (Music and its enemies): here the theme is addressed extensively.
And besides, by focusing on performance and without a disco culture, the whole tour will be controlled by very few subjects. All the big ones go to the same authors and in the same studios, it’s no accident. The day we see Cremonini and Carboni go from the Miraloop studios to ask for information we will write you that we were wrong.
The pandemic had a devastating impact on performers but did not harm the New Musical Art because not being considered -in fact- an art form, there is no physical place used for the enjoyment of recorded music. Spotify is not a place.
The much-desired (apparently only by us) physical place of fruition of "our art form", not existing, was not affected by the pandemic. Peace. Let us leave aside the debate, which is so popular, where it is debated that the governments of half the world have done right or wrong to close the cinemas, theatres and discotheques to prevent the population from relaxing too much: this is a tough debate and regardless of our position (better to keep quiet!) we’ll go off-topic.
Let’s focus on the fact that, while there is an indissoluble link between Cinema (place) and Cinema (art), Theatre (place) and Theatre (art), there is no link between a physical place and the Discography as an expressive or artistic form.
Today the discography is no longer even in record stores, which no longer exist, today the discography is on the sales and streaming platforms of digital giants. Google, Apple, Spotify, Amazon. And to follow the niche platforms for fans like Beatport.
Some will say that the place where you listen to the records are the clubs, another big victim of the pandemic. But the Discotheques are not the place "where you listen to records". They may have been, for a short time, but we all know that’s not what happened. Today the records are more of the places where people go dressed up pussy to drink hoping to bring someone to bed and where, even in this case, is the performance to be the master: most of the people who go to the disco records do not give a shit, Those who are interested in music are still looking for a show, a show: they are not content to listen to records, they need a "shouting" DJ, a famous one who performs. This fact was first denounced by the great Claudio Coccoluto recently deceased, that we remember: Coccoluto was among the first to say that DJs were pawns of PR and organizers because, in fact, it was not the music the point for which people went dancing.
Not even clubs are a real place to enjoy records because there is no real link between disco music and discotheques.
Notice, when this year the discos have closed, the production of House music (to say a genre that dances in a disco) has not stopped, on the contrary: it has increased. So many new musical productions were born between March and December 2020 that would be enough to make a new portal by itself as big as the first Beatport.
To be clear, we do not think that during a year of closed theatres were born many theatre companies...or new theatre performances. To survive, companies had to invent new strategies to monetize, but not by making new shows. This is because the link between theatrical art and theatre physical place is indissoluble and inevitable.
As we said earlier, today a "place" -so we can define it- where you listen to records is, therefore, an online platform. Take for example Spotify. Well, you won’t be surprised if we tell you that Spotify grew up a lot during the pandemic. It exceeded 100 million users and the shares of Spotify Technology S.A., on the Nasdaq index, grew from 126 dollars on March 16 to 319 on December 30, 2020! Not bad? A few days ago since writing this article, the sale of vinyl has surpassed the sale of Cds that has not happened since 1991. And the entire music business in 2020 grew by $1.5 billion.
And just to give more scaled-down examples, since Spotify is in fact a colossus, we can tell you that this year the production of Miraloop has also been growing. To give you some numbers in 2020, the year of the pandemic, the record company of Miraloop has created 26 releases (including 10 albums and 16 singles) for a total of 100 songs, which have generated more than a million and half streaming.
The world of music cannot ignore the performance, of course, but neither can it be just that. And now we have the opportunity to make up so much.
Given that the world of entertainment has suffered a blow, but if we look at the events with clarity we realize that in reality, the separation between the world of showbiz and the world of artistic production does not hurt so much. Also because it will not be forever. It is therefore essential to try to see what the opportunities are.
I opportunity: improve the musical performance
Musical training should not only be understood as an intellectual opportunity, but also as an economic one. We reformulate the teaching of music, we give way to the entertainment business to evolve, we increase the possibilities. In music, as in sports, education is an integral part of the system, although not all children will become Ed Sheeran and not all girls Dua Lipa. Education must be retrained and its restructuring will increase economic opportunities, both from the point of view of teachers and those who learn a new profession. Let’s stop performing all the quid of musical art: there is no room for everyone to perform live, but there is room for everyone to know the music and love it.
II opportunity: revolutionize live music venues for when it’s all over
While in countries like the Netherlands or Germany nightclubs are a meeting place much more "easy", in Italy nightclubs are always difficult places to attend: too much in the suburbs (you have to take the car and you can not drink), amazing times (you arrive at two o'clock and have to do a half-hour in a row to enter), excessive costs compared to the entertainment offer. Very often there is shitty music - excuse the French - and anyone knows that to find a partner Tinder is more reliable and less expensive.
Clubs need to get back to music and stop being addicted to PR and organisers. In times of pandemic, the discotheques have taken a blow from which they will hardly recover, and then we try to rebuild them. Let’s take them to music. And in the same way, we work to give music places of expression independent of the show business patterns. We leave it to the big players to perform in the stadiums, it’s all the rest of the system that needs to mature and grow.
It is not possible in a city like Bologna, the city where we live and work, whose metropolitan area contains 1.5 million people, to have a few dozen places to listen to music. And think that Bologna is the City of Music UNESCO because there are also entire cities of one hundred thousand inhabitants without even a local! Does this look like a model that can create a healthy and virtuous mechanism that can offer real job opportunities? No, it’s not. So much so that the little musicians who played around randomly have almost lost nothing. The hundred euros that they took (often in black) from the small local can do it in many other ways. It’s the greats who lost us, but the greats are covered. Now new models of music used must be structured, both recorded (discotheques) and linked to performance. Also because when the restrictive rules to avoid infections will end there will be a strong need on the part of people to enjoy musical evenings: take advantage!
III opportunity: improve your recording project, music is not just live performance
Most artists rely on live concerts in cities where live music is not actually a business. And in the time of the pandemic, the winner was the one who focused on the discography. The projects of those who had worked well have taken off in 2020 rather than in 2019. We are not saying that live performances are useless, but that they cannot be everything. And in fact, it hasn’t been, so if this historical period has taught us anything we can say now there are great opportunities to structure yourself and create an audience regardless of live performances. We are not talking about streaming shows, we are talking about beautiful music to listen to regardless of the shows. Also because we all know that the concert in streaming is a bubble. First of all, it is sad, but sad really. Secondly, it’s not a business, because it’s okay if you’re Ed Sheraan with a million people fan base, but if you’re a regular musician who obviously also enjoyed the audience at the club where he was going to perform, It’s very easy for the live concert to sell five tickets. Certainly not because he does not know how to play, simply because in the musical show very often the music is an outline, and even if this is a fact difficult to accept for many musicians, it is an absolute fact.
After all, we are not surprised that the pandemic produced "streaming concerts", today music is only considered performance and so the system reacted. But perhaps we should change our point of view for a moment.
The opportunity to change is there. Think about it...!
