A Sense of Entitlement: The Death of the Commercial Music Industry.

A sense of entitlement has been the bogey that emerged in full splendour from the financial crisis.  At the centre of the problem is the payment of rent to individuals with access to streams of income and capital.  In this tradition the rent is taken by individuals regardless of  their merit, regardless of the benefit of their work to the wider community and regardless of any special effort expended by them. The act of taking is based solely a sense of entitlement.  The Commercial Music Industry (CMI) is another group which suffers from feelings of entitlement.  In this case their case is pushed by a strong public relations lobby which is prepared to do much cultural damage in pursuit of its ends.

Their target is the freedom and power of the web which is now a powerful part of our culture. The lobby cites legal rights but these are relict because the special service they were able to provide, which was the provision of music on various sorts of disc, (vinyl, compact or mini) and tapes, has been superseded. They ignore the history of music making over the last few centuries.  Before electricity, music was originally played by amateurs in their own homes, at fetes and celebrations, by choirs in churches and no money was involved. Music could also be heard  played by professional musicians in concert halls who were paid for each performance by those who heard it.

Discs were a wonderful thing because any single performance by an individual musician or a group could be reproduced many times for a negligible sum and sold en masse  for previously undreamed of profits. Well now technology has moved on and music can be spread on the internet for negligible cost. But the CMI believes it is forever entitled to its substantial rent from music because it has failed to notice that the way music is distributed is changed. So it is using its remaining funds to lobby our parliamentarians to put an end to change by restricting our use of the internet.

We should make music ourselves and encourage the more talented amongst us to work away at music, and post it on the net in multifarious ways. To some extent this is already happening but more is needed.  The discipline is to put the CMI finally out of its misery by not downloading anything at all, paid or unpaid. Their companies can then quietly go into liquidation and the loud self-righteous pronouncements of their professional spokespeople will flow down the plug hole too.

We can even pay our friends for special occasions if we wish. A wonderful example of this was a recent performance of Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabeas  organised by the Handel Society. The amateur chorus each paid £20 to participate, the orchestra was paid and the audience was composed of only ten or twenty people! So here money went to professional musicians to succour them whilst the chorus had a wonderful time, the publishers of the score made income too but  best of all the glorious music of Handel was celebrated.

With a few notable exceptions, working as a musician has always been a difficult and poorly paid lively hood. Much of the money generated by the CMI went to shareholders, senior executives and grasping "agents". . Somehow the CMI has managed to make us focus on the very few who have made millions so we believed that, as far as the musicians are concerned, the streets of the CMI is paved with gold rather than lean contracts and lives of penury

The copyright acts remain law and one supposes law is worth adhering to for the sake of stability in our society.  But that may be changing too. It was notable that during the Chilcott  enquiry one Tony Blair, who has a lawyer's training (and a strong sense of entitlement himself), seemed to be saying that there was no such thing as laws but only arguments. This was in the discussion about justifying launching an attack on Iraq.  If he is right this blogger and the politicians who espouse the rule of law are misguided and much more than we thought may be up for grabs. If you disagree I refer you to Mr Tony Blair who is just the sort of person that one would expect the PR departments of the CMI to admire..

Whatever the case, don't download commercial content but instead encourage your talented musical friends and listen live! The challenge will then be for the CMI to come up with something positive or die. It has been argued that Hitchcock through an act of genius. the production of Psycho saved the cinema when it was threatened by the advent of  TV. See for example: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/30dfd0d2-32de-11df-bf5f-00144feabdc0.html

So CMI get off our backs; look at the reality of your entitlement, stop complaining and enriching lawyers; stop threatening impoverished families with huge fines; instead, come up with something brilliant and life enriching - it you can remember how.