The Music Business Is Broken, and Everybody Knows It

Stuck in a system that only benefits a select few, the music community is struggling to even imagine viable alternatives.

Back in 2016, documentarian Adam Curtis released HyperNormalisation, which opened with the following words:

We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world. Suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them, and no one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.

Sound familiar?

Curtis, whose body of work is admittedly filled with similarly bleak films, explained the concept behind HyperNormalisation in an article for AdBusters:

“HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.

This framework can obviously be applied to all sorts of different situations, the most troubling of which tend to be geopolitical and macroeconomic in nature. Yet even when the stakes don’t quite reach the level of potential fascist takeovers, large-scale wars and / or societal collapse, the idea of hypernormalization—yes, I’ve switched to the American spelling—is still relevant. Swap out the words “Soviet society” for “music industry” in the passage above, and Curtis’ words start to look a whole lot like a description of the contemporary music landscape.