The Long View | The European Super League: a cautionary tale for music?

It’s reassuring how much of a shock the unveiling of the European Super League was, particularly for sports professionals. Just when we thought football couldn’t be monetised any more, along came a group of billionaires with a plan to seal the dozen ‘best’ (richest) teams off in a new-fangled private members club, against the wishes of almost all their stakeholders – players, fans, staff.

If it goes ahead, the European Super League will be the most boring football league ever: the spawn of a plan to capitalise on the sport’s entertainment value by sucking all the actual entertainment from it; football as a pay-per-view TV show with the same cast year-in-year-out. With local fans disenfranchised, high-end football will lose all sense of a live, site-specific event rooted in its community. That’s a cautionary tale for classical music’s upper echelons – their obsessive clinging to the same narrow list of superstars and their newfound desire to have every show beamed onto more and more screens around the world.

Football’s stealthy European power grab could only have happened at a time when fans were banished from stadia, when sport was an exclusively on-screen affair. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, asset strippers have talked of the ‘new normal’ in order to suppress our collective memory of what life was actually like when life was actually lived – as it can and will be again.

‘New normal’ sounds horribly stagnant. In classical music, we must imagine something better. That involves being on guard against ‘the pandemic’ as an excuse for selling off or dumbing down, for weakening, reducing and dividing – against a blind belief that our future is entirely digital when it self evidently isn’t. Adaptability and an internet connection got most our performers through the turbulence of the pandemic. They also reminded us that the live experience is paramount and unparalleled.

For the first time in 75 years, we have seen musical standards slip, and for acceptable reasons. One place they won’t be rising again any time soon is in the pit for The Phantom of the Opera. Andrew Lloyd-Webber could only have axed half the orchestra for the West End incarnation of his musical because the orchestra wasn’t present to protest or to strike. Nor, mirroring the empty football grounds, will there be an audience of punters and critics present to notice how suddenly synthetic the show’s music has become overnight.

We’re all getting used to bad, tinny sound and dishonest filtering just as we’re all getting used to being shut of out of football, only able to experience it from the other side of a screen with fake crowd noise slathered on top. The Really Useful Group must have concluded that this was the perfect time to water down The Phantom of the Opera’s music, with the suggestion that it’s all the audience expects.

At least that audience will make equivalent savings on the ticket price. Because that’s the plan, right? I feel for a Lloyd-Webber whose empire is under financial pressure. But the market will surely dictate that those musicians fired in 2021 won’t be re-hired when times are good again. That’s not how profit margins work.

Small public subsidies are meant to protect our more fragile domain from that sort of compromise, and they largely do. But there is reason to fear the strengthening of our very own two-tier system after Covid. Covent Garden has been heading there already, dividing opera runs into the Super League cast, the Premier League cast and the Reserve cast. The differentiation is arguably more connected to pulling power than vocal talent, but the messaging is unavoidable and, by association, undermining. It’s a filter-down model, they say, which helps bolster the coffers to support other shows and even the grass roots. Hmm…where have we heard that recently?

One firm prone to pumping out similar empty rhetoric is the streaming platform Spotify. Its treatment of musicians who aren’t already millionaires makes the European Super League’s ‘great sweating orgy of gullet-cramming avarice’ (Barney Ronay) seem positively philanthropic.

Swedes are a consensual bunch, so it’s been particularly interesting to watch the most famous Swedish musician, Björn Ulvaeus, turn on Sweden’s most famous technological export, Spotify. On the day I write this, in the heat of the Super League bunfight and in the very hour that Marcus Rashford has ridden Lohengrin-like into the debate as the most authoritative voice of moral reason, 150 well-known musicians and composers have written to the government to ask for a tweak in the law to make Spotify’s payments just a little bit fairer. In both cases, it’s looking like the Davids are on blistering form while the Goliaths are still in the dressing room.