June 2001

THE WAVELENGTH GUIDE TO SELLING OUT BY DOC PICKLES

Tired of lining up for FACTOR grants? Sick of hawking your CDs to your friends? Your friendly forces of globalization are lending a helping hand to any indie artist with a bit of ambition. Now you'll just need to contact seven proper authorities in the entertainment complex to inform them that you've decided to sell out.

As an artist, entering this world means they get to own your intellectual property (the songs you write, the images you create, etc.), but the rewards are tremendous, as long as you can reconcile the fact that you are compromising your integrity to feed the machine. Presumably, if your reason for being a musician is to be a "success" and not an "artiste" then you won't have a problem with that. It's this concept of ownership that means Paul McCartney has to get Michael Jackson's permission to sell a Beatles song to a breakfast cereal company. Here is an overview:

BMG: BMG is owned by a German company called Bertelsmann. Heinrich Mohn, who took charge of the Bertelsmann house in 1921, was a founding member of the SS and made a fortune publishing Nazi material during the Third Reich. Suckling up to the BMG teat are: Run DMC, O-Town, Toni Braxton, Dido, Bruce Hornsby, Christina Aguilera, Alabama and the Foo Fighters. Bertelsmann had revenues of $16.3 billion in 2000. Bertelsmann also owns Britain's Channel 5, Lycos, Barnes & Noble, and Random House Books. Next to Volkswagen, BMG are the most successful company to be born out of the Third Reich. My struggle, indeed.

Sony: This Tokyo-based company is not as full of "synergies" as the rest of their global "competitors", but managed to rack up $46 billion in revenues between their 1,078 worldwide subsidiaries in 1997. They stick to pure entertainment - building their playstations, DVD and CD players, and selling you their content (video games, movies and music). They also own many television programs such as Dawson's Creek, Seinfeld, Jeopardy, The Young and the Restless and NewsRadio. Artists that Sony owns: Alice in Chains, Louis Armstrong, Loverboy, Kenny Loggins, Wu-Tang Clan, Mike Watt, Leonard Cohen and Miles Davis. What a wonderful world.

Universal: The mighty U is owned by Seagram, which is now owned by a private water consortium called Vivendi based in Paris, France. Vivendi, through Yahoo, is involved in an online music venture with Sony (see above), who is technically still a "competitor" with Universal. Vivendi had revenues of $41.8 billion in 1999 before their merger with Seagram. Vivendi are locked in a battle with America Online for control of the internet in France (see below). Some of Universal's artists/properties include: U2, the Ramones, Peter Gabriel, Kathie Lee Gifford (who used to work for ABC, which is owned by Disney, see below), Femi Kuti and PJ Harvey. Vivendi Universal also owns MP3.com, 60 publishing houses, Motown and Cineplex Odeon.

Warner: Artists contributing to the Warner Brothers-Time-Life-America Online empire in Dulles, Virginia (and their $31.8 billion in revenues in 2000) are: Madonna, Eric Clapton, R.E.M., Faith Hill, the Barenaked Ladies (on Reprise Records) and Enya. The parent company owns CNN, Time magazine, Fortune magazine, Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo and Ted Turner. A great example of "media synergy" can be found in an article on CNN.com on how fellow Time-Lifers the Barenaked Ladies are battling Napster with "trojan" downloads.

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in Sydney, Australia, which owns Fox TV, the New York Post, Harper Collins, and Star TV made a paltry 13.5 billion last year. Let's not forget Viacom, in New York City, which owns Paramount, Blockbuster, CBS (the company which created it and, after spinning it off, was later purchased by it!), MTV and VH-1 (talk about competition). And let's hear it for Disney, in Burbank, California, which owns everything else (ABC, ESPN, MGM studios, Touchstone, Miramax and Buena Vista).

That means, as an indie artist, you'll only have to give a grand total of seven blow jobs in order to sell out. One each to: Bertelsmann, Sony, Vivendi, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom and Time. That pretty much covers the lion's share of it. These companies, or their subsidiaries, can be found in any phone book, in any city, in the world. Happy sucking!