How Music Works

by David Byrne

  Is the satisfaction that comes from public recognition—however small, however fleeting—a driving force for the creative act? I am going to assume that most of us who make music (or pursue other creative endeavors) do indeed dream that someday someone else will hear, see, or read what we’ve made. Though Darger and some others might seem to be the exceptions, even they may have dreamed of sharing their work. An audience can be your family members or anonymous passersby on the street; just because you’re not booked in a club or concert hall doesn’t mean you’re not a musician. Even conceptual artists and musicians who decided that to merely think about making something was enough—Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Sol LeWitt all made works that consisted solely of sets of instructions—have almost always documented their acts and presented them to their peers.

  Many of us who do seek validation dream that we will not only have that dialogue with our peers and the public, but that we might even be compensated for our creative efforts, which is another kind of validation. We’re not talking rich and famous; making a life with one’s work is enough. So let’s assume that you want to be a professional and get paid—although most of all you want to get your music to others’ ears—then how does that work? Making great stuff is only half the battle.

  When I was younger, it appeared to me that the whole process by which music got to my ears happened by magic. I’d hear a new band or a singer who seemed to have come out of nowhere expressly to blow my mind. It seemed to me as if my friends and I had “discovered” them. I wasn’t aware of marketing—at least not the marketing of music. I was aware of celebrities shilling for cigarettes, laundry detergents, and cars on TV and radio, but I didn’t know that cool music was being marketed in the same way. I must have felt that there existed a Republic of Peers and like-minded individuals who somehow got wind of what cool stuff everyone else was up to.

  Now everyone has at least some understanding of the fact that they are being marketed to. Sometimes we still believe we have magically “discovered” something, but more often we are vaguely aware that someone made an effort to bring that artist or music to our attention. When I first noticed these hidden forces at work, I felt a little disillusioned. Realizing that something I really liked had been sold to me felt like some part of my free will had been usurped. I began to question the whole idea of free will and personal agency in my likes and dislikes—were they all manipulated according to someone else’s plan? If we can do the mental gymnastics, separating this pragmatic knowledge from our enjoyment of music, then ideally this awareness of marketing campaigns might not spoil our enthusiasm.

  My friends and I now have a better understanding of the fact that our tastes are always changing, that some musicians no longer seem relevant while others, in retrospect, seem prescient. We realize that there is an ebb and flow to what we are emotionally involved in, that there are no absolutes. But for a while the music business seemed like a utopian parallel universe.

  As music fans and bystanders, we saw Elvis riding in a gold Cadillac, we saw Sting recording in a French château, we saw the Capitol Records building in LA shaped like a tower of 45s, and we heard the stories of lives lived in excess—drug binges, TVs thrown from hotel balconies, embroidered nudie suits and painted Rolls Royces. We heard stories of Bruce Springsteen laboring in studios for more than a year on Born to Run, or D’Angelo haunting Electric Lady for four years to make Voodoo. Pragmatism seemed beside the point; the music world was about other things. Those tales of profligate spending and interminable recording sessions in expensive studios are almost unheard of now for the majority of artists, mainly for budgetary reasons. The music world then seemed glamorous and extravagant, and the practicalities of marketing and distribution seemed beside the point when one thought of the glory and the lifestyle. Much of that has changed.

  Flaunting a luxurious lifestyle is now mainly the provenance of hip-hop artists, few of whom tour extensively—so someone must be buying some records if that’s what pays for those bottles of Cristal, those music videos, those grills and chains. Or else their record companies feel that fronting the money for such things is a wise long-term investment. Many of those artists have cleverly diversified into perfumes, restaurants, shoes, and clothing; if music sales decline, if there are less and less profits from CDs, profile and income can presumably be maintained in other ways, like having your own line of perfume.

  Over the years, I too have increasingly spent time working in forms that are not exclusively musical—art, books (like this one), films, and DVDs. None of those bring in anywhere near the income that a perfume deal would, or so I imagine—I really missed the boat in that department. With any extra-musical pursuit, my general financial rule is simply to try not to lose money; if a project covers costs and expenses, that’s acceptable. One project is not supposed to bankroll another, though that ideal is hard to maintain. For me, diversification is about seeking out ways of stretching creatively. Diversity is not a business decision; it’s a way of staying interested, alert. Though I don’t want my creative decisions to be guided by profit and marketing—a motivating criteria that inevitably ends in disaster—I also don’t want to be blissfully ignorant of budgets and business.

  There’s an adage often directed at easy-come, easy-go types: the musician who doesn’t attend to his or her business pretty soon doesn’t have any business. Decades ago, I took that warning to heart, and before signing to a record label I read books like This Business of Music. My limited research didn’t guarantee all that much in the way of wisdom, and the lawyers who were hired to protect our baby band didn’t really do much to guarantee us a truly fair deal. Although our initial record contracts weren’t so great, to their credit, they did the best they could under the circumstances. At least we didn’t do anything truly disastrous. In subsequent years we made an effort to learn a little each time out and make course corrections. Some business decisions I deeply regret; though I was never coerced, I was often told a given situation was the best I could hope for at the time. That line has been used to justify a lot of predatory deals, but I got off lightly. I have managed to incrementally improve my legal and contractual situation over the years, to avoid repeating mistakes and to protect myself. I’ve worked with companies big and small, and I’ve even owned my own record company.

  That label, Luaka Bop, still exists, though I’m no longer involved in running it. Our first release was in 1990. I think one year in the early aughts I actually saw some income from the company, but the rest of the time, although it was hugely fun and the music we released was inspirational, it was also a drain on my time and finances.

  I’ve also tried working without any record company at all. The Everything That Happens collaboration with Brian Eno was self-released, though various companies were involved in the distribution of the physical CDs. The Here Lies Love two-disc collaboration with Fatboy Slim came out through Nonesuch, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. I have released music through indie labels like Thrill Jockey, and I have manufactured CDs of remixes and dance scores and sold them on tour at the merch table. I have, at one time or another, tried almost every form of music distribution.

  These days, I tour every few years, and I no longer see it as simply a loss leader for CD sales. Touring used to be thought of mainly as a type of marketing—a way to get the public to buy more records by generating press and building an audience. It does do that, but it can also be a source of income and a creative endeavor all on its own. We’ve been told the old lie that losing money on tour is okay because you can make it up in record sales, but that really doesn’t hold true for everyone anymore. Performing is psychologically and physically enjoyable for musicians, so cash is not the sole attraction. Sadly, that means it’s relatively easy to tempt us to perform for peanuts. Being a musician is a good job, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to go broke doing it.

  I’ve made money and I’ve been ripped off (well, I’ve signed lousy contracts). I’ve had creative freedom and I’ve been pressured to
make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I know I’m not the only one who can say that. If you think success in the world of music is determined by the number of records sold, or the size of your house or bank account, then I’m not the expert for you. I am more interested in how people can manage a whole lifetime in music. Is that possible? And if so, how?

  What is called the music business today, however, is nothing like what I researched before signing that first contract. In fact, the music business is hardly even in the business of producing music anymore. At some point, it became primarily the business of selling objects—LPs, cassettes, CDs in plastic cases—and that business will soon be over. Tower Records closed in 2006, and Virgin Megastores shut their doors in 2009. Borders declared bankruptcy in February 2011, and HMV in the UK closed a massive number of branches in 2012. They’re not coming back; this is not a “downturn.” The few indie stores that have survived have staffs that are knowledgeable, and they love the music and the musicians whose work they sell. I stopped by a record shop in Nashville not too long ago where the staff picks are all worth considering, and I heard a band play there in the afternoon. Beers were passed out. I bought some records. But even those shops have to sell a critical mass of goods to pay the rent, so who knows how long such wonderful outlets will be around.

  This changing landscape is not necessarily bad news for music, and it’s not necessarily bad news for musicians, either. There have never been more opportunities for a musician to reach an audience, and that is what we have always wanted to do. Music, as far as this book is concerned, is the end, and as we have seen, the devices that deliver it come and go. Almost none of the myriad ways of currently making an audience aware of your work existed when I accidentally found myself with a music career. Though the current situation is rife with new possibilities, the industry itself is less flush with money, so you have to learn how to navigate some treacherous waters.

  Lenny Waronker used to run Warner Brothers Records with Mo Ostin. I talked to him recently on the phone about their philosophy back when I signed with that label.

  The music business was not as profitable then. It was run by entrepreneurs, and often the records they put out were based on their taste. Ahmet Ertegün was one, and Norman Granz, who specialized in jazz, was another. They were proud that the records they put out reflected their own taste. We at Warner had a philosophy. In the late sixties and early seventies, we could see that good songwriters learned as they went—one got a sense of their growth. They might not get it the first time around, but it might happen for them on their next record. So we tried to simply sign what we thought were the best artists. Artists who had an aesthetic. We eventually realized that what was important was our roster rather than our records. And sometimes what was right, what clicked, was also a good record. It was a bet, and sometimes you could bet on quality. It was a time of anything goes, artistically. We signed unsuccessful artists who made good records, and we eventually realized that these artists drew other artists (some of whom were successful) to the label. Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Van Dyke Parks, and Van Morrison were on the label, and other artists wanted to be on the label because they were there.

  I remember Seymour Stein saying that he managed to sign Madonna because Talking Heads were on Sire Records at the time. Those days are gone for major labels, but smaller companies still follow some of that philosophy, though their finances and logistics might be different.

  Take a look at this graph.

  DOLLAR AMOUNTS OF UNITS SHIPPED—IN BILLIONS (1980 to 2010)

  Recording Industry Association of America

  Wow. That looks pretty scary. See how much money CDs were bringing in at their peak? No wonder some bad decisions were made. Some say this picture depicts a dire trend. The fact that Radiohead left EMI not so long ago and debuted its 2007 album In Rainbows online, and that Madonna defected from Warner Bros. to sign with Live Nation, a concert promoter, are said to signal the end of the music business as we know it. Actually, these are just two examples of how musicians are increasingly able to work outside of the traditional label relationship. There is no single way of doing business these days. There are, in fact, six viable models, by my count, which I will review in this chapter. There are probably more, and one can mix and match, but these give a picture of the array of options. Having a variety of business choices is good for artists: it gives us more ways to make a living. And it’s good for audiences, too, who will have the opportunity for more—and more interesting—music to listen to.

  WHAT IS MUSIC?

  First, a definition of terms. What is it we’re talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced—it was as much a social event as an aural one. As I argued earlier in this book, before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. It was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal, and often utilitarian. You couldn’t take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that’s not music), or even hear it again. Music was a singular experience, something connected to a specific time and place. It was part of the continuum, the timeline of your life, not a set of “things” that lived outside of it. You could pay to hear music by going to a concert or hiring musicians, but after you did, it was just a memory. Or, as many people did, you could make it yourself or with your family or friends.

  Technology changed all that in the twentieth century. Music (or its recorded artifact) came to be regarded as a product—a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. You didn’t have to go see a performance to hear music, and you didn’t have to perform the music yourself, either. Other people did those jobs. This was, of course, hugely convenient. Most of us grew up in an age when the existence of recorded music was a given. We heard music in other contexts as well, but at least half of what we heard had been pre-recorded or was played on the radio—and much of that was pre-recorded as well.

  As record companies flourished, singers and songwriters began to earn additional income from the sale of recorded music, beyond their income from concerts. This must have seemed pretty exciting. Though there were lots of small record companies early on, the industry was soon dominated by a handful of large companies that signed artists (all of us were at least given the dignity of being referred to as artists), paid for their recordings to be made, and then promoted the hell out of them (sometimes). These companies would then get the records into any place that sold singles or LPs, and they’d also get them played on the radio. In return for this upfront and sometimes risky capital investment, most traditional record companies kept the lion’s share of the income, passing on a relatively small percentage of the sales to the artists. The songwriter (if that person was different from the performer) got paid something too, as composers had with sheet music in the preceding decades.

  These changes upended the function and use of music, transforming it from something we participated in to something we consumed. But our instincts remain intact: I spend plenty of time as a music consumer, with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I’ll still go out to stand in a crowd as part of an audience. I also sing to myself, and, yes, I perform and play an instrument (not always well).

  We’ll always want music to be part of our social fabric. We gravitate to concerts and bars even if the sound sucks; we pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; we build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear our kind of music (opera houses, punk clubs, symphony halls); and we want to know everything about our favorite bards—their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on—it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Mus
ic resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can’t conceive of it being an isolated thing. It’s whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day. Trying to reduce and package such a changeable and unwieldly entity is ultimately futile. But many try.

  WHAT DO RECORD COMPANIES DO?

  Or, more precisely, what did they traditionally do? As I outlined earlier, the record company not only has the capital to fund some of the recording and promoting, they presumably also have some skills, expertise, useful contacts, and access to the latest technology—more than a bank would have, for example. A bank would never give a kid with a guitar a loan; the kid has no collateral from a bank’s point of view.

  The idea used to be that the record company A&R folks all had good ears, and, as Lenny Waronker said, they could sense that these kids and their songs could, just maybe, become hugely popular and make a pile of money for the record company. At some point in the eighties these guys with the special ears began to disappear. Most of the major labels began to merge with one another, or even with non-music businesses. Warner Brothers, where I was, got absorbed by Time, Inc. (Maybe we’d all get good reviews in Time from now on!) And then, to make it even more confusing, that entity merged with AOL. The new stockholders and boards soon demanded quarterly accouting, which pressured the labels to produce significant hits on a regular basis. The “ears” who spotted and nurtured talent were well paid, so to pay off the debts accrued by the recent mergers, these guys were let go. Then even the guys who managed and used to own the record labels were paid handsomely to go away. Other guys who didn’t have a history of dealing with musicians thought they could do just as well or better by being more ruthless and efficient. Mostly, though, they didn’t do any better. The smaller labels that survived still relied on their love of the form and their gut instincts, and because they were actually paying attention, sometimes they hooked a big one. They knew when something moved them, but they didn’t have the same financial resources and marketing manpower as the big boys. Turning one’s heart, ears, and love into cash could be a sometime thing.