Australia's Possible Lip-Sync Law: Would a U.S. Law Benefit the Music Industry?

The pop music industry may be having a huge problem on its...well, lips in the near future. No, this has nothing to do with the slower sales of music in recent years or American Idol getting a pink slip from Fox. It all starts on the tomorrow side of the International Dateline and in Australia where the government of Victoria and other Oz states are finding serious promotional fault with pop stars using lip-syncing in their shows. We're not talking local acts (who, ironically, really do sing--no matter how tone deaf), but international superstars who've already long-conformed to the thought that the public will accept a lip-synced performance.

And it was all instigated by the music industry that backed it when nobody noticed.

Australia isn't directly irked by an artist using lip-syncing during a concert. It's in the refusal of management for Top 40 acts indicating on the ticket stub whether the singer or group will lip-sync during much of a concert. Although you can't help but think this as a secret Aussie plan to corner the lip-syncing issue once and for all. If Australia implements a lip-sync law, it'll put the entire pop music industry behind the blackball and into a quandary for the first time about revealing their shortcomings.

Lest we forget, though, that lip-syncing was once a necessary process in the world of singers performing on TV before it became the crutch for vocally-challenged and dancing pop tweens. If you want to blame the British for starting everything in entertainment, then you can this time. They began the trend of lip-syncing once the rock era started and a bevy of singers were trotted out to the public with little to no singing skills.

What sold these bubble gum stars, of course, were assembly line songs with cool hooks. When required to go on a music-oriented show to dance while singing, the problem of sounding like the original recording while moving around during a production number had to be solved. It wasn't lost on anybody that what sounded good on record wasn't going to translate well in a live setting let alone attempting to sing while doing The Twist with a group of go-go dancers.

Today, it might boggle the mind to see how British teens and adults tolerated musical acts for so long obviously lip-syncing to their studio recording on TV shows. The only wide chasm between then and now, however, was that they usually sang live when going on tour--sometimes with mixed results, if at least being real.

How the American music industry managed to make the public accept pop stars lip-syncing in a concert with expensive ticket prices is one of the perfect examples of manipulation under the populace's noses for the sake of profit. Shelve it next to all the financial and political scams of our history that went undetected for years.

With that context in mind, how would the American music industry handle it if our consumer-watching government took the Australian philosophy and told concert promoters to reveal the truth about lip-syncing?
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The immediate thought of the above situation might be what we saw of the financial titans who bilked America: A meltdown and self-destruction out of fear. Not that we'd think music mavens would blow their brains out if they found out they might lose money revealing something they've banked on for decades. Give a big check mark to panic, though. One thing we've learned about big corporate structure is that when a big cash cow gets caught in the mousetrap, a lot of overdrive contrition starts to come out through the mouths of executives. It's based on getting caught with their pants down and revealing the contents of their wallets.

While Australia's possible law will affect the music industry here as well as every other country with artists who lip-sync in concerts, an American adoption of such a law could set up a massive house cleaning to make room for real singing talent. Or, if the music industry doesn't crumple up in panic from not knowing how to fix something, expect one other form of manipulation: Live singing with auto-tuning microphones.

We know the auto-tune process is already used in the studio with nearly every artist, even ones that don't necessarily need it. Whether you want to consider that another form of cheating during a live concert depends on whether you consider it an enhancement to performance rather than a crutch. It's a compromise that can put legalese to good use in being able to say on ticket stubs the performer really is singing.

It's either this scenario or the music industry capitulating to a law requiring admittance of lip-syncing in concerts. In said situation, would the public bring down all of our pop singers who really can't sing? We won't name names here when they're so patently obvious.

Acceptance of mediocre singing may be the only saving grace to that. There isn't a doubt we've evolved to the point where a great voice isn't needed to get into the Top 40. You can even say that the more raw and real the voice is, the more apt it is teens and 20-somethings will relate to and gravitate to them. It's where the words style and essence still survive.

If that's the direction the American music industry would take after scrambling around to avoid a consumer law, then a new type of singing would have to develop where sounding more natural and raw on a touring show would also have to cross over into the studio.

Whether that's the ultimate expression of music or the downfall of true talent in the world is a matter of the world populace's collective idea of what entertainment will become in the future.

Let them speak up about it now or forever hold a mute microphone.

Source:

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,28383,26311991-7484,00.html