2.3.05: Arcade Fire, Music Biz, Value Added

Sat in with The Arcade Fire, the Montreal band, last night at Irving Plaza. The music biz was out to see both of their sold-out shows. In October they played Arlene's Grocery as part of CMJ convention and now they’ve sold out 2 shows — at Irving Plaza and Webster Hall. They're being courted by quite number of labels I imagine, lots of press clamoring for interviews and calls from friends they never knew they had.

They did a cover of a Talking Heads song when I saw them at Bowery Ballroom ("Naïve Melody") ...we communicated by e-mail afterwards, so asking me to join on that tune was sort of natural. I loved it. Their crowd was lovely and energized as was the band and the room felt like it was filled with genuine music lovers — the word of mouth and internet buzz has all been fairly natural.

Their label/distributor at the moment is Merge, a little label out of North Carolina — bandmembers from Superchunk run it — and they've done incredibly well.

So the question is, can the larger labels that are courting them do better? They can offer larger advances, facilitating larger recording budgets and providing some living expenses for a little while, but beyond that? I wonder. Yale (Luaka Bop) says larger labels have the financial muscle to pay for retail marketing. The CDs that are displayed prominently in stores — those positions at the tops and ends of shelves — are all paid for. Stores where the staff decides which records deserve visibility are few and far between. So this could mean more sales for them — but those sales then merely go to pay off that larger advance the band got — and the larger recording budget. Little of it actually ends up in the musicians' pockets unless things really break big. And most things don’t break all that big.

So, I dunno. I dunno how many records they've actually sold through Merge... but unless it's pathetic then maybe they're doing alright right where they are. Hope they do well whatever they decide.

I was passed an e-mail by someone at my own label, Nonesuch, who was told by Kris at the label Domino that apparently a video of me singing with them is already up on the web.

As I crouched near the pay phones at the airport waiting for my delayed flight to board, a man came up and said he liked my music. This happens occasionally, and it's always wonderful to hear, but this was special

This man mentioned that his youngest son, maybe 5 or 6 years old, has a debilitating disease that may eventually kill him. The father had recently been to a conference of other parents of children who suffer from this disease, and driving on at the end of day he was pretty wrung out emotionally. He said he put on Look Into the Eyeball and he smiled and laughed and it brought him out of it.

Then he said he visited his elder son in a nearby town. The son is almost a grown man. This young man had burned a CD for his dad, and though the father said their musical tastes never really converged, there was one of my songs on the CD. I sensed that this meant they had found some little thing in common, important after what the Dad had just been through.

He then gave me, to keep, a snapshot of the two boys, the elder one holding the younger. Jeez, I was just about in tears at this point. I thought, will he think to himself in a minute "what did I give him their picture for?" But he did it — on pure impulse. It's in my pocket.

Value Added

My daughter Malu asked me "Dad, why do the police go after the people on the street that sell knockoffs?" She was referring to the Vuiton and Gucci handbags and the Rolex watches, I suspect. Not the possibly fake Duracell batteries that are also everywhere.

I suggested that the manufacturers of said objects see them not just as objects, but as fruits of their "creativity" however specious that might be in this case. The color of the bag, the design of the clasp, the shape of the strap and buckles and seams are all the result of vaguely creative decisions, and these people see the bags are embodiments of much personal creativity and research, and therefore a kind of intellectual property. The cheap copies, besides being possibly of inferior quality, well, the makers of these bags have more or less bypassed all that time and investment. Their ideas are not theirs... but they are using someone else's ideas.

"O.K.," says Malu, "so what?"

She suggests why not let people sell and buy the knockoffs if the name companies won't sell cheap versions themselves. Malu believes that anyone (i.e. her classmates) can tell the difference between the "real thing" and the knockoff. Therefore those who want that status can pay for it, if they want, and if they can afford to — the others can enjoy pretending. Or something. Are the people who buy knockoffs trying to fool anyone? She thinks not. (I have my doubts... but more on that later.)

So, if the real thing and the knockoff are as easy to tell apart as she claims, then maybe she's right.

Playing devil's advocate I try to personalize the situation. Let's see where this line of reasoning goes. I say what if you made something and someone else sold a cheaper, less well-made copy on the street. Well, maybe that's O.K., she reasons, as you can still get the good quality version in the shop next door.

Yale (and Danielle) bring up another point. That the goods Malu is focusing on are all luxury goods, goods of a very specific type in which the value has been greatly added on by attaching nebulous qualities.

To be more specific — the actual cost of making the designer bag, the Rolex watch or especially the name brand perfume is not all that much more than what the knockoff charges. But the branding that has been accumulated on the designer version by expensive advertising, carefully considered associations and the history and reputation of the brand allows the designer to multiply the "value" manyfold. Twenty times at least. Sometimes more.

So, with luxury goods one is buying aura — a set of associations that the buyer hopes will generate a feeling of status, class and well being. The carefully assembled house of cards based on images of celebrities, beautiful people in glamorous places living the vida loca is something the buyer hopes will be magically imparted and transferred to him or her by simply carrying the bag or smelling a certain way.

They’re not buying designer bags because they hold more, last longer or are more practical.

Do people really believe that aura is transferred by a bag? Is it that simple? I don't think so. I think the ads, the perfume bottles and the very sound of the name — every little thing — all of it combined — contribute to pushing buttons that make us helpless. At base we're less rational that we like to think, both for the good and the ridiculous. Advertising and branding breaks free from the Enlightenment Cartesian mechanistic view of the universe.

This then is what the police are doing when they harass the knockoff merchants. They are making a show that the system has some reasonable and justified basis — they are using law and threat of force to bolster a basically irrational system.

The luxury goods market is like the art market. Stuff is only worth what someone will pay for it. Its value — whether it be a designer handbag or a Damien Hirst — has nothing to do with its utility, the labor that went into making it or how well it is made.

So we can eliminate that argument right away. The knockoffs are not about quality. There's no reason to pay over $1,000 for a handbag because maybe it's that much better made — because though it might indeed be better made it's not $1,000 better made.

According to Malu the $1,000 might gain you entry into the cool club, which is why we suspect people pay that much money. So, that means the folks she claims can easily be spotted with the knockoffs are left outside the velvet ropes.

That's also why this situation can’t be moved over to apply to CDs, music and feature films. We don’t pay more to see a movie with Judy Davis in it than an exploitation movie because she’s a better actress. All movies cost more or less the same. There’s no status in owning the "real" Usher CD. Even if it has a little more artwork, it's just not enough of an incentive.

Where is this going? I'm getting lost here. Anyway — the luxury goods arena is special case and it is beautiful in its nebulousness. It becomes a weird philosophical exercise, a conundrum, a labyrinth — thinking about stuff that has added value attached, that's worth a lot more — combined with the fact that you can't measure see or perceive in any way what makes that thing worth more. The aura comes from outside the object, it's not intrinsic.

It's as if I had two apples, not exactly the same, but pretty close to one another, and one had a brand name on it — and therefore I could charge about 3 times as much for it.

Flying over snow-capped peaks now. About another hour to LAX... maybe less, as I think the smog that flows from the L.A. basin eastward, cascading over ranges of hills and into valley after valley, is becoming visible.