Back to Kristi McGarity - Writing
Concert music and the politics of independent media
Kristi McGarity
To ensure the future survival of concert music, we as musicians and fans need to recognize the realities of the marketplace: we don't fit into the current business model of corporate media conglomerates, and while traditional institutional funding for art music is declining, individual niche markets for art music remain strong. Our future lies in nurturing and marketing to supportive niche communities like those that blossom around independent media everywhere: fan communities around bands, reader communities around writers, or political interest communities in the blogosphere. Niche marketing alone cannot singlehandedly support the educational infrastructure underlying art music. However, the value that niche communities place in art music is in part derived from the very independence art music has from the corporate media juggernaut. This value is something that we can market both to the niche communities and to society at large.
In the past, the marketing of concert music has often carried an implied cultural assumption of a "highbrow" status as compared to "lowbrow" popular music. It isn't always easy to classify "high art" and "low art," as the two terms mean such different things to different people. No objective, agreed-upon standard of "height" measurement exists in the real world. For some, the "high art" end of the spectrum is the concert music studied in universities, while "low" designation encompasses the vast majority of popular music. As popular music ages its way into history, though, it is becoming a growing part of the academic field of music history/musicology/ethnomusicology, and popular music studies is gaining importance as a field of its own. Some argue that "high art" is music that is presented in concert for its own artistic value, rather than music that we use to accompany activities and rituals-- but this is a fallacious distinction, because a concert is a ritual.
Others cite economic models as the critical distinction: "high" art music is supported by prestigious state and philanthropic institutions, and "low" popular music emerges from lucrative commercial entities. Though the section of the retail CD market labeled "popular music" sees much higher sales figures than the classical section, the bottom-line results for most individual artists aren't that different, especially in an industry where even popular artists with decent sales remain in perpetual debt to their record companies until they recoup all sorts of costs (to the point that 97% of major-label artists never see a single artist royalty check). The vast majority of the money in the recording industry comes in from a select few multiplatinum sellers, not the larger group of popular artists in general. It is also not entirely fair to contrast the prestige of art music's institutional funding with popular music's business-based paradigm, when year after year the institutional funding keeps getting reduced or in some cases cut out completely. University-based artists have to fight to get budget approval for essential concerts and theatrical productions every single year, and music schools and performing arts centers are increasingly hard-hit by staff layoffs as state support keeps shrinking. (This situation may have something to do with the fact that the state itself is increasingly controlled by large business interests via corporate money-- which is a topic for another essay.)
Still others propose that the "high/low" boundary between art music and popular music is disappearing entirely, naming numerous "crossover" artists as examples. Some concert composers do work with existing styles of popular music, and some popular artists do have roots in the contemporary avant-garde, but audiences and musicologists tend to put those artists in new categories of their own rather than declare the existing categories defunct. The artists themselves may or may not actively intend to blur "high/low" boundaries; in many cases these are just composers and songwriters using ideas taken from the world they live in to make their own statements about that world, which is something that composers and songwriters have always done.
The rift between art and popular music may be closing, not necessarily because anyone is deliberately closing it, but because new economic realities render it irrelevant. Increasing domination of the music industry by corporate media conglomerates is creating a new rift-- the rift between corporate pop and the teeming profusion of small niche markets inhabited by smaller and independent artists of all genres. For a growing segment of the music-listening population, "low" art is the music on the generic Clear Channel station and "high" art is any music that resists that kind of mass marketing. Concert composers and lesser-known or independent popular artists are increasingly living in roughly the same boat (or similar boats at the very least).
The corporate model
I am not interested in dismissing mass-marketed top-40 on musical grounds; most of us have our share of favorite contemporary pop songs that we find musically meaningful and inspiring. What is significant about the marketing of pop music today is how the massive media conglomerates producing and distributing it have capitalized on a lucrative gimmick that, along with enriching their shareholders and executives, has resulted in some fascinating side effects and unintended consequences for the entire music world.
Not coincidentally, the rise of the media conglomerates dramatically accelerated with the passage of the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed single corporate entities to grow larger and own more media outlets than ever before. It used to be possible for unsigned and unknown popular artists to be added to radio playlists just because the DJ liked the music, and it used to be possible for those same artists to negotiate distribution deals with independent distributors. Many of those independent radio stations and distributors have now been absorbed or driven out of business as the media giants seek to expand their spheres of influence. Corporations by nature have an interest in turning a profit quickly, and they have a tremendous advantage in being able to lobby the government for taxpayer-funded favors and giveaways. Media corporations are constantly on the lookout for the next artist who will sell the largest amount of various products in the shortest time (that way they can re-invest the profits in other financial entities, and also pay themselves handsomely. One example is Disney's CEO, who with executive pay and stock options pulls in $280,000-- not per year, per month, or per day, but per hour.)
Now that a tiny group of conglomerates controls the vast majority of music production and distribution channels, instead of having to bet on the next big thing they can eliminate the uncertainty by actually deciding for us who the next big thing will be. A large audience of music consumers are still aware of new music only to the extent that it appears on their usual radio station, so by controlling what is on that station it is possible to control what sells. Since more and more radio stations are owned by larger corporate entities, they no longer have the autonomy to decide what to play on their own.
Much of the work of deciding what will be played on the radio is accomplished through independent promoters working for the record-company arms of media conglomerates, literally selling chart positions and airplay in various cities. If they use illegal or unethical methods, the record companies are not legally responsible since they are not direct employees. I had some personal experience with this phenomenon in 1995 when a track I wrote and produced managed to work its way up the playlist at the largest alternative-format station in the Detroit area, even though I was an unsigned artist. This situation probably would not happen today; songs that are independently produced and distributed are rarely added to playlists on individual major-market pop-format stations anymore. (One of the most famous examples of a national radio hit by an unsigned artist was Lisa Loeb's song "Stay" on the soundtrack to the 1993 movie Reality Bites.) I began to get phone calls from independent promoters offering airplay in places like Kansas in exchange for a percentage of my future earnings. I dealt with the onslaught of phone calls by politely referring them to my lawyer, but an acquaintance at the radio station kept urging me to get a separate business 1-800 line because "you really don't want these people to know where you live."
Strangely enough, research in the mid-nineties proved that as radio stations consolidate their playlists to fewer and fewer songs, they gain more and more listeners. People want to know what they are going to hear. Of course, as downloadable music and portable personal audio-file players become increasingly ubiquitous, the media corporations fear that their entire business model is losing ground. Companies (major or independent) hoping to sell records are forced to devise new ways to get their message across to the public. Even mass-produced Clear Channel top-40 artists are trying to adapt to the new environment one way or another. As the father/manager of the currently ubiquitous Jessica and Ashlee Simpson told the New York Times, it is no longer sufficient just to worry about selling records; it is now important to sell the "brand" generated by the singer's physical attractiveness, personality and presence in other forms of media (presumably all the more so when the singers are your own daughters.)
The classical-music departments of major recording companies often work in much the same way, because it's the business model they know. They market the star quality of the stars, and they put more and more marketing dollars behind fewer and fewer artists. This isn't to say that they can't release good music. Clearly they do. What they lack, though, is a means of maintaining the infrastructure to support the larger world of concert music. Sony Classical can popularize today's teen violin prodigy, but Sony Classical can't train the next young violin prodigy or the orchestra to accompany her.
Recording artists, even those popular artists in the top tier of corporate radio play and sales, rarely enjoy longevity unless they are able to cultivate a relatively small but devoted community connected by knowledge of their music. Not even the record labels and media corporations can do that work for them.
The independent niche communities
While the Simpson family and various reality show participants discover that half an hour a week on national TV does wonders for your album sales, artists in smaller markets have to discover their own means of adaptation to the changing music marketplace. Because independent niche markets in concert music and independent niche markets in popular music share so many of the same economic circumstances, they can use many of the same audience-building techniques.
Two relatively new conceptions of music gaining importance in the small-market music world are particularly relevant to concert music: the idea of music as a subscription service instead of as a product for purchase, and the idea of music as part of a larger media art form in conjunction with dance, film, video, theater, lighting, animation, or any other combination of arts. The concept of music as a subscription service is gaining popularity with audiences for both popular and concert music, though obviously it remains to be seen exactly how the music industry will reorganize itself in response to the downloadable music phenomenon-- which itself grows rapidly as faster computers and internet connections make downloading more convenient, and as corporate radio becomes increasingly homogenized. Similarly, as faster computers make digital video, lighting, and animation easier and less expensive to produce, more popular and concert artists are venturing into various forms of live multimedia performance. For successful independent singer/songwriters, impressive shows and creative merchandising have always been crucial sources of income and exposure. Now they are becoming necessities for singer/songwriters, concert composers, and dance music producers alike.
In the future, the act of concertgoing itself may even shape-shift into a new form. After all, the ritual of reverent listening in a darkened hall was not always the venue for Classical-era literature; in its day it was party music. Being part of a quiet, formal audience is not everyone's favorite way to spend an evening. The formality of the ritual itself is often blamed for the decline in classical music audiences, but I'm not so sure that's a fair assessment. After all, some concert music fans like being part of a quiet, formal audience and some don't. Shrinking audiences for traditional classical concerts may not be a sign that classical music is dead so much as they are the natural result of a once-cohesive audience fragmenting into smaller markets.
Part of the reason music can be so tricky to market in the first place is the diversity of emotional and intellectual responses to listening and performance. Any given piece could be experienced in any number of ways. One person might experience a piece as a "will our hero achieve his goal?"-style narrative, with "our hero" being a musical theme on a journey through its musical setting, or with "our hero" being the performer himself triumphing over a technically demanding work. That same piece could be heard as a more abstract emotional landscape, or as a direct stimulus to a personal memory connected with that music in the listener's life. Still another listener might react to the piece in terms of its historical and cultural context, or the political context of the composer's life. Most of us react to a given piece in some combination of all of these ways and innumerable others. Simple consumer products can be marketed to everyone more or less in the same way, but music engenders nearly as many different reactions as there are listeners.
And it's no secret that independent fan communities can fill one of the roles previously monopolized by record companies, by acting as a filter to point members and the public toward interesting music. When virtually anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend can sell a home-produced CD in the market with the largest online music retailers, the net result is a lot of CDs and no good way to tell which ones you might actually like. Music-centered communities can pool their efforts in that regard, cooperatively sharing their favorite discoveries.
The media corporations, however, are getting wise to the potential of these new methods and venues for music. They are beginning to understand this proliferation of self-sustaining niche markets as a threat to their market dominance. Clear Channel has started buying performance spaces, even very small bars and clubs that might seem inconsequential to a company used to sponsoring events in arena theaters. They know if they can control those small venues and small markets, they can use them to showcase their own artists and shut out the present and future competition. Media corporations are vying for control of digital cable, satellite radio, and (believe it or not) links and content moving over their broadband internet connections. Their goal is total dominance in every media market, large or small, and in many cases the U.S. government is helping them get there by offering unprecedented handouts and favors. This is what independent niche artists are up against.
The good news is that despite the media conglomerates' insatiable appetite for absorbing innovative means of production as they come along, independent communities keep adapting, finding new and creative ways to support the objects of their collective affection. We've all witnessed favorite underground artists lose their "cool factor" through overexposure in the corporate media. The corporate media by their very nature are doomed to overexpose anyone who actually gains monetary success through their paradigm. In the new internet-enabled world of independent marketing, where music publicity without major-label support is a viable proposition, independent artists in all genres are finding ways to harness and market this "cool factor." I believe that independent composers and musicians can successfully build audiences by tapping into the communities (face-to-face and on-line) that are growing around niche markets within the world of popular music.
The political blogosphere is a good example of a model adaptation: tired of homogenized corporate news, citizens took matters into their own hands, forming an interconnected web of niche communities who define themselves by common interests. In building these communities they're really doing more than just supporting their favorite causes. They're relating their stories, making each other laugh, poking fun at each other's foibles, arguing, sharing their joy when life goes well, and helping each other out when life gets rough, and the community is a major part of what keeps them coming back. Only a handful of the proprietors of these websites can actually make a living solely through selling advertising on the sites, but plenty of them make enough money to support the cost of running the site, and that's worth something. The natural human tendency to form communities based on shared values is a powerful tool for artists and arts organizations working in independent media, and we ignore it at our peril.
The broader challenge
The trouble for niche artists working in concert music is the tremendous capital investment necessary for many concert music genres, which in our economy require institutional support for mere survival. Were an opera company to fund itself entirely through ticket sales, the ticket prices would be prohibitive to say the least. I remember writing an essay once in high school in which I argued, with a kind of 14-year-old baby-Rand naiveté, that institutional support for the arts should be unnecessary because people can just buy whatever music they like. If there is money to be made producing operas, then some enterprising corporation will produce operas-- that's the beauty of the free market! If opera companies can't attract enough fans to survive, maybe they don't need to survive after all. Things change; it's the way of the world.
It's not an irrelevant argument, and in one form or another it's an argument that a lot of people make these days. But what I didn't fully realize at age 14 was that the American "free market" as it exists today is not actually free, corporations cheat, and business interests are more than happy to enrich themselves by securing government's favors by any means. The musical genres with loyal but small audiences lose access to corporate-controlled major media outlets-- whether the genres themselves be symphonic, operatic, or underground hip-hop. It is the larger concert organizations like symphonies and opera companies whose existence is threatened, both because of their relatively high-budget productions and because of the educational infrastructure needed to train each new generation of performers. Forging individual connections to music through niche marketing and community building, while essential, has not been enough to sustain these larger artistic productions.
Arts organizations currently rely on a kind of selective marketing to individual and corporate donors, philanthropic organizations, and politicians. They have a strong incentive to portray concert music as an institution with inherent social, educational, and cultural value. These efforts are predicated on the assumption that concert music is inherently worthy of support and good for society, more so than "commercial" popular music (which can presumably take care of itself). Convincing wealthy and influential people that concert music is a "high art" deserving of special status is really just another form of niche marketing to a select group. In return for donations, donor businesses get advertising space and access to a specific target audience. Donating to the arts also confers an air of civic responsibility on businesses and non-profit philanthropists alike.
But why does support for the arts generate this image of responsible citizenship, as opposed to supporting the neighbor's garage band or the local bowling club? Concert music is widely promoted as beneficial to society, but what exactly are those benefits? Music can preserve cultural heritage and tradition, it has a natural link with education, and it can both reaffirm cultural identity and communicate across dividing lines. Diversity of musical expression is a symbol of expressive freedom in a society that values such freedoms. None of these are tangible benefits to the marketing-driven corporate media, but they are valuable to a critical mass of audiences. Insofar as sponsorship for the arts sometimes comes from corporate entities, artists can't always avoid appealing to corporations. Nevertheless, the qualities of concert music that make it most valuable to society are also the very qualities that might not exist if it had always been produced by Clear Channel.
It becomes important, then, not just to market independent music to its various audiences but also to promote the idea of art as a social need. In doing so, it's not especially helpful to merely stress the freedom from corporate control in the independent arts media, though that freedom may in itself be an attractive quality to certain politically conscious audiences. It's more important to highlight the specific things art can do because of that freedom that would not be possible otherwise.
Independent film and theatre, for example, can tell compelling stories without immediately visible mass-marketing potential, stories that would be laughed out of the first pitch meeting at a major corporate studio. Stories that draw smaller audiences can show us other voices and other points of view. The cumulative effect of all of those audiences seeing through someone else's eyes can inspire positive social change just as surely as all the activist messages and statistics on the internet. Music has a part to play in all this, and not only as underscore to film and theater. Composers can offer audiences the opportunity to see the world through a different perspective through text setting, musical narrative, musical quotations, program notes, dedications, or even more abstract emotional connections, as in 20th-century concert works by composers as diverse as Benjamin Britten, Arnold Schoenberg, John Corigliano, Frederic Rzewski, John Adams, Aaron Jay Kernis, Anthony Davis, and Luigi Nono. Explorations of voice and perspective, both overtly "political" and less so, are central to the work of many electroacoustic composers, running the gamut from pioneers like Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen to contemporary composers Laurie Anderson, Trevor Wishart, Paul Lansky, Robert Iolini, and Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), just to name a few.
Another of the most important societal benefits of concert music is its hand-in-hand connection with education. I'm not referring to some misguided attempt to save classical music through forced indoctrination ("If only kids were educated, then they'd love classical music!") but rather a kind of interdependent cycle where early participation in music stimulates interest in music performance, which in turn stimulates the music education establishment to train the next generation of musicians. The music involved could be any genre, though the written tradition of concert music is a natural fit with education, as classical music can be taught to the broadest range of instrumentalists. Even jazz and popular music are notated, though sometimes in different forms. And there is intrinsic value in learning to read and play music, if only because no other activity requires so many senses and mental pathways to operate at once: the student must simultaneously judge spatial relations and mathematical proportions, comprehend foreign terms and symbols, react to visual and aural stimuli, and control both small and large muscle groups-- all in real time with no opportunity to stop and think.
The salient point is not that "high" art music is "high" because it requires a specialized education to be understood and appreciated; I don't believe it necessarily does. Music requires education, though, because most of us rely on education or mentoring in order to actively participate. A rare few have the innate talent and drive to teach themselves, but virtually all musicians in all genres first learned to play with the help of teachers, experienced colleagues, or friends-- and a huge number were introduced to music by participating in groups such as bands, orchestras, and choirs.
It sounds like a circular argument: we must keep classical music alive because it's educational; we must keep music education alive because it teaches appreciation of classical music. The reality, of course, is not that simple. Classical music education and its support network survives in America, beaten but not defeated, in schools and colleges, community music schools, and local music centers-- yet even with wonderful teachers, good equipment, and every advantage, music education doesn't necessarily guarantee future listening audiences. I am reminded of author Sarah Vowell's assertion that she had the best classical music education in the world and that's exactly why she can no longer stand classical music. Students who participate firsthand in music performance either grow to enjoy it (or at least enjoy being good at it), resist it, or remain indifferent. The great challenge of teaching is sparking enthusiasm in the indifferent ones-- a form of marketing in itself, especially in a world where so many forms of media and entertainment compete for people's attention. Music education reveals music to be a unique and integral part of the cultural landscape, not a mere widget for purchase and consumption, and it promotes awareness of music beyond the corporate paradigm.
Community-building, innovative marketing and merchandising, connecting art to politics and life-- all of these efforts are part of sustaining concert music as a viable independent medium, but they by themselves they will not sustain the budgets and the educational infrastructure underlying the concert-music tradition in cases where institutional funding declines or disappears. For that we do need small groups of steadfastly dedicated fans, but we also need the performance/education cycle. Maintaining that cycle requires marketing the intellectual skills and individual expression inherent in learning music, not just consuming it. These are skills that can translate to all genres and all fields of human endeavor. It's not about forcing children to play instruments just to artificially bolster a dying art form, which wouldn't succeed anyway. Nor do I believe that music teachers merely keep a dying art limping along by preparing more people to be music teachers in some kind of endless feedback loop. That's not what it's all about. It's about maintaining another viable channel for human thought and expression free from the confines of corporate-owned media, for us and for future generations.
Perhaps even more importantly, participating in music performance sparks a crucial discovery: what you can't do at first, you can eventually accomplish with the right kind of effort. This discovery helps us realize on a larger scale, as John Cage once wrote, "the impossible is not impossible." In writing his famously difficult etudes, Cage was hoping that "were a musician to give the examples in public of doing the impossible that it would inspire someone who was struck by that performance to change the world, to improve it." Even on those days when it seems as if our independent media are all destined to collapse into bankruptcy, our own experience tells us to keep trying. If our work has an audience, however small, our own experience tells us we can find a way to make it sustainable. In the end, perhaps some of the best advertisements for the future of concert music will be ourselves and our students, changed for the better, navigating the world with new skills and a new sense of the possible, free to work in whatever expressive media we choose because all of us-- the teachers, performers, parents, the niche communities, and the larger community-- were there and we did our job.