Gimme Some Truth: Music reference works in the digital age

Remember when content was king? It was one of the enduring myths of the tech bubble alongside stratospheric growth projections, the paperless office, etc. But where has the combo of new technology and open access media left the real value of content and scholarship?

Research used to be so much harder. If you regularly worked for a music paper you had access to a cuttings or back issue library, or so I am given to understand, never having worked for an ‘inkie’. Then there were the staples of a music writer’s bookshelf; The Guinness chart books, the excellent Trouser Press guides, Pete Frame’s exquisite Family Tree series – which never did quite fit said bookshelf – the Guinness (later Q) Book Of Rock Stars, etc. I did some editing on the latter and also wrote for the Guinness EPM (Encyclopaedia of Popular Music) for my sins. And there were also genre-specific titles, but nowhere near the plethora that emerged around the start of the nineties, seemingly driven by the back catalogue boom of CD – a point at which there also seemed to a growing recognition of the legitimacy of taking popular music ‘seriously’. (For some reason heavy metal guides seemed to proliferate, but there was a boom also in reggae, blues and, from a standing start, hip hop tomes as the decade progressed).

But that cottage industry has been decimated by the advent of Wikipedia, blogs and fan sites. The first selling point of many of those standard texts was that they contained more raw detail than you could find elsewhere. That’s something that no print publication will ever again be able to claim. The second was the quality and integrity of information. Now, in many cases those claims were utterly bogus – you only have to read Bill Drummond’s 45 to find out how someone allocating you the wrong birthplace in one publication soon becomes a viral untruth, with efforts to disprove a widely held falsehood descending into Kafkaesque farce. Generally speaking, the works were well researched and fact-checked. But now, if you want specific information, beyond the potted histories that even an enterprise as huge as the online (and occasionally printed) All Music Guide can offer, you are going to hit the band’s fan websites, official or otherwise. Not least because the hyperlinking allows quick and easy access to supplementary information, commentary and often direct link purchasing. And, of course, the information is usually current and regularly updated. And sometimes, heavens to Betsy, you can even listen to the music itself – which really cuts out the middle man when you’re struggling to find the most piquant bon mots to convey the genius of Test Department’s Pax Britannica.

The Encyclopaedia of Popular Music (which passed through various owners, from Guinness to Virgin to Oxford University Press; who have finally put it online on a charged basis) was never going to be able to compete against fleeter footed types. Slow to acknowledge the threat of the internet, it did contribute content to Microsoft’s ‘Music Central’ during that brief early 90s gold rush when it was widely held that anything of value could be sold on a CD for, say, £390. The EPM database was eventually purchased by Muze in the late 90s, who then got into a few legal scrapes with AMG’s owners, which was highly amusing at the time. I remember being very disappointed when my summons to give evidence in New York didn’t materialise, despite a flurry of legal correspondence over the similarity of entries on, if I remember correctly, Roxanne Shante. But in terms of licensing content to various retail and online outlets, a market which AMG had long since sewn up, the EPM never made up lost ground. Its skeleton staff – not that it ever employed more than a core of three or four alongside a multitude of freelances – were laid off at the end of last year.

There used to be an element of ‘discovery’ and ‘retention’ in working on research in this field. You could satisfy yourself with unearthing some little nugget that had escaped others. And you felt you had custody of it for at least a little while. Now, any snippet is immediately duplicated, disseminated or repudiated, across the cyber universe. In theory that places greater emphasis on writing considered articles with textural depth whose value can less easily be xeroxed. But then when your material can be ‘re-hosted’ with near impunity, it’s cold comfort. And the logical conclusion that we’re heading to an ‘all information is (nearly) free’ destination comes with Google’s initiative to make books available for free online access and the resultant settlement of a class action by publishers and authors’ representatives.

Now there are good and bad points in the settlement. I will be the first to acknowledge how useful it will be to reference out of print books for my own research purposes. The income, though terribly minor, will be a boon to authors. Google would argue that it’s a meritocratic solution too; that the higher the residual value of your work, the more income will be generated. However, of the four tiers of income currently identified, the one thought by the Society Of Authors to be the most lucrative – a licence for unlimited access by academic institutions – is on a flat-fee basis.

In effect, Google, Wikipedia and such likeminded aggregators (of which, of course, rocksbackpages is tangentially linked) have become our new encyclopaedias and reference works. Our cyber bookshelf. But what worries me is, who is going to set store by the thorough research and investigation that the aggregators draw down when the commercial value of that content has sunk to such a low level?

Wikipedia is undoubtedly the enfant terrible of this brave new world – especially so if you ever drew a salary from the traditional reference industry. Many of us are well aware of the pitfalls of over-reliance on ‘wiki-wisdom’. If you’re a journalist on either the New York or London Times, you will have been informed quite specifically that it cannot be used as a legitimate source. There are various academic staff likely to turn puce should you cite it in your footnotes. Yet it would be churlish for most of us (myself included) not to admit that its our first destination as a research tool; offering a snapshot overview before the real digging begins.

What the new Wiki paradigm lacks most of all, however, is objectivity – which Wiki readily admits. In fact, its rebuttal of any such possibility is enshrined in its guidelines. “There is no such thing as objectivity,” it states. “Everybody with any philosophical sophistication knows that,” it further chides. Instead it refers to its ‘neutral point of view’. Hence:
“This is probably the most common objection to the neutrality policy, as well as the most common misunderstanding of it. The policy makes no epistemological judgments as to the existence of an ultimate objectivity in writing: a “view from nowhere” to use Thomas Nagel’s phrase. Rather, the policy is simply that we should describe disputes, not engage in them.
If there is anything possibly contentious about the policy along these lines, it is the implication that it is possible to describe disputes in such a way that material from all reliable sources is presented comprehensively and neutrally. Whether this is possible is an empirical question, not a philosophical one.”

Isn’t ‘neutrality’ just about interchangeable with ‘objectivity’ as a concept herein, philosophically and empirically? Before drowning in semantics here, what’s important is that, in practical terms, the medium is massively open to abuse. I have been asked (and paid) to write Wikipedia entries for record companies (on the strict understanding that the content would be wholly factual). I’ve edited some frankly terrible grammar on the pages of artists I like, just for the hell of it. If I find similar errors on the pages of artists I don’t like or am not interested in, I can’t be arsed. At a very mundane level, it’s therefore possible to understand that artist A’s page might be expanded and improved upon over artist B’s, with all the concomitant promotional dividends, simply by whim. I’m not being objective. But I’m darned if I’m being neutral, either.

It’s an interesting conundrum to wonder what the motives of other contributors might be. Wiki clearly has a large number of well-intentioned ‘good eggs’. But does it produce balanced, contextually appropriate results when entries often appear as an act of explicit advocacy of its subject? Aside from original composition, it’s obvious that there are paid and unpaid custodians of information regarding specific interests. I checked in on one obscure artist on Wiki and found them to have an entry roughly three times, in proportion to impact and record sales, that their stature would appear to entitle them to. Why? Not because they have a very active fan base; they don’t. But they have one very, very active fan.

The traditional music press may not always have played fair in this regard – far from it – but there did seem to be at least some broad ideal of editorial independence or distance. And editors of reference works always prided themselves on their scrupulousness, even if some never lived up to it. I’ll leave the horror stories for another time.

The other policy statement that’s pertinent here is that “Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought”. Sounds a bit Orwellian, doesn’t it? It’s consistent with the site’s other policies, but it is an admission that Wiki isn’t the straight replacement for the well researched encyclopaedia that many presume it to be; merely an aggregator of published facts, opinions and data. Then again, any new research usually shows up on it pretty quickly as soon as it’s in the public domain. In that sense it’s voraciously parasitic. And yet, as its co-founder Sanger once noted, its open armed plurality generates an innate disdain for ‘expertise’ – be that expert an emeritus professor in ancient civilisations, or indeed, your would-be pop historian.

Wiki represents a fairly utopian notion; that contributors and editors will deport themselves with unassailable decorum without the need for any central control checks beyond a dedicated community of sysops or monitors. Some have scoffed at such an anarchist premise (Wiki founder Jimmy Wales has self-defined himself as an objectivist and ‘reluctant libertarian’), and it’s little wonder that such august bodies as the Encyclopaedia Britannica have been scathing in its criticism. The latter’s Jorge Cauz, pointed out that “Wikipedia contributes to the spread of information and many people are happy with it as their only source of reference, as are many people happy to eat McDonald’s every day.” Ouch. Not that he doesn’t have a track record for such high-handed aphorism. In 2006 he told the New Yorker that “Wikipedia is to Britannica as America Idol is to the Julliard School.” Yet, starting from February 2009, the Britannica invited visitors and readers of its free online division to contribute proposed changes to editors. Which, I guess, is kind of like serving fries with caviar, or running a symphony quartet through a Marshall stack. Or something. Anyway, I doubt very much whether I’ll be able to find out what The June Brides’ second single was from the EB.

Other online open access fora are equally open to manipulation. In one recent case, a high-profile PR working on CD re-release I was co-ordinating admonished me when I objected to his campaign strategy of instantly posting five-star reviews on Amazon and other sites. “Everyone does it,” quoth he. When I objected, he backed down. Then did it anyway. Marketeers and their equivalents are working to a pure capitalist agenda – assessing the weaknesses and ‘gaps’ in the information marketplace, and profiting accordingly. Just as record companies are now recruiting ‘specialists’ in social networking sites and search engine optimisation where they once planted news stories or demanded features in return for paid advertising.

Wiki and its ilk have encouraged both best and worst practice. In the latter category, I have seen record company press releases which consist entirely of material lifted verbatim from Wiki pages. Sometimes one wonders how Wikipedia itself gets away with regurgitating the work of others. On a brighter note, it’s conversely marginalised plagiarism to a degree. There is simply little point, as arguably there once was commercially, in writing an article or entry for a reference work that isn’t drawn from original research. In that manner, the Wiki refutation of the ‘original idea’ has opened a space, and imperative, for it to blossom elsewhere.

So here I sit, with my carefully indexed collection of Qs, Mojos, Record Collectors and the like, a minor rainforest of fanzines and heaving bookshelves full of discographies, record guides and encylopaediae (as us old-schoolers would have the plural). Much of it, effectively, redundant. Any takers?

(Wikipedia was widely consulted in writing this piece. I admit it. If anyone is prepared to knock together a wiki for me, I’ll do the same for you – written from a neutral point of view, with no aspirations to objectivity, naturally)