Most serious music fans decry the state of the music industry, and with good reason: It's a world marred by an increasingly narrow corporate oligarchy, down to four major companies (BMG, Sony, AOL-Time Warner, and Universal) and shrinking. It's a world that produces a string of anonymous one- or two-hit wonders—Marvelous 3, Lou Bega, and so on—while rarely investing in patient, long-term artist development. And it's a world where virtually every commercial-radio playlist is chosen through monkey-see-monkey-do conformity, where even big-name acts must be willing to play station-branded sampler concerts if they hope to grease the wheels for airplay.
Granted, the music business has been headed in this direction for decades, but artists' and fans' frustration with the system has become so palpable that it's almost hard to understand: Can disillusionment really ring true when disillusionment is virtually unanimous? You'd have to be awfully naïve to have illusions to begin with these days, and to believe that the business of music has ever truly been about music.
This year's South By Southwest music conference, held in Austin over the course of four long days and nights in the middle of March, danced, as it always does, on the precipice separating content and commerce, offering equal parts networking opportunities and frequently transcendent music. As usual, the industry showed itself to be far removed from the real world: Just like in 1998, when thousands lined up to see Bran Van 3000 (which would have drawn a few dozen savvy fans in most cities), hype and huge crowds greeted the likes of Gomez, Modest Mouse, and Nebula. Which isn't to say the talk of the convention should have been the biggest names—though most in attendance understandably took advantage of the opportunity to take in at least one of the established names, including Patti Smith, The Jayhawks, Cypress Hill, and Elliott Smith—but Gomez, Modest Mouse, and Nebula are signed national touring acts. What happened to fans going to SXSW to discover the undiscovered, such as the elegant and unpredictable likes of Knife In The Water and The Czars?
Then again, does lamenting the conference's emphasis on pre-discovered acts constitute more of the same predictable, it-used-to-be-about-the-music bellyaching? Year after year, those in the know cluck their tongues, decrying how big and corporate SXSW has become—it's a tidy microcosm of the music industry itself—so is that phenomenon even news anymore?
In fact, perhaps the most intriguing phenomenon at SXSW 2000 was attendees' widespread embrace of big business. Sure, Steve Earle's lamentably song-free keynote address attacked the corporate world—and the WTO, and the death penalty—but it was fascinating to see the topics of panel discussions shift from 1999's "Downloading On The Upswing: Trouble For The Music Industry?" to 2000's "What's My Business Model?" during which representatives of dot-com companies such as the bandwidth-sucking, MP3-distributing rogue Napster imparted marketing wisdom.
The music itself was newsworthy, as always, as fans indulged in sounds ranging from a night of inventive rappers (Dead Prez, The Jungle Brothers) to an abbreviated set by Hank Williams III (5,000 amps in Austin and you couldn't just borrow one?), several nights of blistering, black-lit rock (Fu Manchu, Fireball Ministry), and even a chance to eat a delicious funnel cake while watching Patti Smith and her great band play in a park.
As for the fast-moving but ever-flawed music industry, wait until SXSW 2001, by which
point those in the know will no doubt lament Napster's monopoly on the distribution of music through the Internet.