PARTICLE

March 18, 2002
By Jon Pareles

Festival Is Upbeat Despite Music-Business Doldrums

AUSTIN, Tex., March 17 — The two dozen musicians and singers of the Polyphonic Spree, wearing white robes and broad smiles, started the 16th annual South by Southwest Music Festival here with a pop benediction for the doldrums of the music business. "You'll find that you're missing what others thought you had all the time," Tim DeLaughter sang, "And it's high but you're reaching, the trees are getting harder to climb."

With horns, flute and 10 backup singers chiming in on contrapuntal la-la's, the Polyphonic Spree revived the blissful, elaborate pop of "Penny Lane," "Pet Sounds" and "Happy Together." The group offered a purposeful burst of optimism for an event where a dip in superstar sales, and the fear that Internet file-swapping will make recordings less profitable, could not subdue the pleasures of live music or the ambitions of do-it-yourself bands.

There was an after-the-gold-rush tone to this annual convention, which is the largest music-business gathering in the United States. Major labels still sent talent scouts but sponsored fewer events. Internet start- ups, which since the late 1990's had hoped to build businesses around recorded music, were almost absent, as major labels have been reluctant to license hit songs to them.

The recession, fear of flying after Sept. 11 and the weakness of the euro were also reflected in the convention's attendance. Approximately 6,500 people came, down by about 15 percent from a peak last year, said Roland Swenson, the managing director of South by Southwest. "We mirror the business, such as it is," he added. "But it's a carnival mirror."

More than 900 bands performed during the convention, including groups from Sweden, Japan, Iceland and Brazil. And as executives contemplated what Robbie Robertson of the Band called "doom and gloom" in his keynote speech, audiences packed the clubs, cheering and dancing to music that found its rewards in the moment rather than on the charts.

Jubilation greeted Kinky, a band from Monterrey, Mexico, that knocks out dance grooves built from funk, rock and trance; occasionally, it tops them with a lick of Tex-Mex accordion. Eels, including Joe Gore from P. J. Harvey's band on guitar, played songs full of bleak pessimism and wary hope, with stark riffs and sudden jolts of distortion. Petty Booka, a Hawaiian-flavored Japanese group, had two young women wearing leis and strumming ukuleles, harmonizing songs by Patsy Cline and the Ramones.

By day, recording executives described a rudderless business. Hilary Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group, compared the labels' insistence on selling music as albums — rather than singles, individual compilations or Internet subscriptions, among other possibilities — to offering Coca-Cola only in a 64-ounce bottle. But if the labels were to offer music more cheaply and flexibly on the Internet, she said, they feared offending the CD retailers who currently sell 99 percent of
recordings.

"Record companies have been trying to serve too many masters other than the consumer," she said. "It hasn't been a successful strategy." The cost of promotion to retail stores and radio stations has made an act that aims for the Top 40 a million- dollar investment. Yet there was a glimmer of hope in the example of the movie soundtrack "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," an album that has sold millions of copies although it's a collection of old songs, simply recorded, that was largely ignored by country radio stations.

Miles Copeland, president of Ark 21 Records, warned that the CD business could be destroyed entirely in three years by the availability of free music on the Internet. "We have a serious problem with the industry," he said. "We don't have a way to solve it. They're grasping at straws." He also complained about greedy musicians, saying that if they insist on getting a larger share of their profits on hit recordings, recording companies will have less to invest in struggling bands. He suggested that future musicians should sign a single contract for all their enterprises — recordings, tours, merchandise, publishing, management — so that each could support the other. (A similar system, instituted by Motown in the 1960's, left many musicians feeling bitterly exploited.)

Courtney Love, the songwriter and leader of Hole, had little sympathy for recording companies. She has had a three-year legal battle over her contract with Vivendi Universal, the conglomerate that bought the label that signed Hole. She denounced the "short-term thinking" of current record labels. As mergers have made recording companies parts of large corporations, she argued, the pressure to show strong quarterly results to shareholders has caused the labels to seek quick hits rather than lasting music.

By contrast, the bands in the clubs had long memories. Most of the previous century of music was represented at South by Southwest. There was raw-boned Mississippi blues from T-Model Ford; Texas honky- tonk from the Flatlanders; punk- rock from the Briefs; hip-hop from the Anti-Pop Consortium; robotic, keyboard-driven late-1970's-style rock from Clinic; frisky power pop by the Revs, and jam-band funk and rock from Particle and the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.

The sound of mid-1960's garage bands and psychedelia was all over the festival: in the pounding three- chord songs of the Soundtrack of Our Lives and the Greenhornes, in the drone-based, dramatically surging jams of the Warlocks and in the wailing, extending freakouts of Acid Mothers Temple, a Japanese band that also threw in some throat singing, creating two notes at once. Majestic electric-guitar soundscapes — droning, swelling, cresting, shrieking — were at the core of bands like Oceansize and Lift to Experience.

Austin has long been a bastion of meticulous singer-songwriters, and among the many who performed were Josh Ritter, solo on acoustic guitar, playing folky songs rich in metaphor and romance; Caitlin Cary, formerly of Whiskeytown, who shaped heartbreak into country- rock, and Neil Finn, who sang exquisitely melodic ruminations on mortality and longtime love.

For many of the bands at South by Southwest, expectations were considerably less exalted than a million- dollar deal. The Six Parts Seven, from Kent, Ohio, plays absorbing, serenely minimalist music built on subtly evolving guitar patterns. Tim Gerak, one of its guitarists, recently quit his day job. "If what we do could pay for itself," he said, "that's what we're looking for."