Schools and universities across the country are starting up again for a new year, but they are missing a few students. The heads of the major record labels need to go back to business school for a quick refresher course to help out their ailing companies.

It seems to me that record labels these days are so caught up in the changing dynamics of the industry that they are forgetting the principles of basic sales. The idea of selling something isn’t to harass people about why they shouldn’t do something (like download MP3 files illegally), it’s about overcoming the objections that stop them from doing what you want (like buying a CD or legal music file) in a positive way. Labels should be better explaining why buying music legitmately is better for people. They need to make sure that people understand why their way is better for the customer than what they are doing now, pirating music. And if it isn’t (in the customer’s opinion, not the label’s), they need to develop some new product or process that is.

The key here is “better for the customer”, the music fan, the people. The people who, at the moment, don’t trust the record labels. Everything I’ve seen and read about the big record labels, and even a lot of smaller indie ones, suggests to me that they are way too focused on themselves. They just want to better themselves and their artists and don’t care all that much about the people who pay their salaries, their customers. But guess what. In business, it’s not the company CEO who calls the shots. It’s the market, the customer base. And right now, they are revolting. There is a battle going on, and the labels just keep looking for bigger guns. Instead of finding out what the customers really want, or even nicely explaining to them why things cost money, they blindly defend their ignorance in a futile attempt to survive.

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Dehumanizing Music: Kraftwerk Seeks Musical Purity Through Technology
Gregory E. Pilling

Kraftwerk is the name assumed by four Germans who have had an extremely dramatic impact on music as we know it. They knowingly established the electronic music genre in an attempt to create a pure musical sound based on the precision of new computer technology, free from the influence of humans and their imperfect capabilities. In the early 1970s, Kraftwerk pioneered this creation of computer-based music with their use of technological devices like synthesizers and home-made drum machines, which were still in their earliest stages of development at the time. Hundreds of musicians worldwide have been greatly influenced by the sound and aesthetic they developed. Without Kraftwerk’s influence in the underground electronic culture early on, music genres like industrial, techno, dance, new wave, synthpop, and certainly electronic would have never developed into what we know today. Every aspect of the band, from their music down to the way they acted on stage and in public, epitomized their belief in a total electronic aesthetic and the rejection of human involvement in their lives.

Early electronic music has many roots deep in mid-century Europe, particularly in Germany, from a small cluster of creative geniuses who were probably the anti-social computer nerds of their time, on the fringe of society. They were bothered by the fame and fashion that surrounded popular music at the time, and they were unsatisfied with its sound, inspired by human emotions, so they decided to set out on a course that would eventually change how we understand music today. Being Dadaists of music, they shunned contemporary ideas of what music was and should be, and rejected the traditional instruments that were used to make it. No longer would music have to be created by the talents of mere humans. But who were these forward-looking visionaries of sound? They were music groups like Kraftwerk, Can, and Neu!, Kraftwerk being the most recognized and famous of them all.

All of this was taking place at a time when new technological innovations were being made every day. The 1960s and 70s saw the earliest development of computer technology to help aid universities and businesses, and one day the personal user, but Kraftwerk saw a different use for all of this new-fangled circuitry; music. If someone could figure out how to utilize this equipment, which often makes alien sounding beeps and blips, a new form of electronically created music would literally be invented in front of their eyes. Unfortunately for them, the members of Kraftwerk were not the only eccentrics with this idea in mind. A few other bands and early computer technicians were on the same page, but that only benefited Kraftwerk in their efforts to dominate the infancy of electronic music.

Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter were students in Germany during the 1960s, and they shared a common interest in the German music scene which came to be known as “Krautrock”, which is usually characterized by an experimental use of non-musical sounds, noise, and language, and has a rather spacey atmosphere. The earliest lineup in which Schneider and Hütter performed together was actually with Kraftwerk’s predecessor, a short lived project called Organisation, in 1970. There were several other members of Organisation, but only these two founding members went on to form Kraftwerk. Likewise, the early Kraftwerk lineup shifted several times, and once even contained guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger who later went on to form another influential band of the time, Neu!, but Schneider and Hütter stayed with the band all the way through. The most recognizable Kraftwerk formation consisted of the two founding members plus Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, both of whom were electronic percussionists. Throughout the early part of Kraftwerk’s career, significant input was also provided by renowned producer ‘Conny’ Plank, who also worked with other respectable experimental and electronic bands of the time.

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