We’ve taken aim at Wired’s Panglossian attitude when it comes to the relationship between the Internet and the music business before, mainly because the powers that be at Conde Nast’s ever-shrinking tech bible just make it too easy. Witness the magazine’s latest, and somehow most witless, entrant to its ever-growing “we can write about music, honest!” canon, “Why The Music Industry Hates Guitar Hero,” which somehow manages to be offensive, wrong, and a testament to why Wired should maybe think about scrapping its print edition and just go online. All at once!
Reading this little rant by Crowdsourcing author Jeff Howe only serves to inflame my ire at self-proclaimed tech pundits, who seem to be too busy thinking up inane buzzwords and jetting to and from Powerpoint engagements at conferences to actually take some time out and do research beyond their privileged little bubble where every artist can “make money on the road” or at least get a boatload of YouTube views. Let’s break it down.
The topic is an old one—so old that it’s actually irrelevant now. This little bit of drivel appears in the March 2009 issue of Wired, even though it’s pegged to a tantrum that Warner Music Group’s Edgar Bronfman had all the way back in August. Of 2008. What’s happened since then? Well, sales for Guitar Hero and Rock Band have cratered. Oops. So much for the future being predictable!
Someone let these sentences go into print without fact-checking them at all: “The success of these games is good news for the music biz. They’re breathing new life into old bands (Weezer, anyone?) and helping popularize new ones.” Yeah, Weezer was really toiling in obscurity before Guitar Hero came around. “Beverly Hills” wasn’t all over pop radio back in 2005, and the band sure wasn’t selling lots of copies of its albums. On the bright side, at least everyone in America has heard of Dragonforce.
But wait, there’s more—in the same paragraph! “They’re even becoming a significant distribution outlet for new releases. So the record labels ought to be ecstatic, right? Nope. They’re whining over licensing fees.” Never mind that instead of saying that these games are “significant” distribution outlets, Howe could have taken time out to explain how, or why, “significant” might be an accurate adjective. It wouldn’t have even taken that many words to provide just one example! (Could that be because it’s not true? Or at least not easily proven, and better illustrated by a sweeping generalization?)
There are two artists mentioned in the entire piece—both of whom probably wouldn’t have made as much money off their in-game presence were it not for that dadgum music industry. Note how the battle here is pitched as industry vs. industry, with the artists whose music is, let’s be honest, the real reason people are (or were) buying those games being little more than collateral.
Or straw men! In addition to the ill-advised Weezer shout-out, Howe notes that “Aerosmith has reportedly earned more from Guitar Hero: Aerosmith than from any single album in the band’s history.” (How did Howe first hear about Aerosmith and Weezer? Probably from their major-label-distributed and -marketed albums.) Helpfully, the Web monkeys at Wired have provided click-through access to the Aerosmith claim, which actually came from a rep for the game’s publisher and was not actually confirmed by Aerosmith’s management themselves:
“[Their] version of ‘Guitar Hero’ generated far more in revenues than any Aerosmith album ever has,” said Kotick. “Merchandising, concert sales, their ability to sign a new contract [have] all been unbelievably influenced by their participation in ‘Guitar Hero.’”
So it wasn’t just from an advance on Guitar Hero—that money came in that ever-elusive currency of “exposure.” Huh. That context sure does provide a vastly different picture—especially when you realize that Aerosmith hasn’t been on tour since 2007, and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith came out in the summer of 2008.
There is more, but I certainly am not being paid enough to double as Wired’s fact-checking department right now. Although given the amount of music-related inanity the publication in question has shoveled out over the past few months, maybe they should hire me! I can always use some extra scratch, even if I have to get some of my payment in used Zunes.
So, seriously: I can just spout off whatever random nonsense about The Web and The Future I like, and Wired will pay me?
Dude, getting paid in Zunes doesn’t sound so bad. If only they worked on my mac…
Amen. I even stopped subscribing to their blogs.
Good catch on the Aerosmith tour claim. Hilarious!
Honestly, I’d like non-musicians to stop writing about the whole internet and music business thing altogether.
I stopped reading techdirt because every article was some socialist bent on how musicians should be grateful about the internet and do whatever they can to make sure their fans can get all the music they want for free.
It has made it feel that demanding any compensation for my music makes me some conservative, greedy prick.
Thanks guys. I hate to say it but “you don’t know, man”. You don’t know at all how shitty it is to have people tell you that you don’t deserve a dime for labouring for weeks/months over a mixing board and computer to produce something worthy of listeners.
To all those entitlement champions I say please stop enabling the pirates. It’s very scary to think of teh generation we’re raising with these ideals.
I haven’t yet flipped through the incredibly light paper edition that arrived in my mailbox the other day. Not even for the “Watchmen” feature. It’s just kind of sad.
@sicksteanein: Only musicians should be writing?
Musicians should be the only ones writing about the internet and music industry?
Quoi?
Won’t somebody please think of the children?!
@Thesemodernsocks: Ya that was a little reactionary. :)
But I hope my sentiment stands.
I wish there was a “like button” so that I might show my support for this post, which I enjoyed.
I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to catch Wired’s errors since my vision is still damaged from their print version’s eye-stabbing neon colors that were so chic in the mid-90’s.
Thank you Maura for this article, I feel like the general problem you are talking about here can be found all over the technology press.
I suppose its as a result of the public perception that the music industry is drastically changing and writers want to cash in on the interested eyeballs. I just feel like most of the time these people don’t even know what they are referring to when they use the term music industry.
The music industry is saved because Aerosmith got paid! In related news, the banking industry must be doing well; all the bosses got bonuses!
It won’t take long for that money to start trickling down as members of Aerosmith pay to attend concerts and buy all those CD’s and merch.
And music journalists & bloggers can cover tech news better, I’m sure.
Yeah there are holes and whatnot, but at least the piece was better than their movie reviews.
I still like a lot of Wired’s long pieces, but certainly not the ones that cover music. They always seem so…two years ago.
To be fair, Wired has *always* been wrong far more often then they’ve been right, and usually irrelevant even when right. I’m in IT, I’ve been in IT for damn near 20 years. Business types love wired and believe it’s The Truth. Techies like the pictures of cool geek toys and ignore pretty much everything else as being wrong, irrelevant, or hopelessly out of date.
@sicksteanein: With the exception of the first sentence of your initial post–which I don’t agree with but know EXACTLY where you’re coming from–you have nailed it right on the damn head.
Check out this recent conversation I had over drinks with a self-confessed tech nerd/music fan:
TN/MF: Man, free downloading and file sharing are gonna be awesome for music.
KJ: Really, how so?
TN/MF: It’s gonna bring music back to minstrelsy. As a musician, you won’t be able to pay your rent or bills with it, but it’ll be great. Your music will be out there, man.
KJ: Hey, I know it’s a bad analogy, but you wouldn’t feel that way if the government, the marketplace or whomever, arbitrarily and/or greedily made, say, writing computer code a non-compensated skill, right?
TN/MF: Um…
KJ: Listen, I’ll pay you $100 bucks a head for every musician you bring me who honestly believes that the disappearance of revenue streams is a good thing for him or her.
TN/MF: Well, um, I guess, yeah…I hadn’t seen it that way.
Ugh.
Good job, Maura.