Changing values
Alex James
Fifteen years ago a state-of-the-art recording studio would have cost well north of a million pounds. Mix consoles were vast and needed continuous maintenance by ex-NASA scientists. Even a pair of the requisite two-inch tape machines with Dolby could cost more than a house. Mind you, houses were quite cheap back then. Studios featured endless corridors of doors that led to specially designed rooms housing reverb plates, power supplies and air-conditioning units. A/C was essential to offset the heat generated by miles of hot circuitry buzzing in the heavily insulated soundproofed chambers. The cost of investing in all that equipment — allegedly more than a million pounds on doors alone at Air Studios — meant that decent studios were only to be found in the nicer parts of town where the buildings were worth investing in — St John’s Wood, Primrose Hill, Soho, Bloomsbury, Fulham, Hampstead — and making a record was like boarding a luxury cruise liner with bar, brasserie and legions of helpful staff. It was merely the beginning of an out-ofcontrol spiral of spending feedback which meant that a record company’s profit margin on a CD that cost £13.99 was about the same as it had been on a piece of vinyl that had cost £4.99 ten years previously.
I am proud to have been a part of that madness. It’s hard to see how it could have been avoided. Recording costs were marginal compared with marketing budgets. If the other guys were spending a hundred thousand on a video, there was nothing else for it but to stump up the cash in order to compete. It was a buoyant market, with record sales hitting, er, record sales and nobody complained. My! How things have changed. In 2008 a recording studio would look pretty well appointed if it contained about 25 grand’s worth of gear. You’d probably still need a couple of weeks in a posh mixing and mastering suite to finish a record, but the huge mixing desks, tape machines and sound processors of yore have all disappeared inside an off-the-shelf Apple Mac. It’s absolutely amazing. You need more than 25 grand’s worth of gear to make a handmade cheese.
I’ve just finished recording some tracks in my shed with my old mate Bernard, who was in Joy Division, the all-time undefeated champions of Indie music. The tracks have come out really well. They certainly wouldn’t sound any better if they had been recorded in a castle on Montserrat. We could make a video for next to nothing, too. YouTube production values aren’t the same as MTV’s. Even if we bought a couple of Z1 cameras, it wouldn’t break the bank. If we were clever about it, it would cost less to make a film than it would to design some sleeve artwork for a CD. People in bands always know people who make films.
The record-company business model is starting to fail because it puts all the value on a band’s recordings. Recordings now cost next to nothing to make and are worth next to nothing in the marketplace. What record companies do help to create, though, that are of a higher value than ever before, are brands: brands that can be used to sell just about anything, from concert tickets, T-shirts and posters to cheese and even products made by other companies, which the record company doesn’t see a bean from. The irony of it! They create the elixir of marketing itself and yet they can’t sell anything.
I’m wondering whether it’s even worth playing these songs to any record companies. We’d be better off talking to a shrewd advertising agency if we wanted some help with marketing. We’ve already made the record and we have worldwide distribution at our fingertips at zero cost. It seems completely pointless to manufacture any CDs and I wonder why they still exist? We don’t need them. They’re environmentally irresponsible, but, worse even than that, they’re history: yesterday’s, in an industry which is exactly all about today.
My friend, who is a record producer, says he isn’t expecting to make any more money out of records. I think he’s being a mite pessimistic but he doesn’t really care if he does or not. He’s already sold enough not to have to worry and he’ll go on making them just because he wants to. The bands that have influenced me the most — The Velvet Underground, The Smiths and Joy Division — all seemed to have something to say rather than something to sell, and none of them generated much cash until after they had split up. Money always makes artists make bad decisions, anyway. Work like you don’t need the money. It comes eventually.
Previous page
