John Harris has a silly piece in today’s Guardian, in defence of major labels:
Any half-decent record collection bulges with logos symbolising commercial clout and recurrent musical brilliance: CBS, Parlophone, Reprise, Elektra, Atlantic, Geffen. It’s instructive to remember that despite the conveyor-belt cynicism that defines the world of The X Factor, the best labels still take punts on the basis of taste and belief; no one, I’d wager, signed such recent sensations as Kasabian or Klaxons with an eye on the balance sheet.
He must think that popular capitalist wisdom such as ‘you’ve got to speculate to accumulate’ does not apply to those working in the record industry. If labels ‘take punts’ based on taste and belief, it’s partly because they think their taste and belief will lead to a hit record. And, I’ll wager, their ‘taste and belief’ is largely a function of the amount of capital they have at their disposal.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that the strategic vision of a record label need not entail making every record a hit (was it Adorno who talked about how military language gets instrumentalised by the culture industry in order to better ‘target’ the public?). That would be ludicrous. Indeed the function of a record label may not be to sell vast quantities of records at all, but to fulfil a strategic objective of the corporation of which it is a subsidiary. Granted, a by-product of this may be the odd listenable record. But it seems slavish to write paeans to The Man on this basis.
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