Greet and gouge

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Following the whopping record-industry revenue loss reported in last week’s column, I wanted to plunge the knife in a little deeper and take a closer look. File-swapping may be the industry’s scapegoat, but most of the problem lies with major-label myopia.

Look up, look way, way up. There, kissing the clouds in their ivory towers, are the suits at the biggest U.S. CD retailer, Wal-Mart, which overtook its chief competitor, Target, in 2004, and hasn’t looked back since. If there was ever a reason to get your music illegally, it’s Wal-Mart—applicable here as the chain has extended its tentacles onto Canadian soil.

Despite being the Big Kahuna of digital disc sales, Wal-Mart only employs half as many CD buyers as the Ed McMahon of retail, Target. What that means is a narrower selection, resulting in fewer releases to choose from, with a set ceiling of only 5,000 titles at any given time—for every store in the country! Not only is Wal-Mart basically eliminating rack space for local bands by not employing regional buyers, it’s also implemented its own censor board, thus further stunting the creative world with oatmeal-flavoured middle-American “values.”

Wal-Mart’s biggest offence is that they also force majors to sell their CDs to them at a loss, which they in turn sell at a loss, thus crippling indie competition. Their price-gouged CD stock is merely a lure for automaton consumers, to steer them to more profitable merchandise and the bigger (i.e. more mundane) artists they stock. Wal-Mart’s ultimate intentions are as transparent as wet tissue—at the door, you walk past the elderly, smiling greeters, who are supposed to bring a sense of community to your shopping experience, before going to buy your Shania Twain CD for $10. To get to that pitch-corrected, ProTooled disc from that sassy lady from Timmins, Ont., you have to go past aisles of CD players, stereo equipment and—you guessed it—MP3 players (ah, the plot thickens).

This three-card monte sales tactic has worked like a charm for them for years. So why do the majors bend over for Wal-Mart? They take this loss because SoundScan registers these sales and majors use these numbers of “units moved” to entice other retail stores to stock more CDs, and to increase radio play and arena-show hype.

Seems to me that the major labels and major retail are pretty much steering your grubby mitts straight to those diabolical file-swappers, aren’t they? Now that you’re there, are you going to pay for the compressed mp3file, or grab it for free?

Next week: how file-sharing affects the indies, and how it actually helps music… I swear!

In other news, let me hip you to the show of the week. Waging war against the seven seas and general good taste, the good ship Death Boat docks at Petit Campus on Saturday, May 12. The eight-member crew of scurvy-ridden rock pirates mop the deck with sea-metal shanties like “Anal Caverns” and “Crabby Von Shitpants” for a motley crew of landlubbers, sea urchins and, uh, people with scatological preoccupations.

Real men don’t shop at Wal-Mart… Jonathan.cummins@gmail.com