“The really clever people didn’t blame the internet for the crash. The business geeks were complaining about the web and piracy and so on. But I found the really good music guys, people like Rick Rubin and others, all said, “No, the business was actually sick.” The system was broken already.
Gareth Murphy’s Cowboys and Indies is a multifaceted history of recorded music since the 1850s. It tells the story of the mavericks behind the scenes as it examines the recent decline in the industry. Murphy’s interviews with weighty figures such as Seymour Stein, Geoff Travis and Martin Mills are married to extensive research. His historical analysis produced a key eureka moment.
“I’ll never forget the day in the library when I stumbled on the fact there had been an industry crash in the ’20s,” he remembers. “At the time, lots of people I was talking to were saying, ‘It’s the end of the system, nothing like this ever happened before’. Then to realise, my God, it actually did happen before, and in a strangely similar way was fantastic.”
Way back when, the music industry also faced a new adversary...
“The last time around the radio corporations just basically steamrolled all over the record companies,” he explains. “They didn’t care. They came out of nowhere and just took over the world. But once they got very big they realised that they needed music and so began a ten-year battle – there was lots of lobbying and court cases, similar to what we are experiencing now.”
And you know what? They started paying royalties. In the current war, one figure stands head and shoulders above the rest according to Murphy.
“As boss of the Beggars Group, Martin Mills is probably the number one indie power figure – he’s a real king,” he states. “He’s the one within these organisations that has to negotiate with Apple, Spotify and YouTube for royalties. Over the last ten years he’s been helping to save and steer. He is the noble king of the indie world.”
He sums up the necessary solution to the crisis succinctly.
“The geeks need to cop on, it’s really that simple. Basically we have to fight to get more royalties off these tech giants. Because people like YouTube are so arrogant they say they don’t need us. These geeks are richer than God and as far as they’re concerned record labels don’t have a clue and are dinosaurs from a bygone age. But the thing is they need music!”
Murphy, now 41, has worked in the industry all his life. All is not doom and gloom, he concludes.
“The fact that Spotify is doing so well is an incredible story, because they’re miles ahead of everyone. So the bigger they get, the better it is for the music business.
“There’ll be new labels. There’ll be less physical product,” he adds. “But the labels will do what they always did, which is A&R and marketing and publicity. Find the music, spend the money on getting some great stuff, then have a load of people basically plugging it. So the business won’t change that much.”