Friday Music Link, here on a Monday
The interesting thing to me about this fiasco is not so much the sight of Charlie Brooker desperately trying to get the broomsticks to stop marching, but the actual video itself. In particular, the gentleman who pokes his head in at about the half way and starts rapping.
This guy is clearly not a schoolfriend or musical acquaintance of Rebecca Black. He's someone who has been hired to appear in the video along with the rest of the audiovisual production team, on the basis of a presumed wage paid - he is quite literally a journeyman rapper[1]. The music industry fascinates me; have a look at that bloke driving a car along talking in verse about his pretend friend the thirteen-year-old and consider that somebody booked him. Somebody in all probability confirmed his availability on the day. He then sent an invoice which somebody had to process, pay and then file. Somebody does his tax return.
When you consider that the whole number apparently cost Ms Black's parents no more than $2000 plus sales tax, which has to pay for the opportunity cost of the recording studio, the person who wrote the backing track, the recording engineer, cameras and video edit suites plus someone to run them, and obviously a fairly substantial profit, it really suggests that there's been a revolution in these things. About ten years ago I managed to rent my car out to a video production company (to represent the car of a character who was portrayed as a halfwit; I was not too offended) and got £500 a day for it - this absurd sum was regarded as reasonable back in the days when video production was such an amazingly expensive business that anyone doing it was literally awash with money. Productivity miracles, how are ya, and I suspect that compared to the video production industry, print journalists don't know they're born.
In general though, it's an occasional theme of this blog that the media industry is an industry (something regularly forgotten by government departments of trade and of education, who really seem to think that only science graduates make products that can be exported) and this is a good example. Next time you're watching a music video, remember that this is a manufactured object. The people bouncing up and down are not having a party; they are hourly-paid workers employed to simulate having a party. The beer cans they are rhythmically waving have been sourced, procured and brought to the production facility and it will be someone's job to clear them up once the shoot is over. The open-topped sports car has been hired by the hour in order to drive back and forth in front of a camera, as the man at the wheel pretends to sing. All of this stuff produces an item that thousands of consumers are prepared to pay hard cash for, and although it frankly seems a little ridiculous, future generations may find it harder to understand that we used to dig coal.
Envoi, and footnote [1]: I find myself wanting to write a country and western ballad about this uniquely American character, wandering from town to town with dust on his sneakers, living off his wits and rapping for his room and board. Someone with a little more talent and empathy, like Johnny Cash perhaps, could really have moved you to your soul with his evocation of the life of Pato Wilson, scraping his way through a hard MidWestern life, extemporising couplets about someone's mother and asking what's up for ten bucks, room and board. Until one day, he could rap no more, but his ghost still haunts the road, moaning "One time, yo", to the stars and telegraph wires ... (actually, of course he turns out to be the local studio owner who ran the show, but go with me here).
Update: thanks very much Alex, comments now fixed I hope.
You need to remove the broken tag (a href=" br, but I've removed the anglebrackets so it goes through the comments box) at the end of the footnotes to get your comments back.
ReplyDeleteOnce you've done that, everyone else will see the clever point I'm about to make, which is that the song you're describing at the finish of the plot has been done and is actually Eric B. and Rakim's "Paid In Full".
And here I thought I was the only one who had even noticed the rapper fellow, let alone found his presence jarring enough to provoke meditation on the music industry.
ReplyDeleteAs to the costs of the video, your ruminations would be a lot more interesting if I didn't very strongly suspect that the production company retained some very interesting rights to the final product.
"Cheap vanity press" is a good line when one is taking potshots from one's fortified Class Warfare bunker, but that is so not how things work in LA.
Great post. Aside, of course, from being entirely founded on an assertion acknowledged to be untrue in the footnote, namely that the rapper is someone other than the CEO of the production company.
ReplyDeleteStill, wonderful wannabe-Freakonomics observations. You wouldn't want to let them go to waste.
RobotSlave - your strong suspicion is apparently justified per the link in the footnote, albeit that I can't bring myself to believe that a payday bonanza from a cyberbullying viral explosion was part of the business model. Or for that matter any royalties at all - I mean ffs, look at the bloody thing.
ReplyDeletedd, you're right, they're probably not relying on revenues that come from leveraging /b/, but on the other hand, someone had to post that first Facebook embed.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't look to me like ARK is trying to muscle in on the royalties end of the music-biz food-chain; they seem to be looking for a few lawyer-bites from the roast while it's still in the pantry, rather than try to elbow their way to the table for the feast proper.
And as to the 'bloody thing'-ness of the product, well, it's at least good enough(*) to get people past the 1-minute mark, and to the point of jeering and exclaiming, which is more than can be said for the vast majority of the unholy foaming surf of demo material that beats against the base of the Real Record Company cliffs.
* I think in this particular case the good-enoughness is due the "audio production", which in the current pop world means the actual composing and playing/programming of the music, in addition to the studio knob-twiddling. I remember having exactly the same "haha this sucks and I listened to the whole thing" reaction the first time I heard Baby One More Time, but then I had the dubious privilege of hearing it before it was stuffed ass-first into the commercial radio meat grinder; with Friday, the whole internet** got the raw product without the fait-accompli hit-ness conveyed by the very medium of commercial radio/tv.
** or at least the first, jeering audience-cluster... if we could refer to this in the future as the b-wave***, it would save a lot of explanatory boilerplate.
*** it just looks a lot classier without the slashes.
Raymond Williams said once that the current generation in the developed world - meaning 'Baby Boomers' I guess, people born 1945-55 - were the first people ever to spend more time watching drama than preparing food. And then there was the Internet. Weird little world we've got here.
ReplyDeleteI'm fairly certain this is no longer true for me. I cook more than I watch drama.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely not true for me. Who has the time to watch TV.
ReplyDeleteYou realise there's a glut of both music production studios and video production outfits, particularly in the US? Its like any industry where people are chasing a dream, most people work for what is essentially free. So yeah, part of this is the astonishing improvement in video equipment, but that's not the whole story.
I wouldn't be surprised if the 'rapper' wasn't a failed rapper, who decided to become a record company svengali and failed at that also (but still had to pay off capital costs).
Costs at the higher end don't seem to have declined that much. And the last time I saw a TV show being shot it still had an astonishing number of production staff working on it.
I think broadcast TV is still pretty well-staffed (although much less than it used to be and news TV has very definitely been hollowed out). But further down the food chain, there's definitely been a quantitative change - there's just no way that people filming a cheapo series of TEFL DVD films would pay £500 a day to rent a quirky prop any more.
ReplyDeleteI know a bit about the proliferation of minor studios, having rented a few and owned part of one once - I'm just amazed how much the cost has come down. "Friday" was put together, including video, for less than the cost of 20 hours at a decent quality rehearsal studio (which is presumably the bare bones minimum cost of a soundproof space, albeit that I suppose I'm thinking of central London real estate rather than Bogarse Suburb, USA)
TBH I'm not sure it's true for me any more - all we seem to watch at the moment is the Crystal Maze on Challenge (they're up to the Ed Tudor-Pole years now, unfortunately). But if you look at the viewing figures for soaps and Casualty and Lark Rise, and Serious Drama like South Riding or The Devil's Whore, and shlock like Outsiders or The Event, and DVD rentals and people actually going out to the pictures (people do still do this, apparently)... Divide that by 30 million evening meals per day (who cooks lunch?) and I'm not at all sure you're below 1.0 overall.
ReplyDeleteper BARB the average British person (I think this includes kids) spends 28 hours and 49 minutes watching TV a week. If we say that half of that is news and half of it is (broadly construed to include sitcoms etc) drama, and add in a bit for DVDs, cinema and theatre, then I think Phil's factoid goes through. Unless you count tea and coffee as food maybe.
ReplyDeletebtw, my calculation above is tonto - "20 hours" implies a cost of sixty quid an hour for Central London rehearsal space, and even the most absurdly overpriced is more like £15.
ReplyDeleteGoogling around, recording studios are cheaper than I remember them being; Ms Black's parents' $2000 would have bought two and a half days in a pretty decent looking studio or five days in a reasonable one (or, admittedly, about a minute in a real top-end place). If everyone involved knew what they were doing (big ask), and you could get the song done in two days at "Ignition Studios" and the video done with one camera and three hours' editing at "Bluecat Productions" (who would also write the thing for a hundred quid!), then I can sort of see how you could bring a British "Friday" in on budget.
which in the current pop world means the actual composing and playing/programming of the music
ReplyDeleteRobotSlave raises a v interesting point here - it does, doesn't it, and it really didn't used to? I suppose that part of this is that it's really absurdly technologically easy to compose some kinds of music these days - I am not going to embarrass you all with the detritus of my "online music community" account, but suffice to say that anyone with a mobile phone and an hour to spare can pretty easily put together something that would have been considered state of the art dance music in 1990.
Here is what someone in the slate comments said:
ReplyDeleteRachel Sapyta
My 12-year old auditioned for, and was offered a contract with ARK about 3 months ago. ARK is based in LA, we live in TX. Her contract required that we pay $4K as an off-set for the cost of making the video. There were kids who auditioned who were not required to pay anything, but I got the feeling that they were ones who lived in LA.
First, she would HAVE TO WRITE HER OWN SONG (this was one of my big issues with all of this). In fact, immediately after her Skype audition, she was told to start thinking about the song that she would write while they determined the level of participation she would be required to put in.
For our $4K investment, she would be flown out to LA, have x number of session with their vocal coach. Would be styled. They would record the song and the video and would promote it.
I actually felt that $4K was not a bad investment for this. However, while my daughter is a trained dancer (was accepted to Alvin Ailey in NYC this summer), singer and actor, she is no song writer. I was concerned with this "model". I felt it could actually work very well, but both my daughter and myself have a different vision of how she wants to proceed from here. For one thing, she was adamant that she did NOT want to be auto-tuned (she has perfect pitch and has had a lot of vocal training). Knowing what ARK was intending on doing, I felt that it might go downhill from there.
Mostly, my daughter has worked very hard to become a professional performer. I really didn't want her being put on Youtube and getting a following for putting "the worst song" out there, which could happen without professional writers and producers.
After she was accepted to Ailey and also the Broadway Artists Alliance (as both a dance and vocal major), we decided that those training grounds were where our $ had to go. I think that it was the right decision for us, but I hold nothing against ARK and their model and I still thank them for their offer.
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It seems that the producers are:
-looking for kids with musical talent
-getting the kids to write their own songs
-charging $4000 for the whole deal
I think they just really like being record producers.
They did actually write "Friday" though apparently, and $4000 is IMO not an absurd amount to.ask for that sort of a deal. On the other hand, there are plenty of rich parents who would consider spending $2000 on a birthday party, and looking at the video, I suspect that's what we're seeing here.
ReplyDelete"(or, admittedly, about a minute in a real top-end place)"
ReplyDeleteAnd how much of the cost of that "real top-end place" qualifies as actually better acoustics/equipment/personnel and how much qualifies as "I recorded my album at the same place The Beatles used"?
I ask this seriously, not snarkily.
There are prices that are related to economic fundamentals, and there are prices related to snobbery/scarcity value/conspicuous consumption --- but the latter prices are simply not very interesting in the context of this sort of discussion
Hard to say, because of course the two are correlated. But in terms of the capital equipment (particularly the monitor speakers in the control room and grand pianos), you definitely do get something for your money. And the house engineers at the expensive places are going to typically be better simply because they've got more experience on high-end recording sessions. I suspect that there is a brand premium in there, but it's not all hot air; the cheapo places I was looking at don't boast about their gear all over their website and I suspect there's a reason for that - ie, that it's perfectly acceptable but not absolute top end.
ReplyDeleteThere is then, I suppose the decidedly questionable issue of whether the top-end audio gear in the expensive studios is itself worth the money
If this is a kind of birthday party, isn't it possible that we are looking at real friends having a real party, although in the US presumably without real beer?
ReplyDeleteMy wife's office once made a video clip in a similar set-up, mostly with naughty lyrics about their boss. Looked far worse than this, because unlike real rock stars they did spend most of their budget on booze instead of the video.
Well they're 13 Zamfir, so you'd hope so...
ReplyDeleteDSquared: You're a bit low with that $2000...
Actually there's a pretty good then/now comparison between the cost of this song and the cost of producing the Time Lord's 'Doctorin' the Tardis' back in the early nineties. The Time Lords aka KLF aka god only knows what else actually documented the process of writing producing and marketing the song in their book 'The Manual' (I think that's what it was called, it's floating around online somewhere).
ReplyDeleteIn total, it added up to about 10 grand, with about 8 grand being spent on the helicopter shots, which they felt were unnecessary in hindsight. Of course, their business plan involved being industry insiders to some degree.
Plus they didn't feel the need to rent a crowd, until they were faced with the prospect of having a police car perform the song on TV when it hit number 1, and realised that they probably needed some dancers to make up for the fact that the car wouldn't be moving.
That's a bit like saying you can build a house for the cost of the materials, if you're a qualified electrician, plumber, builder, etc. The reason that it normally costs more than that is that the KLF were able to do things that people are usually paid to do.
ReplyDeletecian: well, no. The way they presented it in their book was that they had no particular musical, production or promotional talent - they just knew the right people to talk to and where to get started. Other than that, they'd been exposed to the Stock, Aitken and Waterman process for churning out easy hits, which was basically what they were presenting in the book.
ReplyDeleteThe song itself was ripped off from dance club beats and a few samples, with vocal provided by everyone in the studio getting together and yelling 'Doctor Who!' into the microphone. All of the musical talent came from the producer and programmer employed by the studio.
I think there's a tendency to estimate the cost of studio time based on the rate that the Rolling Stones are assumed to pay. In reality, studio owners are pretty keen to keep their equipment and staff busy, so picking up a few thousand dollars to make a throwaway song in between serious production isn't all that unreasonable.