Today, back catalogue sales account for much of the revenue generated by record companies. Here, producer Martyn Ware considers what will happen when there is no longer any back catalogue left to exploit...
If there's one thing that bugs me about the UK music industry — and one thing that I feel ought to be improved — it's the way that young talent is mistreated by the abuse of resources. New acts are not being given enough support to develop.
For some years now, record companies have been milking their back catalogues, but like North Sea Oil, these are not unlimited resources. Inevitably, they will peter out, and unless these companies start investing in new talent, there will be nothing to replace them with. All labels are doing is looking for elusive 'superhit' singles that they hope will sell albums — and yet they're still struggling to break acts in the albums market, because they are increasingly signing acts on just singles deals. This means that producers like myself are being asked to deliver miracles with one single — and even if it is a hit, there's no further material to back it up. You get a mad scramble to cobble together enough tracks for an album in a very short period of time. It's not exactly forward‑thinking, and personally, I think it's very worrying.
At the moment, record companies are guilty of putting the cart before the horse in a way that makes no economic sense at all. In the good old days, if you like, A&R staff had a genuine degree of autonomy, and were given a budget to develop their own acts in the way they saw fit. These budgets were usually album budgets, and acts would be signed for a minimum of three, and a maximum of eight, albums. When the album was recorded, it would be a genuine representation of the band at that point in their career. Only then would the record company select the tracks that would be released as singles.
Britain has always had an international reputation for creating interesting music, but right now our position on the world stage is becoming a pathetic joke, because record companies have set up an infrastructure where they spend a pitiful amount on a new act, build up their hopes, and then drop them when the single fails to chart. As a result, our domestic market is withering on the vine, and the public is having to put up with a load of one‑off singles, with very few interesting new acts coming through on the album front.
This system is also incredibly unfair, because these young bands are not battle‑hardened veterans. They can't deal with this kind of cynicism, and if they are dropped, they are often destroyed. As a result, we all lose out, because a lot of talent is lost with them — talent that could have turned into the back catalogue of the future, if only it had been nurtured and allowed time to develop.
One way to ease this situation would be for the BPI to come to an arrangement with all UK record companies that allowed for first albums to be released at budget price. This would encourage the public to buy material from relatively unknown bands — something they are not prepared to do at the moment, when every CD costs the best part of £15. Record company No Risk Disk initiatives are a step in the right direction, but we need to do more.
At first sight, it may seem that all this has little to do with me, or with any other producer. But in fact, it has an enormous impact, because none of us can guarantee that the work we do with young bands will ever be heard by the public. No matter how good a track is, it is not unusual for record companies to spend more money on remixes than they do on the original recording. Of course, this raises the stakes even more, because if the label doesn't recoup its investment by getting a Top 20 hit, it drops the band. But who actually wants a CD single with five versions of the same track by an as‑yet‑unknown band?
In the end, I can't complain — I make a living out of what I do, and enjoy doing it. But my heart aches for the broken dreams of a lot of young and talented people. For instance, there's a band called Liberty that won Capital Radio's Young Bands competition two years ago, and to this date they still don't have a deal. I've kept in contact with them, and tried to help them, because I really believe they have a marketable talent, but this band is so hard up that there are times when they can't even afford the price of a tube ticket to come and see me.
The fact is that these days very few bands get signed on the strength of a demo, no matter how good it is, and to me that seems a terrible waste. The most common way bands get deals is through knowing someone in the business who can put their names forward to the appropriate decision‑makers. I can't help thinking there is something wrong when the Phil Collinses and Elton Johns of this world get such massive marketing budgets, while the future is so obviously neglected.
Martyn Ware was a founder member of The Human League in the late 1970s, but left the band after two successful albums to form Heaven 17 with fellow League member Ian Craig Marsh. After enjoying worldwide success, Martyn struck out as an independent producer, and garnered widespread acclaim as the producer of many top‑flight '80s acts, including Tina Turner, Scritti Politti, Terence Trent D'Arby, and The Style Council. In the last two years, he has enjoyed further success as the producer of Erasure's smash album I Say I Say I Say and hit singles by Joe Roberts and Lena Fiagbe. Martyn remains busy in 1995, following work on new albums by Alison Moyet and Marc Almond.