Back to the Future: Kot and DeRo talk past, present and future

By Liam Warfield

Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis seem to be preaching to the choir. The longtime hosts of NPR’s “Sound Opinions” (and rock scribes for the Tribune and Sun-Times, respectively) are at Columbia College to discuss the Future of Music, and the young crowd is well-primed for their gospel of free file-sharing, liberalized copyright law and the obsolescence of major labels. Already well-acquainted, presumably, with the illegal download, several early arrivals have been fiddling with their iPods as the room fills up. “Technically, I would guess that everybody in this room is a criminal, based on the copyright laws in this country,” Kot opines, noting that peer-to-peer downloads now outnumber paid downloads forty to one.

Bad news for the major labels, of course. Placing the music industry’s “seismic change” in historical context, Kot and DeRogatis evoke the advent of wax cylinders and the emergence of cassette tapes, developments which sent the industry’s old guard into similar states of panic—though this time around the worry seems justified, the Big Four labels having seen a thirty percent decline in revenue over the last few years. These slow-moving industry giants are finally waking up to the new standard—Atlantic Records announced last week that digital sales were outpacing physical sales, a first for a major label. But while the majors scratch their heads and try to regroup, it remains something of a Wild West out there, the rules not yet written. The industry is “desperate for new ideas,” Kot says.

As music fans, Kot and DeRogatis are clearly excited about the possibilities. “If people are asking, ‘what’s the pie-in-the-sky future?’, it’s every song ever recorded, available at the touch of a button,” Kot asserts, calling this a “distinct possibility” within five to ten years. But in many ways, the revolution doesn’t seem all that, well, revolutionary. Kot hails Radiohead’s paradigm-defining model of pay-what-you-will downloads. It’s what he describes as the “tip-jar model,” hardly a new concept. “In the Middle Ages, the traveling troubadour took out his mandolin,” DeRogatis recounts professorially, “and he put out his hat, and if he was a good player, he got enough coins in his hat to eat that night.”

Their vision of the revolution, in fact, has a wholesome, old-fashioned ring to it. Kot talks about the emergence of a “musical middle class,” bands with a modest, internet-cultivated fan base bypassing the industry middle-men and piecing together a living from concert ticket sales and ground-level merchandising. Which is what a lot of bands have been doing all along; the new model, in many ways, is not so much a novel invention as a vindication of time-tested indie principles.

All of which, they posit, may well render the majors obsolete. DeRogatis is blunt in his assessment: “I think they¹re pointless,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any need for them whatsoever.” There’s little room in the digital future, he and Kot insist, for the type of “macro thinking” which deems a band like The Flaming Lips a major-label disaster for selling a mere half-million records. Kot foresees a more “modestly scaled” music industry based on direct artist-fan relationships. The notion is almost Obama-esque in its gentle pragmatism.

Kot and DeRogatis’ take on copyright law is similarly cool-headed. The current approach to copyright law, which Kot calls “a very draconian attitude toward artistic invention” (and indeed, the Bush administration recently appointed a sinister-sounding, cabinet-level “copyright czar”), is, he reminds us, a fairly new development. Musicians and music-lovers have always borrowed liberally. “Robert Johnson stole freely from Charlie Patton, who stole freely from Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Muddy Waters stole freely from all of them,” Kot notes. The possibilities for copyright-bending cross-pollination offered by digital technology are simply a modern twist on a classic impulse, though industry people haven’t quite come to terms with it. DeRogatis cites Girl Talk, a Pittsburgh mash-up artist known for cramming hundreds of pirated samples into a single album, as the type of copyright-flouting artist which the industry has yet to get a handle on. “On the one hand they want to kill him, and on the other hand they want to hire him,” he jokes.

If there’s anything truly striking in Kot and DeRogatis’ appraisal, it’s the implicit revelation that, in some ways, very little has in fact changed. Musicians still borrow from other musicians. Duh. People still want free (or reasonably priced) music. Double duh. That these basic truths are finally biting the record industry in the ass is a relief, if not a shock.

Though obviously gleeful at the industry’s recent comeuppance, Kot and DeRogatis can’t start dancing on its grave just yet—it’s still their meal ticket, after all. Bringing the evening’s Q&A to an abrupt halt, DeRogatis apologizes, with mock-exasperation, for their hasty departure. “We have to go cover the fucking Grammys,” he shrugs.