Jean-Michel Jarre: The Music Industry Needs A Complete Revamp
Audi recently gathered several of the most iconic names in sound to discuss the future of the music industry, creating a symposium they named Audi-O-Rama.
Electronic music icon Jean-Michel Jarre, so forward-thinking throughout his career (he practically invented the concept of multimedia concerts) was there to discuss how the modern music industry needs to change.
How do you feel about the music industry?
Music has never generated so much money, with the authors gaining so little. Step by step the music industry made mistake after mistake.
The first dark move was the CD era. Then the fact that the industry that created pirate radio wanted to put pirates in jail 25 years later. Then when the industry was dying, Apple came along and said they were the saviours. Steve Jobs said he was the saviour of the industry, and it got even worse.
Now Spotify is valued at $4 billion, we are virtually shareholders in the company, but what we get at the end of the year is the equivalent to the price of a pizza, without anchovies.
If we’re talking about the future of music, we need to create a new business model for music. And beyond music - for movies, for photographs, for books.
I’m not pessimistic, but we have to make noise. We should send a clear message. It’s not a problem for the niche musicians in Europe and America, sitting on their pot of gold. It’s far beyond this..
It’s a problem involving every family in the world. In every family, you have a father, a mother, a brother, a sister. [That might be] a filmmaker, a photographer, a musician who is not going to be able to live their dream. They’ll have a job on the side and end up giving up. This is something we have to address.
This is beyond the idea of rights and money, it’s a philosophical and social concept about what intellectual property means. It’s one of the big challenges of the 21st century.
People now make their own playlists from lots of different albums. Is the album as an art form still important for artists?
There’s been a revival of vinyl. People are discovering again how important it is that music lasts. We are also living in a world where we’re in constant zapping mode on the internet, where we have the focus time of two minutes on YouTube, but we can also watch hours of ‘True Detective’ without sleeping. So our relationship with our cultural content is changing. It is up to the artist to create a piece of music that can last for eight hours.
You pioneered performance as a key element of electronic music…
Rock music was designed and devised as performance, for playing music and sharing music. Electronic music was the reverse - it was designed and devised in studios, so it was a problem putting it on stage. People were hiding behind their synthesisers for two hours, it wasn’t the sexiest thing in life.
And people were listening to music everywhere, in the car, in the street with the first Walkman, and they were listening to music at home. So people were starting to go to concerts to share a visual experience, to get some kind of visual correspondence with artists they like.
In those days I felt lots of places were not adapted for electronic music, more for jazz and rock. I thought electronic music belonged in outer space. So I linked architecture and visuals to the music, creating cinematography. We created the raves of the future.