Renner Death Is Not So Bad!

On the Future of the Music and Media Industry
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-3-86287-109-4
Verlag: Fuego
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

When Tim Renner applied to the German record company Polydor in 1986, he intended to write an exposé about the music industry. However, things went differently and he turned this exposé into a career. For eighteen years his biography has been intermeshed with the development of the music industry, he led bands like Element of Crime, Rammstein, Tocotronic and Philip Boa to sucess. He raised up higher and higher on the ladder, finally reaching the top of Universal Music Germany. He witnessed how musical development has been hampered by the pressure of the markets, how pop and commerce diffused, and importantly, he witnessed the rapid dissolution of old comercial structures through the forces of digitalzation and globalization. But the ponderous giant labels kept their eyes shut in front of these developments and Renner finally quit. After his leave from Universal in 2004 he described his point of view on what he found were wrong tracks and challenges of contemporary pop music. 'Death is not bad!' is a profound analysis of culture and music in times of digitalization, based on the vison that creativity, consumption and capital could find a way of coexistence. Ten years after the German edition of this book was published some passages read like a history book about a long forgotten time. Some passages pointing to developments which are fully manifested today and look to evolve further in the future. The book shows the changes of a whole industry and the first steps of a society on it's way into the digitalized future.

Tim Renner, born 1964, was a musical writer when he started working for the German Record Company Polydor, part of the multinational trust PolyGram. His intention was to write an exposé about the 'EVIL' major label. But he found the music industry provided him with the means to carry artists out of their niche into mainstream. After an argument with the international top management about the future course of market leader Universal Music Renner resigned from his job as head of Universal Music Germany in early 2004. He founded his own company Motor Entertainment providing management and label-services for independent artists.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Renner, Tim

Leseproben

PARADISE PARADISE – SAVED BY HERBERT VON KARAJAN AND JAN TIMMER 1 August 1986, my first day at Polydor as a junior artist and repertoire manager, began with an announcement from my boss that it was his last day. What a volatile industry, I thought to myself as I wished him the best for the future. I assumed, not without justification, that this would enable me to conduct my research a bit less closely observed. I was still, at this point, planning to reveal the dirty secrets of the music business by operating as an undercover investigator. Had I been sufficiently observant, I would soon have realized that the material had fallen into my lap for a far bigger story: the story of the beginning of the end of the music industry as we know it – I was there! A corpulent, semi-bald man, who reminded me strongly of South African President Piet Botha, stood on the stage of the Golf & Sport Hotel in the Baltic coastal resort of Timmendorf. I and almost everyone else present felt awful. The day was still young and the previous evening had been given over to an incredible drinking contest (schnapps and beer) between the product managers (of whom I was one) and the sales reps, who had won decisively on points. I swore to myself that I would turn up at future sales conferences better prepared for this kind of thing. Now all I could see were circles. They all had a hole in the middle of them and were being projected onto the screen in front of us. The large gentlemen who had introduced himself as Jan Timmer, world boss of PolyGram, was busy giving these things names. One was a data CD and could make jolly pictures appear on computer screens – the future CD-ROM. Another was a CD that could record data, which later became known as the CD-R. It wasn’t just my hangover that made the talk seem absurdly abstract. In the whole of Polydor there was just one computer, and before being allowed to use it you had to prove you were qualified. My vacation job as a data inputter with Albingia Insurance was not good enough. Recordable – no, that didn’t sound too good when I thought about our rights situation. But cassettes were also recordable and they hadn’t destroyed the industry. I smiled at the memory of the “Home taping is killing music” campaign run by the music industry. Ever since ailing vinyl had started being replaced by the CD, no one ever mentioned it any more. The CD had been pushed through by Timmer in the face of opposition from the rest of the music industry. Why couldn’t he be happy with that? We were all suffering with headaches and another change of format was the last thing we wanted. Things were finally going well again for the industry, although it still hadn’t fully recovered from the scare of 1979, when the market collapsed dramatically for the first time. Only the previous year, the corks had been popping in spectacular fashion at PolyGram. Saturday Night Fever and other records from the end of the disco era had delivered fantastic profits in 1978. This had had to be celebrated. Former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was invited to the annual conference in Florida as guest speaker, flamingos that had been flown in by company jet teetered through an artificial lake created specially for the occasion, and the company gorged on caviar. A year later the hits that could have made up for the weakness of vinyl sales failed to materialize and bankruptcy loomed. Unfortunately I was not there, but I know about the party from the vivid picture painted of it by the grim-faced head of Human Resources at a staff seminar in Noordweik, The Netherlands. Back then, in 1990, we simply reflected on the case study and shook our heads. What idiots, we thought and said. Anyone who has attended a basic marketing seminar could tell you that products have a life cycle. First comes the introductory phase, followed by the growth phase, the maturity phase, the saturation phase, and finally the decline phase. This can even be represented by means of mathematical formulae; it is predictable. The end of vinyl came as no surprise, therefore. The naiveté of our predecessors, on the other hand, did. I didn’t understand Jan Timmer and his lecture. What else but this had his message been? And yet the same thing happened to the next generation of sound carriers, the noble CD, which at the time was bringing us undreamed-of returns of over 20 percent. He was not yet able to show us a prototype of the CD-R, but he did explain what the logical and technical next steps would be on which the patent holder, Philips, our Dutch parent company, would soon embark. The day was coming and with it the beginning of the end for the CD and the music business as we knew it. In 1990, Jan Timmer began a six-year stint as head of the entire Philips group. And although he introduced a drastic restructuring program (named “Centurio”) at the badly hit electronics giant, cutting more than 50,000 jobs in the hardware division (and earning himself the nickname “Butcher of Eindhoven” in the process), the company held on to its software interests for as long as he was in charge. His aim was to reinvent Philips as a media group with significant vertical integration. Above a certain size of company, territory and number of products to be marketed, it makes less and less sense to attempt to maximize profit by cutting costs. This occurs more through the absorption of costs within the group. If a company controls numerous different phases of the value chain, many costs get reabsorbed into different areas as revenue. At the heart of Timmer’s strategy was the music division PolyGram. He knew the business well and saw content such as music as being where the biggest opportunities for development lay. His goal was to link content with hardware interests and to let one drive the other. The introduction of the CD was a perfect example of this strategy. The story of the CD began in 1969, when Dutch physicist Klaas Compaan came up with the idea of a disc that could be read by laser. A year later he was working on the prototype with his colleague Piet Kramer. Not long after that, capital started to take an interest. Philips’ technical director at the time, Lou Ottens, took the view that compact dimensions were vital for the successful marketing of the new development and was therefore responsible for naming the invention. In 1979, Philips unveiled a prototype of the compact disc player and formed a strategic partnership with Sony. The collaboration would prove a brilliant success on two fronts: first, from a technological point of view, as Sony’s expertise with digital conversion technology complemented Philips’ development of the CD perfectly; and second, Sony already had a stake in CBS, parent of Columbia Records (now Sony Music). While all the record companies originally rejected the new format, Sony was at least able to help overcome the objections of one of the major players. By this time Philips had poured $60 million into the development of the CD and reminded its subsidiary PolyGram of this in no uncertain terms (in other words: “Now hand over the back catalog”). On 17 August 1982 Philips and PolyGram presented the public with the first CD player and CD, a recording of Chopin waltzes by pianist Claudio Arrau. This was closely followed by the first pop album: The Visitors by ABBA. The development of the CD and accom panying CD player is a good example of how important comfort and emotionality are for the consumer and therefore the success of a market launch. The introduction of the CD succeeded with such speed and success precisely because the underlying technical complexity of the system was belied by its outward user-friendliness. In the first year, PolyGram produced 376,000 CDs – and then demand exploded. To date, 950 million CD players and billions of pre-recorded CDs have been sold. It was through the CD that the phenomenon of digitalization first reached the mass market – not as a terrifying data monster, but as an audible, perceptible leap in quality for the user. The CD was less sensitive than vinyl; the tracks could simply be keyed in – there was nothing users could actually do wrong. The CD may have been a technical innovation, a “cold” development, the simple conversion of music into countless zeros and ones, but it was sold emotionally, “warmly.” Here the nature of its content – music – played a decisive role. So too did the artists. Herbert von Karajan set the standard in two different ways. The conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was given a CD demonstration as early as spring 1981. He adored the format and was prepared to talk about his new love to anyone who would listen. “A technological achievement comparable with the transition from gas lamp to electric light,” enthused von Karajan. At the same time, Philips and Sony were in discussion over the size of the CD. Originally, Philips had set the diameter of the disc at 115 millimeters, which yielded a playing time of 66 minutes. But at Sony’s instigation this was increased to 120 millimeters and a maximum playing time of 78 minutes. The reason was that Sony president, Norio Ahga, a former opera singer and fan of classical music, wanted von Karajan’s recording of Beethoven’s Ninth, his favorite symphony, to fit onto a single CD, and the recording lasted 72 minutes. There were dramatic repercussions. At presentations, Sony staff used to casually pull their demo CDs out of their shirt pockets as a way of highlighting the practical dimensions of the new discs. This larger CD would no longer fit into normal-sized pockets. Sony staff were therefore supplied with shirts with larger breast pockets. And this size was eventually adopted as the new standard...