The Death of the Priest Class

Do we need a “priest class” any more? 

Back when I had hair, and the Columbia Record Club was a thing, a small group of record company “priests” decided whether you got recorded and promoted.

 

These same gentlemen (always men) pocketed hundred dollar bills, lost $20 bills on bad risks, spent $5 on production and promotion, and paid artists pocket change. 

 

That was “the business” of music. 

The same thing happened with books, magazines, newspapers, and even movies. 

But we no longer live in the age of schooners and candles. 

It's 14 ADSJ (after the death of Steve Jobs), and no one needs to rent a recording studio or pay a 98 percent cut to the nameless and the faceless when, for $5,000, you can put a studio in your basement better than anything the Beatles ever recorded on. 

Want to publish? It’s free, and I assure you that your book will be as well promoted by yourself as any publishing house ever did. 

Let’s face it: publishers did next to nothing to promote 99.5 percent of all books. Ditto for the A&R guys in music. 

The real “job” in all these industries was controlling access to the the bottleneck of production and promotion that went to stores — stores which mostly no longer exist in a world in which books and newspapers do not depend on paper or ink, and music needs no vinyl. 

If you’re writing something with any kind of demand and sell 5,000 copies, that’s $50,000 in the door to you, and no publisher will pay you that sum for those kind of sales. 

The old guard in publishing, music, newspapers, and magazines have skills.... but also a lot of blind spots. You can be a blackbelt on the Oxford comma, and a whiz at reducing copy with an El Marko, but what do you know about Audible, Twitter, online marketing, and pod casts? What is best practice for paywalls, free first chapters, Google books, etc.? 

White folks (men mostly) sitting at the Big Table of book, magazine, music and newspaper publishing are  dying off because we don’t need priests anymore .... of any color, gender, or ethnicity any more than we need most brick and mortar stores. 

I download my music on the phone (or get it for free on streaming services), listen to books on Audible, crack open the ancient classics on archive, look up obscurity on Google, and repair the fridge base on a Youtube video while I cook a recipe I found on Pinterest. 

My kayaks came mail order to my door, as does most other stuff from coffee to shoes. 

No one buys paper maps anymore.

Books?

You mean those things holding down the little tables by the bed and the big chairs?

As Donald McCaig once noted to me, who is reading books these days? We’re all reading Twitter and Facebook, emails and web sites. 

All editors want to imagine they are Max Perkins, and some are.... but that economic world is not coming back, and it’s not clear it needs to. 

The bitter truth is that there’s more great research, writing, photography, graphic design, music, and film today than ever before. The proof is in the pudding, and the only place where things have well and truly gone to shit is television news. 

So who is the new Priest Class? 

We all are. 

We rank sellers and buyers on Ebay, forward thought and humor on Facebook, search for topics of interest on Google, compare prices and goods on Amazon, and we are all competing and playing on a relatively flat playing field. 

Mostly, it works.

What’s this have to do with dogs?

Quite a lot.

The Kennel Clubs and their mavens once put themselves out as “dog experts” who were breeding better or even “improving” dogs.

And then the Internet happened, and we could all look up the data for ourselves. 

Whoops! 

Kennel Club dogs were not only *not* better; in far too many cases they were qualitatively worse.

And if scores of health studies based on hundreds of thousands of records collected over decades was too much to digest, you only had to go to the video tape to put a face on it, or a pet insurance site to put a dollar figure on it.

The result; a dramatic decline in Kennel Club registrations even though more Americans own more dogs than ever before.

If not yet quite dead, the Kennel Club “priest” is very sick and bed-ridden, even as dogs in general are doing better than ever.

Are there people out there who miss the priest class?  I’m sure there are, but I doubt many choir boys or their parents can be counted in their number.