An Oasis in the Desert of Reality, Part Two

The original Oasis lineup from 1994, as per NME

This essay is a follow-up to An Oasis in the Desert of Reality

The recently announced Oasis reunion was followed almost immediately by something that’s become widespread in today’s music industry: price gouging. Euphemistically termed “dynamic pricing,” the online structure lets ticket outlets jack prices commensurate with surging demand. This means that, as tickets became available for the paltry seventeen dates around the UK and Ireland, computers hiked prices to £350 ($460) per ticket, outside their working-class audience’s budgets.

American audiences could summarize the exorbitant prices with two words: Taylor Swift. Tickets for Swift’s Eras Tour originally sold for $49. Quickly, however, a combination of forces, including the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger, unauthorized resale, and limited access, bloated prices to over $4000 in some markets. Swift’s mostly young, mostly female audience base obviously can’t afford such numbers. In both cases, predatory marketing ensured that fans best positioned to appreciate the respective artists, could least afford access.

But both artists share another characteristic. Why do these acts share monolithic grips on their markets? This perhaps made sense when the Beatles upended the music industry in 1963 and 1964, when fewer media options ensured a more homogenous market. But advances in technology have granted listeners access to more radio stations, innumerable streaming services with nigh-infinite channels, and more opportunities to share music with formerly niche fandoms.

Yet increased diversity produces a paradoxical outcome, embodied in the crushing demand for limited tickets. As listeners have access to more artists, more styles, and the entire history of recorded music, demand has concentrated on a smaller number of artists. I’ve noted this trend before: as the buy-in to create and distribute music has become more affordable, the actual number-one position on the Billboard Hot 100 has become less diverse.

Some of this reflects the way conglomerate corporations throttle access. Sure, entrepreneurial artists can record music in their bedrooms at higher quality than the Beatles dreamed possible, and distribute it worldwide almost for free. But approximately half the music market today travels through one outlet, Spotify. And, as Giblin and Doctorow write, Spotify’s algorithm actively steers listeners away from indie, entrepreneurial, and otherwise non-corporate options.

Taylor Swift in 2023

Three corporations—Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner—currently control over eighty percent of the recorded music market. That’s down from four corporations controlling two-thirds of the market in 2012, the year Universal absorbed EMI. (EMI, in turn, owned Parlophone, the label which published the Beatles.) Without support from the Big Three, artists have limited access to publicity, distribution, or the payola necessary to ascend Spotify’s ladder.

Aspirational musicians might, through good business management, make a middle-class living through constant touring and indie distribution. But without a major-label contract, musicians can’t hope for basic amenities like, say, a full weekend off, much less enough pay to buy a house. And with only three corporate overlords controlling the supposedly large number of major labels, musicians will always have a severe disadvantage.

Sure, the occasional musician might beat the odds and challenge the Big Three oligarchy. Taylor Swift notoriously forced both Spotify and Apple Music to pay overdue royalties to backlist artists a decade ago by withholding her lucrative catalog. But most musicians, even successful artists with chart hits, can’t expect to ever having such influence. Citing Giblin and Doctorow again, many artists with chart hits still bleed money in today’s near-monopoly market.

This structure encourages blandness and conformity, from both artists and audiences. Oasis sounded new and different thirty years ago, but they’re now comfort listening for a middle-aged, middle-income British audience. Taylor Swift samples styles and influences so quickly that she’s become a one-stop buffet with something to please (or displease) everybody. Both artists give audiences what they expect to hear—assuming they can hear anything over the stadium crowds.

Collective problems require collective solutions. Start by supporting politicians who enforce existing antitrust and anti-monopoly laws—and not supporting the rich presidential candidate who brags about not paying contractors. But we also have private solutions, starting with attending concerts and buying merch from local and indie artists who reinvest their revenue into their communities and stagehands. Tricky for some, yes, as most music venues are bars.

The problem isn’t hypothetical; we have changed in response to a diminished market. As Spotify, LiveNation, and the Big Three have throttled the music industry, we listeners have responded by accepting diminished standards, and consuming blander art. Though we have the illusion of choice, we allow the corporations to channel us into a less diverse market, and buy their pre-screened art. Independence is neither cheap nor easy, but it’s urgently necessary.