John Niven, a former A&R (Artiste and Repertoire) man in the music business explains in the Times where a lot of the money pouring into the music industry in the 1990s really went.
"Post-graduation, in the early Nineties, I was certain of two seemingly contradictory things. 1) I didn't want a proper job of any description just yet, thank you very much, and 2) I wanted - after four years of university plus two of playing guitar in a penniless indie band - to earn some money. Both lazy and avaricious, without even knowing it I was already an ideal candidate for a career in the music business...
The marketing meetings were an eye-opener. Records were “this useless, stinking piece of shit”. Artists were “clowns”, “losers” and “spastics”. Like many a bright-eyed newbie before me I was quickly, viciously, disabused of the notion that record companies loved music.
It also soon became apparent that, if you were lazy and avaricious enough, there was only one area of the music business to be in. The kind of area where you could reasonably expect to be handed a six-figure salary, a BMW and a bottomless expense account in return for rolling out of bed at noon. A&R - Artiste and Repertoire, to give the full handle - is responsible for finding and developing new talent...
There is a Hunter S.Thompson quote that has become the music industry's Magna Carta: “The music industry is a cruel and shallow money-trench. A long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.” It's appropriate enough given that the dominant emotions within A&R culture are fear and loathing: fear that you had - or were about to - signed the wrong thing. Loathing because one of your peers had just signed the right thing...
As you've probably gathered, there was a problem with my A&R career. I was absolutely terrible at it. But then again, so was everyone else. You were a success if you could produce a profitable act every two or three years...
jetting off every other month to some exotic location for a “convention”; a scarcely credible four-day holocaust of drugs and expense-account abuse. Miami for the Winter Music Conference, Cannes for MIDEM, Cologne for Pop Komm, New York for CMJ, Texas for South by South West: hundreds of A&R men spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on flights and entertainment. In a good year these conventions might produce one signing of note."
Read the whole thing and think about it the next time you hear anyone calling for copyright term extension to sound recordings in order to ensure old, poor, retired artists get their pensions.
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