Sherlock Holmes and Motown and the Digital Revolution
Ok, let’s, for a moment, talk copyright. And let’s, for a moment, talk shit and shinola. These two idea are becoming intertwined…
It’s been a lot of years now since the first shouted, wailed warnings came, first from the record companies over Napster and it’s kin and then the Movie corporations and their slaves over youtube, of the deep, terrible, vicious and profit maiming internet that had to be tied up and made profitable before everything just fell apart.
I’ve been fascinated at the shout outs and the bitching since this all started. I think it comes from just being of age to remember the last two times they did this – first, right at my adolescence, with the c30-c60-c90 fear that cassettes would ruin the music industry and then the slp,lp,sp fear that VHS would do it to the movie industry. If you could press a record button you could ruin the, or their, world, apparently. I’ve been most fascinated by all this because I remember quite well that, actually, these horrible revolutions in technology managed to make a shitload of profits for their respective industries once the idiots at the top of the corporate food chain managed to figure out how to harvest the formats.
Note, this is not a shitload of profits for the people how made the records/songs/scripts/movies. Most of those, particularly in the music industry, made nothing or less than nothing over those years. Most musicians don’t make anything off their albums if they are on a label. At all. In fact, in the 80′s, most of them went into debt to their label in making an album. But, in that same time of technological advance, the corporations made buko…
I have been wondering why these same corporations, now combined into even larger conglomerates, have NOT managed to pull in digital distribution in the same way. And I had a suspicion for a long time that was just confirmed tonight… It involves, quite fittingly, Sherlock Holmes. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.
Now, to regress for a moment: I like Guy Ritchie. Lock, Stock is one of my favorite films. You can watch it drunk and giggle and watch it stone sober and marvel at the build of the plot line, and still giggle. How many films can you say that about? Plus, it has a lead that makes a stunning Adam Ant. Snatch was pretty good, but floundered. And Ritchie had been, well, on a downward spiral since… So, when his version of Sherlock Holmes came out two years ago I just couldn’t… trust it. It looked impressive. I love Robert Downey Jr. But, well, the ex-Mr. Madonna had managed to shake me, convince me that I shouldn’t be so easily convinced. So I missed it…
I just caught it. Online. For free. From a seedy Czech site with a lot of ads for an accompanying video of the world’s smallest bikini (it wasn’t that small, it was just that what it was hiding was remarkably, and artificially, enhanced, but anyway…). It was excellent. A perfect vehicle for Ritchie. London underworld but bigger, more sweeping and more open to manipulation. I will be buying the DVD.
BUT, and here’s the point: if it SUCKED, I wouldn’t buy it. EVER.
I have always had the suspicion that the fear of the record and movie companies wasn’t that streaming would ruin their business but that it would take the ability to make a load of cash on a n-th rate crap product much, much more difficult. You can always pull off a single that sounds ok or a trailer that looks pretty cool, but if people are allowed to see the whole product before they buy you have to really put some effort in. You have to make it more than an album with one hit and a load of filler or a movie with all the good bits in the trailer. You have to invest in the maker and let them hone it, take some time, build up a following…. The big corporations fear of digital distribution was never really about sharing/downloading. It was simply that they don’t tend to make compelling products. They can make some damn compelling advertizing, but with digital distribution that is out of their hands. At long last.
And what a shame that’s all the big boys make anymore. Listen to the old Stax or Motown disks. All the long play disks were just a compilation of current singles. Everyone had heard everything on those disks on the radio before they came out. Quite a lot like streaming music today. And, man, there is nothing like those disks. And maybe never will be again. But being able to hear ever track on a disk or every chapter on a DVD gets us just a little closer.
