Despite the format, the song remains the same

The music industry is changing but customers are still willing to pay for a good product, writes Rob Long

The video of Beyonce's new song Formation  pushes the boundaries of the traditional music video. Chris Graythen / Getty Images / AFP
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Sometime over the past week, in a daring and unannounced act of superstar confidence, the pop idol and cultural touchstone Beyoncé released her latest song, Formation. She just did it, suddenly, without a press release or a premiere party, without any of the usual things that accompany such events.

Despite its quiet release, Formation instantly became an internet and cultural sensation. Within hours, it was a blockbuster.

“Where can I hear it?” I asked a young friend of mine.

He looked at me quizzically. “Hear it?” he asked. “You don’t hear it. You watch it.”

And as he tapped on his phone a bit I could tell he was muttering something insulting under his breath. Something about how old I am. Something, I’m pretty sure, that contained the phrase, “old and in the way”.

It’s almost impossible to remember, but in the early 1990s, when I was just starting out in Hollywood – and had the beginnings of what we can euphemistically refer to as “money in my pocket” – I bought a fancy car with a 10-disc CD player sound system installed.

If you’re my age or older, the paragraph above needs no explanation. If you’re younger, let me offer some background:

In olden times, when tele­phones were large appliances about the size of a cabbage, people listened to music by placing a disc into (or onto) an electrical device. The truly ancient among us remember when these discs were made of vinyl, with the music etched onto the surface. The merely old can conjure up foggy recollections of “compact discs”, shiny and round plastic things, flatter than a pita, which stored the musical data digitally.

We bought these musical platters in places called “record stores”, which were actual physical places you had to enter in real life.

Back then, I remember spending Sunday nights at a famous spot called Tower Records, on Sunset Boulevard, buying fistfuls of CDs – Spin Doctors, Alice in Chains, Counting Crows, the Nirvana album with the naked baby on the cover – and sitting in the car park in a frenzy, ripping open the jewel boxes and loading them by the tens into my fancy car’s CD changer, and taking the long way home to the beach.

How did I choose what to buy? I simply wandered throughout the store and picked up what interested me, what I had heard about and what my friends were listening to. At places like Tower Records, which was located in the heart of the Sunset Strip and therefore the centre of the popular music business, there were listening stations all over the shop. You could listen to almost anything before you bought it.

There’s no way, of course, to bring back the splendid frustration of trying to open a brand-new CD – the plastic wrapping, the thick adhesive-tape label, the metallic band-aid sealing it all shut.

Tower Records went bankrupt years ago, a victim of the internet thing that the kids are so into. Downloading this and that with abandon, they’ve forgotten the old, simpler joys of yesteryear, when we all used to slice the tender skin just beneath the thumbnail, trying to open the latest U2 offering.

And maybe that’s all to the good. What was required, back then, to release music into the marketplace was a small army of shop owners, salesmen, display designers, radio disc jockeys, marketing mavens and landlords.

What is required, these days, is a spectacular and intriguing video and a willingness to take a risk. You used to have to drive to the record store and do a lot of work just to listen to new music. Now all you do is tap your phone once or twice.

My friend handed me his phone and showed me – which still seems like the wrong verb, even though it's the accurate way to put it – Beyoncé's new song, Formation.

It’s a mesmerising, deeply visual work that pushes the boundaries of the traditional music video. I’m not much of a Beyoncé fan – or wasn’t, until this song – but I’m not too old to discover something new.

Still, it was irritating that I was being forced to “watch” the song on YouTube. I don’t think it makes me hopelessly archaic to prefer listening to music. Tower Records may be long closed, but the joys of driving along a winding beach road listening to music are timeless.

“So where can we buy it?” I asked my friend. “So I can listen to it anytime.”

He sighed again. “You don’t buy it,” he said. “You get it on your music service.”

His tone of voice was uncalled for. I know what a “music service” is. In fact, I have three of them on my phone right now: Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play.

“It isn’t on any of those,” he said. “It’s on Tidal, which was started by Beyoncé’s husband.”

Ah. Of course. The music business may have changed over the years, but it’s still guided by the same basic economic rule: if the customer wants to listen, the customer is going to pay.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl