What the music industry can learn from TV

Earlier this week the Daily Beast published an article about the contrast in fortunes between the TV and music industries, and how one can learn from the other in five ways. They are:

1.    Target adults, not kids.
“HBO realized that the dumbing down of network TV left a large group of consumers under-served, namely sophisticated grown-ups—and these were the same people with the most disposable income to spend on entertainment.”

2.    Embrace complexity.
“Complexity appeals to the sophisticated grown-ups mentioned above. But also, more complex content inspires repeated listenings and greater long-term loyalty. The subscription TV networks have figured this out. Meanwhile the music industry is hoping that simple songs … will solve their problems. They won’t.”

3. Improve the technology.
“Television has gone hi-tech with big screens, crystal clear pictures, and concert hall audio. Music is the only branch of the entertainment world to embrace progressively inferior technologies. Movie theaters have upgraded their experience. Video games have achieved unprecedented standards of visual quality, far beyond what the inventors of Pong and Pac-Man ever dreamed of. But music devices sound worse than they did a half-century ago.”

4. Resist tired formulas.
“Every one of the old shows suffered from the same obvious problem: you could predict how the story would end even before it started, so why watch at all? But the beauty of the smart new TV shows is that you still aren’t sure how it ended. Record labels need to emulate the boldness with which the leading pay TV networks have sabotaged genre recipes.”

5. Invest in talent and quality.
“The reality TV model, embraced by broadcast networks, is built on the radical view that you don’t need trained actors or high-priced talent. You can take Snooki off the streets of New Jersey and turn her into a celebrity star. HBO and its peers have adopted the opposite approach. HBO spent $18 million to get Martin Scorsese behind the pilot of Boardwalk Empire. When Netflix decided to back House of Cards, they were willing to pay top dollar for Kevin Spacey—Snooki wasn’t good enough. The music industry is still stuck in the old model. They know that the Snooki path to celebrity is the model to follow, because the public doesn’t really care about musicianship and those tired traditional metrics of talent.”

The article certainly provoked debate in the comments section, although much of it seemed to revolve around whether vinyl sounds better than a digital recording. The other big discussion point was who buys music and how important is complexity in compelling that audience to pay?

The first thing to acknowledge is that people appreciate music and TV shows in different ways. A track might be the pick me up that someone turns to now and again, or something to set the mood while they do something else. And even then, there’s no guarantee that that track will be purchased. It could either be enjoyed on the radio, on YouTube or downloaded illegally. In contrast, a TV series is a major commitment of time, an immersive experience that people like to lose themselves in – with no distractions and few compromises in quality. Put simply, it demands more attention than a song or album.

Everyone has a favourite TV drama. Each is likely to be an international phenomenon. Count them: The Sopranos, 24, Lost, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black and many more. Some, like House of Cards, are guaranteed winners because they are based on our own viewing habits – retailers such as Amazon and Netflix harnessing big data to transform themselves into TV production companies.

No series has raised the bar higher than True Detective in recent years. Obsessing over those first six episodes, pondering them as they took hold of me, demonstrated how far TV drama has come. The scale of ambition. The high concept and depth of emotion. Moments of exhilarating magic like the first appearance of “the monster” Reggie LeDoux or to the one-take shot of Matthew McConaughey’s undercover heist gone wrong. TV hasn’t felt that unsettling and electrifying since Twin Peaks or possibly The X-Files. The formula is easier to spot these days: intricately layered storytelling, deep characterisation, Hollywood-quality direction and production, a sprinkle of A-list talent and a touch of mystery have combined to blur the lines between the box and the cinema. We live in these must-see series on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, freed from the generic and conventional. Open to the elliptical and idiosyncratic. Even the foreign.

Quality at our own convenience is another powerful part of the sales pitch. We need never miss a thing because this is the age of series catch-up and on-demand viewing. Streaming HD-quality video on a giant screen as we put our feet up in the lounge. That’s where we tend to do most of our watching in the UK – 98.5% in fact, according to this Thinkbox survey. Is it any surprise that people are willing to pay for access to a Netflix, Now TV or Lovefilm in addition to their TV licence and/or Sky subscription? In the US, “TV trumps films” on these services, while box office takings are heading south. This serialised entertainment fits into our lives like never before and shrewd investment in talent – from screenwriting to casting – has helped to heighten our appreciation.

So where does this leave the music industry? If executives have learned anything by now, it should be that one size does not fit all. Some people will value unlimited access to a bank of assorted music like Spotify – on any device, anywhere – while others might also appreciate lavishly packaged box sets with liner notes and carefully curated recommendations each month. Across the board, they need to restore respect for the art form and tackle head on this notion of music being a disposable product. The volume of mediocrity and homogenised noise isn't helping the situation.

The way to run a profitable business, one with longevity, is to make something distinct that people want and find very hard to refuse. Using the TV analogy, that could mean raising the quality of releases, both in terms of the music and its reproduction. Neil Young is determined to revolutionise music listening on the go with his Pono Player, although many commentators predict that his efforts will fall on deaf ears. Then there’s the content itself: St Vincent, in a recent interview with The Wire, implied that songwriting could save the industry because it’s an alchemic skill that no auto-tune-like machine can replicate. Not yet anyway. The fact remains: pop music could really do with more craft-oriented stars such as Michael Jackson, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Whether their absence is down to poor label management or a lack of musicianship and songwriting ability at grassroots level is too contentious a debate to get into here. In short, we need more standard bearers of depth and skill in the limelight.

In terms of a target customer, it’s a mistake to only focus on adults. We all like some form of music: it is still an affirmation of identity to be able to purchase or cue up your own choice, especially if you’re a young kid growing up. The industry needs to stoke the fires of the youth and appeal to their appetite for the new. In time, they may well come to appreciate the value of music making enough to want to pay for it. It’s a hassle to find torrent sites and click through endless windows of ads. Build the right ecosystem – one that’s easy to use, encourages discovery and is stocked with the music that sounds like it’s fresh from the studio – and it will be very hard to say no if the price point is right for both artist and fan. Getting younger generations to invest time and money in an album will be a lot tougher though.

The listening public is often accused of dumbing down, gravitating towards the lowest common denominator or having dwindling attention spans. I have more faith in human endeavour, that need to make something honest and meaningful that speaks to others. Let’s hope that more stars with substance such as Jessie Ware, James Blake, King Krule, FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, Banks and Sampha – even divisive figures such as Kanye West and Lana del Rey – will emerge to give us all something to hum along to and pick over for more than a minute. 

Let's get…

Adolescence, mental health, ageing and death. Artists and performers have mined these often complex and upsetting subjects for hundreds of years but has there ever been a collective shot for the jugular quite like Sick!?

This arts festival, taking place in Brighton from February until the end of March, has caught the eye because it treads a more holistic path than the one you and I are more likely to encounter. There's entertainment on offer, of course. But there's oodles of enlightenment too. Sick! hopes to challenge perceptions, prompt reflection and encourage debate by drawing on a powerful alliance of artists, scientists and medical experts. A fusion of the factual and the emotional, if you like.

Clive Parkinson, Director of Arts Health at Manchester Metropolitan University, gives a great example of this in his festival introductory essay, Present Tense: Confronting Mortality. "Whilst the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath urges clinicians to avoid the 'twin traps of over treatment and therapeutic nihilism', it also stresses that 'there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug'."

He then goes on ask, "Can artists provide insights into cultural, social and political attitudes towards death and dying?" The example given is a quote from then terminally ill playwright Dennis Potter, a wake up call to live in present and, through the arts, attain some kind of wellbeing. "We're the one animal that knows were going to die, and yet we carry on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs … behaving as though there's eternity in a sense. We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense. You know I can celebrate life. Below my window … the blossom is out in full now. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom, but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying, 'Oh that's nice blossom,' looking at it through the window when I'm writing. I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The fact is that if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy, can you celebrate it!"

There is a temptation to view this festival as an endorsement of arts therapy. Some of you may have seen last year's Souzou exhibition in London, a collection of art made by residents of specialist care institutions in Japan, each diagnosed with a cognitive, behavioural or developmental disorder or mental illness. In Japan this 'Outsider Art' has been closely aligned with public health and social welfare for many years, a means for residents to not only produce work for the sake of creation alone, but also to learn to accept the world and their place in it.

But that's not the main point with Sick! as co-directors Tim Harrison and Helen Medland explained to the Argus: "We don’t claim to be providing a cure. We want to raise awareness of these issues. Perhaps through being really open about it, we can help to reduce the stigma that still exists. Even if we can’t solve a problem, sometimes just acknowledging that the issue exists is an important first step. Maybe some of the works and debates in the programme will give others, the friends and families of people with mental illness, some new understanding of those experiences that the people they know are going through."

The directors hope that those coming to the festival will see something that encourages them to talk more freely about difficult 'life topics'  and empathise more deeply with outsiders; the afflicted, the troubled and the lost. To do that they've called on a wonderful mix of characters: the amusingly confessional (Ruby Wax on depression and how we sabotage our own sanity); the balletically poignant (dancer Koen de Preter's performance with a partner 58 years older than him); the deliciously playful (Hart and Darton's cafe-cum-surgery); and the achingly beautiful (Frank Alva Buecheler & Neil Hannon's In May – a series of scored letters from a dying father to his son).

Throw in a handful of debates featuring the contributions of more than 25 experts in their respective fields, and film oddities such as Halley – Sebastian Hoffman's surreal take of one walking dead man's will to live – and you have a platter of challenging, often confrontational work that will have you tingling with life in no time. No wonder Brighton & Hove City Council has cited the festival as part of its public health strategy.

Adolescence has been a topic of particular interest to me. How many of us feel the pressure to act our age, conforming to a certain checklist of life milestones? Things you should be or do by a certain age… As a young boy I always felt in a hurry to grow up. Obsessed with academic achievement and desperate be a success. So I kept my head down and ploughed on through. But at what cost? Last night I went to Gob Squad's Before Your Very Eyes, looking for a few answers. This was the eagerly anticipated last part of the CAMPO trilogy of theatre works with children, made for an adult audience. The first part was Josse De Pauw’s üBUNG, followed by Tim Etchells’ That Night Follows Day. 

Gob Squad are a collective of UK and German artists "exploring the point where theatre meets art, media and real life." In this case, society's obsession with youth and ageing. Our viewfinder to this self-conscious world is a Big Brother-like fish tank containing seven kids, able to be seen yet unable to see who's watching them. Protected, yet exposed. This was the first time that Gob Squad have not appeared on stage themselves, instead directing.

The 75-minute performance – their last after three years of touring across the world – mixed on-stage interaction and video footage, not to mention a side-splitting dose of comedy dancing to Queen's Don't Stop Me Now, among other more introspective songs. One minute a child was fantasising about the adult things they would be able to do (smoke, dress up, have sex, sleep when they want), the next they would be confronted by their younger selves and cringing at how stupid or loser-like they used to be. Why is a rubber so important to a child? Then, as their lives hurtled into the future, we were greeted by the 45-year-old versions of these kids – fat, single, socially awkward … or just plain average, prompting the question, "Did things not turn out as you expected?" To which someone would ponder what might have been: "I could have… [insert dream here]."

Life also imitated art. Gob Squad had been working with these kids for about five years and some of the footage we saw from their early days was actually taken from their auditions, for example Ramses' confession about the love letter from his sweetheart. If looks could kill… The structure has remained the same yet the content has evolved as the kids have grown up. Apparently 95% of the show was their improvisation according to performance coach Pascale Petralia. The impressions of adulthood they presented us with are their own – their parents, other adults they interviewed – not those of Gob Squad.

As one lady mentioned in the QnA afterwards, the performance was extraordinary in how it managed to provoke a range of emotions. The joy of being young, reckless and devoid of any responsibility. Years later, this gives way to pangs of disappointment as the promise of youth dissipates and the mind clings to opportunities missed rather than wisdom gained. I sat there towards the end of the performance thinking: "If child me could have a talk with my older self, what would I say?

Professor Jonathan Green, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Manchester, called the show "a really special, boundary-breaking piece of work". Alluding to the notion of our past being another country, he acknowledged the complexity of childhood experience – that kids are not merely concerned with the trivial stuff we think they obsess about – and suggested that "there is a need to forget and a need to remember". In other words, forgetting is necessary in order for us to grow and move forwards. "If we can live with ourselves in the past, there we're going to be a lot more comfortable with ourselves in the present." 

Robert, one of the most charismatic performers, joined us for the QnA, sporting a onesie and a very matter-of-fact manner that belied his baby face. When asked about whether he worries about getting old and dying, he simply replied: " Every life has good and bad things. It's up to us to make the best of it." And then he went back on himself, as if speaking for the rest of us when he closed the night by saying: "If I was reborn, I think I'd have another childhood."

And how did I feel after a profound night of big questions? I opened up my pad and scribbled the following words: "No expectations. No regrets."

Sick! Festival runs until 29 March. visit www.sickfestival.com to see what's on and book your tickets. 

PS If you're interested in open discussions about the taboo subject of mental health, then please pick up a copy of Manchester-based mind culture magazine Nous. Non-profit, heartfelt.