Adam Cohen on music

Last week, while driving later at night, I caught part of an interview on Q with Adam Cohen, son of the legendary Leonard Cohen, talking about his father's influence on music and on Adam himself as a musician. Adam talked about music losing it's "cultural relevance", telling a story that when some thieves broke into his car, they didn't touch all the of the great music he had lying around on CD, but they took everything else they could grab. He said this was, in part, to music not being valued.

Adam has a point, but not because the thieves passed up his awesome CD collection. Music, like most types of media, is around and available for free (or almost free) more than ever in the age of the internet. Not only is copyrighted and legally released music pirated as soon as it's released, and made available in very easy to find ways, more and more artists have been releasing their music with little or no expectation of being compensated for what they do. Part of this is a need for a fan base. A band can put out their music on bandcamp or other service for free and people can come by and check it out with no expectation to buy it. This makes new fans quickly. But, is there an incentive to actually buy the music after sampling it for free?

In 2007, Radiohead caused a controversy by offering their album In Rainbows up on their website for "pay what you want". Fans could download the album then, if they wanted, send the band some money for the music. There was no expectation to pay for it though. The album was downloaded 1.2 million times. While Radiohead never released sales figures, they have said they did quite well with the strategy. Some critics say that Radiohead were cutting off their noses to spite their faces, offering up a critical and financial success of an album for basically nothing. This probably set the ball rolling for the free digital download we all enjoy today.

It's a hard road for any up and coming musician. You need people to consume your music, by buying it or by coming to a concert, but few people will take chances on an unknown quantity. Offering up music for free may get you heard, but it takes food out of your mouth.

Adam Cohen was right about music being less culturally relevant, in as much as we've begun to consider music not as something we need to pay for, but as something that we are deserved for free. In addition, the age of the album is slowly starting to disappear. Music is much more ephemeral, with artists riding more and more on a hot single rather than a hot album, sometimes to disappear after they're not the flavour of the month anymore. One can't fault the thieves for not stealing his TV on the Radio CDs, not because they didn't know who they were or know how awesome their music was. Rather, the thieves were interested in monetary value, not cultural value. Making money on music is a hard slog now, both as a musician and as a thief. No one will buy something that they can get for free, unless the artist is offering something of quality, and something that is well known. It's less a cultural issue than a changing musical financial landscape. Until there's a better model of how to market and sell music in a digital age, the CD, the album and the physicality of music will be a relic to all but music collectors and avid fans, like me and Adam.