When Will Auto-Tune Get Album Credit?

Pearl Jam shot courtesy of Slightlynorth and our Flickr pool.

Our editor asked this question after receiving a press release from a record label, linked to a video featuring the, um, artist known as "Lights." [Ed.: Who's singing at El Corazon on October 23!] It's a good question, and one that's been bothering me for a few years. A question that has made me re-evaluate my decades-long love affair with popular music. I don't think it's just me.

I love pop music. Hip-hop, bubble-gum, emo-rock, dance--pick the poison. As a woman of a certain age, I think it's finally time to 'fess up, so I'm coming out of the closet.

Yes, I was the oldest person without children in tow at the American Idol Season 1 concert. Yes, I am generally the only person wearing black nail polish in the audience at a Justin Timberlake show. My first album was Shawn Cassidy "Under Wraps," and yes, I still have it. I also have a Tiffany Pandora station and I will throw down over which fin de siècle boyband was better.

But the affair seems to be over, due to the passing of my beloved. I blame Cher. Not that Auto-Tune hasn't been around since the early '90s, but back then it was a dirty little secret. Then Cher embraced it on 1998's Believe, using the technology to tighten up her aging voice in the same way she's taken to tucking her face. With, unfortunately, the same unsettling result. Cher went from pop matriarch to alien robot, and the robots have since taken over.

Even Christina Aguilera, who once railed against Auto-Tune, has visited the mothership: Her most recent album, 2010's mechanical Bionic, literally sounds phoned in, Aguilera's glorious voice butchered and unrecognizable on almost every song.

The record industry seems to be betting that the public won't notice, or care, but record sales say otherwise. 'N Sync's 2000 release, No Strings Attached, sold over one million copies in one day and 2.42 million copies in the first week. Compare that to Bionic, which sold 110,000 copies in its first week and Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster, which has sold only about 1.2 million units in the U.S. over the past year--yet, Gaga has been called the reigning queen of pop. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Pop should mean popular. But what is popularity when over half the audience has disappeared? What's the point of topping the Billboard Hot 100 when the charts themselves are no longer relevant? Where have all the fans gone?

The music industry blames piracy, Napster, and gnomes for their evaporating revenues, but the numbers don't add up and never have. Napster operated June 1999 to July 2001, spanning the period in which No Strings Attached blew industry sales records to kingdom come. File-sharing has turned out to be no more pernicious, and as beneficial, as home-made mix tapes were back in the days of Mylar—simply a more efficient method of hand-selling, word-of-mouth promotion via bytes. Everyone in the country would have to be stealing half of their music for industry revenues to have lost that much of the domestic music market to pirating.

It must, therefore, be the fault of gnomes, which is accurate if by "gnomes" you mean independent artists, small labels, local acts self-distributing, and their various customers. Not exactly a unified force out to stick it to the man, but the very essence of supply-and-demand: Give the public what it wants or the public will go elsewhere. The industry is looking for an entity to blame, and then to sue the pants off of, but it is their customers who are wearing those pants. It's generally bad business to make a habit of suing your customers, which leaves major labels in the awkward position of behaving like Soup Nazis dishing out bad soup

There is no Soundscan data for web sales and alternative distribution. Soundscan can't even count small, independent record store sales. However, numbers can be extrapolated by the growth of MySpace, digital music stores, and general web growth. In 2008, iTunes surpassed Wal-Mart as the largest music retailer in the U.S., and was believed to account for up to 80 percent of the online market. There are currently an estimated 35 million—million—legitimate digital music download stores in operation on the Web, the vast majority of them single-entity self-distribution sites. Put another way, 15 percent of all (estimated, as of December 2009) websites sell music, in some way, shape, or form. That's a big, crunchy bite of music sales.

Polls, anecdotal reporting, and sources like Amazon and Yelp! support the big, crunchy bite hypothesis. An informal internet poll (conducted primarily to check the official reporting against actual people) indicated that about 40 percent of respondent's total music purchases in the past year have been independents, and another 40 percent said that all of their music purchases were from major labels. That's a 20-percent gap in sales for consumers to hop back and forth over.

Respondents also noted that of the major label purchases many were singles, replacements for older albums, or non-pop genres such as classical music. 52.6 percent of respondents preferred to buy their tunes as a digital download, while another 31 percent sometimes downloaded music purchases. Most damning, only 31 percent had a positive impression of the major labels; the remainder, nearly 70 percent, reported negative feelings.

Small labels and self-publishing musicians aren't raking in the dough, by any means, but digital music distribution allows independents to make a decent living without support from an industry that is often perceived as problematic. Jill Sobule's fans donated $90,000 to finance her 2009 self-release California Years, surpassing the $75,000 that her album cost.

Sales figures aren't available, but at $9.99 to $15.00 per sale, even a modest sales volumes--say 10 percent of Bionic's first week sales--means that Sobule probably came out ahead: she had no expenses to recoup, no advance to sell-out. Instead of taking home 10 to 15 percent in royalties after paying off an advance of $5,000 to $150,000, as major label artists do, Sobule took home nearly 100 percent of sales.

Industry reports show that only one in 10 major label recording artists sell enough albums to make back their advance. That's dismal and it leaves musicians indebted in a form of creative wage-slavery, the majority owing more than they will ever earn, since unrecouped expenses can carry over to the next album, and the next, for as long as the contract specifies. That glass isn't half-full, it's nearly empty. How many companies survive with a 90 percent product failure rate? And this while self-publishing flourishes. Who can blame both artists and consumers for opting out?

That the most interesting and creative acts are choosing to forgo the dream of signing a big record deal has left major labels with a dearth of talent. Seattle used to be a terrible town for a popular music fan. It still is, but now the entire country is a terrible place for pop—the record industry seems determined to kill off the genre out of either ignorance or spite. Simon Fuller, creator of the reality television shows Pop Idol and American Idol, and their spin-offs, hoped to fill in the gap by letting the buying public choose its pop stars from a self-selecting pool of aspirants, but few have panned out. In the U.S., only Kelly Clarkson (Season 1 Idol winner) and Carrie Underwood (Season 4 Idol winner) have made significant sales numbers.

Maybe the industry needs Auto-Tune. It's possible that the best major labels can offer is alien robots lip-synching over a beat machine and backing track while pyrotechnics and ever-more-goofy costumes attempt to distract concertgoers from the dismal performance they just paid $50 or $100 for. A decent pop show, with singing and dancing and gags and patter, will run much more. Sales seem to indicate that at least half the potential pop audience has decided that the music is more important than the spectacle. The other half, the measurable remainder of consumers, will be lining up for the next alien robot landing.