A favour from Neil Finn
By Russell Brown,
Finn’s sledging may prompt the PM to see the problems in our music industry
[Music]
There’s still one music award where the Prime Minister is welcome as the star turn. And she put in the effort to be there at the Auckland Town Hall to hand out the 2007 APRA Silver Scroll. It was a close-run thing; most of the crowd was a few drinks down before she even got to her plane in Wellington.
But she may end up thanking Neil Finn for his comments (made last year but not printed until May in Real Groove magazine) that he was “sickened … to see Helen Clark getting up at the music awards and taking the bows”.
Finn’s follow-up column for the New Zealand Herald veered towards the mean-spirited (he bagged Clark for leaving the Music Awards before the after-party, when she had actually spent an hour chatting to kids and having her photo taken before the show). But it did emphasise that Labour, and Clark in particular, should be wary of treating the music industry as a paid political advertisement.
For some time, people around Clark have been trying to steer her away from giving The Speech: an increasingly threadbare string of Kiwi Music slogans that barely varies from year to year. Nearly a decade on, things have changed. Local music sales are slipping, and there is genuine concern in the industry that parts of the cultural effort may not be money well spent.
Part of the problem is the emphasis on radio. The innovative schemes developed by NZ On Air to get more New Zealand music on air were so effective that NZ On Air became the default industry funding body. The results really were splendid for a while. Indeed, the 20 percent share of local repertoire on radio is still resilient.
“For the cost of a music video, it’s possible to make an album’s worth of cheap, inventive clips. TV might turn up its nose, but every kid with a MySpace page wouldn’t”
But guess what? Music played on the radio increasingly isn’t the music people buy. The record companies know this: it has become impossible to ignore since the sales charts were revamped this year, including digital downloads for the first time and de-emphasising radioplay.
Radio’s role in the discovery of music has become far less important, prompting some fairly stern negotiation over rights fees (which are calculated as a percentage of advertising income) between RIANZ and commercial radio. Part of the assumption has always been that radio functions as an ad for new music. If it’s not doing that, then radio is just using music, for cheap.
So where does music get discovered these days? Online retail is one place. iTunes has been as important to Fat Freddy’s Drop as a marketing vehicle as for sales revenue, especially in the US. Back home, the biggest seller of singles is Vodafone. Vodafone returns this year as the naming sponsor of the Music Awards, much to the relief of RIANZ. If it first got behind the awards as a good branding opportunity, Vodafone returns as a genuine industry stakeholder.
TV still sells music, but even there, things are changing. For even the modest cost of a single music video for TV (say, $5,000 from NZ On Air and $2,500 from the record company), it would be possible to make an album’s worth of cheap, inventive clips. TV might turn up its nose, but every kid with a MySpace page wouldn’t.
Beyond that, music industry funding policy basically follows Trade and Enterprise guidelines, with the Music Industry Commission accounting for the single biggest chunk. That policy is approaching its turn for review, and it deserves scrutiny. To the extent that their overseas owners allow, the local branches of the major music companies are making genuine efforts to change their businesses in line with emerging Internet-age realities. It would be only fair for policy-makers to ask where they, too, could change.
And here’s the pay-off: when Helen Clark started making The Speech in Opposition, a good part of its power came from the fact that it charted a forward course. With each successive year, it has become less about where we’re going and more about where we’re at—even when, strictly speaking, we’re not really there. If Clark can get up next time and talk about the future, she just might have a good story again.
(A disclosure: the author has written a discussion paper on related issues for NZ On Air.)
Comments
Jason Kemp
Funding bodies like NZOAir just need to follow the money and the people to any number of social media sites.
From reading the discussion paper referred to I understand this means a change to their charter - which should happen ASAP.
Top research (BTW) from Russell & Andrew
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