12 June 2013 (Day 163) – Musing re Home Taping

It was such an incredibly busy day that I barely was able to sit at my desk.   This was a shame because I was in the mood to listen to albums by the so called Los Angeles “Paisley Underground” acts of the mid-1980s.  But over the course of the day, I did manage to listen to an album by arguably its most important band at a significant point in its, and thus the movement’s, history;

(# 426) The Dream Syndicate – The Day Before Wine And Roses (live 1982/released 1994)

This live album was originally a live in an LA studio radio show in September 1982, just a week before the band went in to cut their debut album, The Days Of Wine And Roses (hence the title).  It is an intense but short (no more than 45 minutes) gig of a band in its earliest days and so it is no surprise that there are a number of covers in the set including, Buffalo Springfield’s Mr. Soul.  This comes just after the opener, Some Kinda Itch, both tracks rendered in a low key but brooding style increasing the musical tension until the band explodes into Sure Thing.  (It was such an effective combination that the three numbers were subsequently released in sequence on a vinyl EP I have somewhere at home.)  The guitar orgy continues into the classic That’s What You Always Say followed by a return to covers, this time a reasonable reading of Dylan’s Outlaw Blues.  Open Hour, the early title of what was to become their best known work, John Coltrane Stereo Blues, comes next and is comparatively sedate but no less effective compared to some of the wilder versions captured on subsequent albums or bootlegs.   When You Smile and cover of Donovan’s Season Of The Witch return to the nature of the opening couple of tracks before the explosive closer of The Days Of Wine And Roses. 

This is an album that is among the relatively select few in my collection I make a point of playing each and every year.  And every time I play it, I end up musing about the “evils” of home taping and now illegal downloads.  The trigger comes just after the band is introduced for its set.  Its leader and lead vocalist Steve Wynn states that he has been told he has to read a statement that starts with the phrase “Home taping is ruining the industry” before seemingly dissolving into laughter. I would have laughed if I was placed in Wynn’s position too. 

Why? Consider this scenario; here is a band that has only released an EP on an independent label being asked to broadcast a statement that the taping of a live performance (which, by the way, the album’s liner notes state started at 2 am in the morning!) would contribute in some way to ruining an industry run by huge multi nationals.  Surely it would have dawned on someone that the band was hoping there would be fans out there prepared to tape the show so they can play it to others would might be sufficient enthused to buy the band’s recordings, attend their gigs and purchase their merchandise.   

And this is the point that the recording agency completely and consistency never considers in its total opposition to the duplication of music.  Think about your first exposure to many of your favourite acts; no doubt there are some occasions where that first exposure has come because you’ve borrowed an album or received a copy of it on a tape or USB stick from a friend.  Sometimes you might heard a track or gossip about an act and download something to determine whether you’d like to purchase it.  By way of example, the very first AC/DC album I ever owned was a taped copy I made of the TNT album owned by someone else.  At the time I didn’t have money to purchase albums which were luxury items after all.  I did scrape up enough money to get the Jailbreak single (now just where is that?) but I lived with that tape  for a very long time.  But since then I’ve bought most of their albums, the Bonfire and Backtracks box sets and see them every time they roll into town.   And it all stems from that one little tape I made.  Sometimes you have to give a little in order to gain a lot.

But the industry does not think in those terms.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never received a freebie from a record company other than the occasional sampler.  (Even then a label sampler will contain the acts on the roster you’ve never heard of or wouldn't want to hear.)   Usually when something extra is provided, such as a bonus disc or DVD with an album, it will now be in the form of a special edition for which you have to pay extra.  Even worse is when the special edition comes out a discrete period of time after the album has been released and all the hard core fans have purchased it.  You’re then left with the decision of effectively having to buy the same item again in order to obtain the bonus material.   It’s even worse these days with the differing versions of anniversary recordings.  Take, for example, The Who’s magnificent Live At Leeds album.  I first purchased a cassette version of it in the pre CD era in its original 6 track incarnation.  Eventually the CD version was released and I got that.  Then came the 25^th Anniversary Edition in which the album was extended to a full length CD and I got that.  I drew the line when the 30^th anniversary 2 disc edition was released containing the entire show.  And as for the super deluxe edition containing the full Leeds show and the gig the following night in Hull, forget it.  Fortunately sanity has been restored and the Hull set is now available separately which I've since purchased.  But the bonus live disc that came in the Collector's Edition of Who's Next has not been released separately.  Given that I originally bought the album on vinyl, then CD and the then CD edition with the bonus tracks (effectively the forerunner to Disc 1 of the Collector's Edition), I figure I'm entitled to make a copy of the live disc from the Collector's Edition should I choose to do so.

And this is not a rant against The Who.  There are plenty of others out there.  The question remains, what other industry does this?  (I know the movie industry releases special edition DVDs, but usually this means the addition of documentaries and commentary tracks not wholesale changes to the basic project. The number of Director's Cuts of movies is really not that great.)  I don’t know about you, but if I’m being forced to buy an album for the second, third or fourth time in order to access new material which the label doesn’t deem fit to release separately, I tend to think in terms of duplication.

And this brings me back to the Dream Syndicate. Steve Wynn has authorised special editions of their albums, notably the expanded The Days Of Wine And Roses and the expanded version of their brilliant Live At Raji's album.  But the former, which had only a very limited initial CD release, now has all of the singles and the EP attached to it and The Complete Live At Raji's provides the entire show.  Thus in both cases there is now no scope to produce a third or fouth generation release of these albums.  But even then there has been the deliberate reissue of the stop gap, This Is Not The New Dream Syndicate Album...Live and the Medicine Show albums onto a single disc.

This brings me back to the statement Steve Wynn was asked to read.  Taken quite literally the prediction was ultimately proven to be false.  Home taping did not ruin the industry.  Indeed it’s the tape industry that’s now in trouble. ( Seen many blank cassettes for sale in shops these days?) And who knows, it was probably all those tape copies that were made of the show that mutated into bootlegs that probably convinced a record company that the show could be released on CD.

Is the internet killing the industry?  Steve Wynn certainly doesn't appear to think so.  Like many acts, you can go to his website to purchase a number of his albums that are difficult to obtain anywhere else.  Yet he also approves the uploading of audience tapes of Dream Syndicate and solo shows on the Archive.com live concert website.  (Indeed some of the shows come from his own tape archive.)  Obviously here is at least one act that doesn't think that the internet is a threat to his own livelihood.

Yet how did the recorded music industry respond to the internet?  Well it appears they took the same attitude as they did to home taping and it was only after they realised that a) they couldn’t ban it and b) suing the consumers who used it to download songs was not a good thing that they’ve embraced it.  But this slowness to act has come at a cost.  For starters, way too many of the superstar acts have realised that they can make much more money by selling live discs and even albums via the net, free of record company interference.   Even more importantly they have lost the means to control consumers by forcing them to buy albums.  In many ways we’ve now reverted back to the 1950s where the emphasis is now on individual songs.  But it is a new frontier, with consumers are now increasingly thinking in terms of favourite songs for their smartphones, iPods, iPods, etc.   In some ways the industry has got what it wanted – for consumers to treat music as something that is disposable – and for it to constantly purchase the same song repeatedly in the form of soundalike acts.  And if they educate consumers to delete tracks from their devices when they tire of it, they will eventually succeed in getting them to literally repurchase the same songs when they yearn for it again.

But are they proceeding along the right path? If one thinks about online streaming services, I’m not too sure, mainly because if have absolutely no interest in ever using them.  I look at it this way; just how much of the annual fee each subscriber pays actually gets back to the artists and is the service economically sustainable at current rates?  All I know is that the industry would not want to have me for a customer.  Consider this; so far this year I’ve played a total of 426 albums.  Assuming an average quantity of 10 songs per album (which I suspect understates my listening significantly) I’ve listened to 4,260 tracks.  If I’ve paid a $100 subscription for one streaming service for one year, that has already translated to an outlay of 0.023 cents per track which, of course, will halve by the end of the year assuming I maintain my current listening rate. So, just who will benefit from this, the artist or of the record company?  Clearly, its in the interests of the record industry to continue to purchase albums, but what incentives are they providing me other than the incentive to copy?
But there are two aspects about the whole home taping/downloading issue that one needs to be careful about.  One is the need to look after up and coming acts.  By this I don’t mean the new acts being foisted on the public by the record companies which I think is now being achieved exclusively though these so called reality TV programs such as The Voice and Idol…..this is a matter, I’ll expand upon next week.  What I refer to here are the acts like The Dream Syndicate in September 1982 as these are the acts that we’ll need to nurture and encourage if the music is to continue to develop.  Similar considerations apply to those acts who have consistently provided fine music over the years without ever hitting it big.  As one’s definition of who these acts are will invariably differ according to taste, I won’t single these out other than by noting that you know the sort of acts I’m thinking about.  These are the acts – and the real industry  -  whose products we should be purchasing.