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David Byrne panel report
Did David Byrne miss his calling? Or at any rate, one calling. The singer/songwriter/musician/producer/record-company-owner proved his potential as an archetypal absent-minded professor in his one-man panel titled “Record Companies: Who Needs Them?” He displayed two requisites for academic excellence: extensive knowledge and a wry sense of humor to fill those moments when his agile mind went wandering off on a new tangent, or strayed back to an old one, or was briefly discombobulated as his laptop brought the wrong chart up on the giant screen. The crowd that nearly filled the Convention Center ballroom listened indulgently, and in- between endearing bumblings, Byrne offered up plenty of food for thought on the future of the music industry.
Byrne said “Who Needs Them?” did not really signify a desire for record companies to go away, but rather that the role of the record company is changing as artists are able to reach their audiences in new ways. The labels’ function as “banks,” for instance, is disappearing as some costs go down. Digital downloads don’t have the manufacturing costs of CDs, and with outlets such as YouTube, “the bribery that used to go to MTV doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. Artists don’t necessarily need the labels’ financial clout for achieving airplay, since “radio as it stands won’t exist more than another couple years.” Byrne also showed a photo of a large professional recording studio, followed by a photo of a laptop, and said, “There’s my studio.”
Where record companies used to be essential and could offer take-it-or-leave-it contracts, Byrne said, nowadays there is a whole spectrum of options for using the resources of a record company. A Britney Spears might need the whole panoply of support offered by a traditional record contract, while another artist might want to cherry-pick from offerings such as marketing or distribution support. Byrne said the deal he is currently negotiating with Nonesuch won’t much resemble the type of deal he’d have signed 10 years ago, and he offered Aimee Mann as an example of someone who was dropped by her label “and rose from the ashes and did it all herself.”
Byrne concluded his talk by confessing, “I don’t have a good ending,” to a round of applause. “I hope I wasn’t too vague …” he apologized. The Q&A was prolonged, inevitably, by a few fans fawning for minutes before coming out with something only vaguely resembling a question, but one questioner led Byrne to offer some sharp insights on the decline of sound quality from CDs to digital downloads. “Sound quality probably peaked with vinyl,” Byrne said. “What we’ll have before too long will be about as good as the Edison cylinders. But when you think of it, that will be the best for live music!”
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