Industry’s fears silence music for critics
BY BEN WENER
As you may know, the White Stripes’ new album, “Elephant,” arrives in stores Tuesday. Flop, milestone or some middling nothing in between, it is surely one of the most anticipated albums of the year.
And I can’t hear it – at least not until everyone else can.
“I haven’t gotten my advance copies yet,” I was told earlier this week, which is a publicist’s way of saying “You’re not getting one.” Really, calling them “advances” at this stage is ludicrous. By the time I do get a copy from the band’s label, I already will have purchased one at Tower Records – exactly the same case as Linkin Park’s “Meteora,” which I wasn’t allowed to hear even in advance of a concert last week designed to preview it.
I bet you’ve heard this complaint before, and it’s not the sort that elicits much sympathy. “Oh, boo hoo, the poor critic can’t get all the best albums weeks before everyone else. And for free at that!”
You’re right, of course. But it’s a curious thing: No one seems to mind that movie critics get to see every major and minor flick weeks in advance of its theatrical run, but a great many people take angry exception when a music critic gets the same treatment.
Yet we don’t all get the same treatment in this game. I guarantee that the country’s four or five biggest publications will run something about the White Stripes by Tuesday.
Is this not the equivalent of, say, only Ebert & Roeper, Entertainment Weekly and USA Today being allowed to see the next “Lord of the Rings” installment, while all other movie writers have to wait until it opens nationwide?
Such selective coverage – “spin,” you might call it, even if the publicity machine can’t control what gets written – has gone on for years in pop circles, at least when it comes to blockbuster releases. It’s a publicist’s way of ensuring a high-paying client gets a long run – TV and radio first, then the big publications, then down a notch, and again, until you’ve reached the lowliest weekly in Smalltown USA. Full media saturation.
But this practice has gotten worse, thanks to unfounded fears over file-sharing. So ignorantly terrified is the music biz of losing profits to illegal downloading that now the most oft-heard excuse for not sending out advances is, essentially, “We don’t trust you not to leak it.”
Never mind that I wouldn’t, and haven’t, in my eight years of writing. Let’s imagine what might happen if I did: nothing. Look at the most recent releases from Eminem and 50 Cent – widely leaked, available on the Internet before street dates, yet both are huge sellers.
The industry just doesn’t get it. After decades of all manner of private tune-trading, they still think they’re getting ripped off, when in fact the proliferation of good music only benefits everyone who helped create it. Losing even 100,000 buyers to downloading pirates doesn’t keep the masses from purchasing.
Radiohead knows this. I’ll believe it when I see it in my mailbox, but supposedly the band isn’t concerned that people might hear its next album, “Hail to the Thief,” before it lands in stores June 10, which should mean I’ll hear it in time to offer thoughts in a timely fashion. (And don’t believe for a second that I or anyone else is refused an advance copy for fear we might say something cruel. Everyone knows bad press is still good publicity.)
When the label does send out high-profile advances these days, the restrictions they put on them borders on the comical. It’s one thing to “watermark” a disc, their way of tracking down which copy might have been the source of a leak to radio or the Internet.
I’m all for playing by the rules: Ask me not to share a disc and I won’t. But listen to this poppycock Warner Bros. attached to the advance release of “Counterfeit2,” a solo covers collection from Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, which I find hard to believe will attract a large audience:
“By accepting this CD, you agree to not make any copies of the CD, to not play the CD in your computer and to not upload the CD or any part of it to the Internet or otherwise allow, or make, the CD or any part of it available on the Internet. You agree that you will not lend this CD to anyone, and that you alone will listen to this CD for promotional purposes. Accordingly, you will not play this CD for anyone.”
Does that mean if I play it too loudly at home and my neighbors hear it, I should bludgeon them to death to keep them from spreading the word, then turn myself in to the authorities? And, of course, surrender the disc?
Isn’t the whole point of making popular music to get it heard? And by as many people as possible? And if it’s merely bootleggers the industry is worried about, is there no better way to attack that problem than to make the whole of the music press feel like scheming criminals?
Frankly, I’d just as soon send the Gore disc back, along with the new side-project effort from System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, which was sent in similar fashion, than to adhere to such laughable terms.
Of course, then I wouldn’t be able to share details until at least a week after it came out.
Which leads to this question: Would you prefer to know about an album as it’s about to come out, as a critical service, or would you rather read babbling after-the-fact, once we’ve all had a chance to digest it? It’s getting awfully hard to do the former these days, and in an era of massive hype for one corporate (and independent) mediocrity after another, I’m wondering if it isn’t better to resist participating in the mad rush.
Maybe it’s time to write about music that matters when it matters – which is rarely the day it shows up at Tower.
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