David Bowie and The Beatles? The three greatest ‘industry plant’ bands in history
We’ve become obsessed with the term industry plant in recent years, and it is no small tragedy. In an era when the music industry is being beset by incumbent class disparities, continued misogyny and racism, rampant big-wig dividends, dwindling artist profit shares, and vital grassroots projects facing an existential economic threat, focusing a war of attention on the issue of mythic ‘industry plants’ is like fighting climate change by trying to find these bloody fire-breathing dragons and berate them into incombustible submission.
We’ve grown power hungry with our hankering to identify and call out so-called industry plants: ‘Royal Blood did something I didn’t like, and I personally have never liked their music either’ suddenly means industry plant; ‘Wet Leg are not the band I was hoping would be the big breakthrough indie act of the 2020s, and they’re women’. The result? Industry plant. This calculation seemingly stems from the increasingly conspiratorial nature of society coinciding with the strange modern philosophical desire to have the world around us fit our own exact spec of philosophical ideals—right down to the bands who ‘get big’.
However, what they fail to do is supply any evidence at all and simply twist the narrative of a band to fit their notion of ‘underserved popularity’ and posit that this is because of something sinister rather than a mere difference in taste. For evidence of this, you need to look no further than Wet Leg being called suspicious “overnight sensations” over ten years into their musical pursuit, which finally resulted in them finding a niche that was commercially concurrent.
Wet Leg’s arc helps to highlight how the mechanisms of the industry plant narrative are nonsensical. If bands are popular, it is because people like them. The term industry plant implies that these fans have, in fact, somehow been brainwashed into liking the artists. My friend is a huge fan of Wet Leg and recently described their live show as one of the best she has seen in a long time; has this friend’s enjoyment somehow been coerced by a sinister cabal within the industry? If she was woke enough to regard them as an industry plant, would she not like them and suddenly start exclusively listening to unsigned bands untainted by the disgusting ways of the ‘music industry’.
To break the argument down, there has been nothing purported as evidence of an industry plant that is not in keeping with the norms of a record label in the pop culture age: the job of a record label is to find artists that they think might be successful. They will then try to assist them on their journey through advice, funding, marketing, and getting them on the biggest stages that they can. Meanwhile, they will lobby the music press and promote the artist to the public. Through the lens of industry plant glasses, this is all a sinister scheme designed to get undeserving artists into a position of power and fool the public at large. In reality, it is all literally the job of a record label that hasn’t changed one iota since pop culture began.
The distinction that seems to have been forgotten in all of this is that the music industry is profit-driven, just like every other corporation. And in this case, its profits come from popularity. Perhaps because of the way we view the art of music as some sort of authentic transcendence of the soul over strife, we imbue the industry that supports this as having a similar sentiment. We want it to have its ear in the basements of this world, seeking the next humble star like Nick Drake, and give them a free creative license. And perhaps in a perfect world, they would support talent and artistic integrity uber-alles, but this is an ideological pipe dream. While many brilliant artists might indeed suffer because of the industry’s natural inclination to champion commercially inclined, manageable and mouldable acts, those who are backed towards success are there due to potential profitability by virtue of their popularity. Any suggestion of a conspiracy is either a gross misunderstanding of how the industry works or toxic cynicism, which has, by and large, railroaded further misogyny.
When heavily championing a band, what a label is doing is not some sort of evil conspiratorial hoodwinking of the masses, but rather keen economic strategising—the same savvy strategising that has changed the world countless times over thanks to brilliant artists that I can’t help but think would, unfortunately, be termed ‘industry plants’ and as evidence of this, I have compiled a few below.
That is not to say that everything the music industry does in the name of profit is acceptable – there are cover-ups, payola issues and other backhand tactics – it is just that exhausting our focus on industry plants is a sorry distraction. When tackling disparities in the music industry, we have to be careful that we’re not perpetuating a dangerous myth and losing sight of genuine problems. For instance, the reaction to Royal Blood’s silly little spat kicked up far more facile column inches than the impending loss of treasured grassroots venues like The Leadmill, the potential hammer-blow of AI’s incoming policy-less involvement in music, or, on a more celebratory note, the new all-female festival Higher Ground.
So, to ram this point home, let’s look at some of the great bands gone by who are in no way discernible from the modern artists being mindlessly tarnished with the tired industry plant brush.
The best industry plant bands:
The Beatles
“So, they sent them down from Liverpool,” George Martin recalled of his first meeting with The Beatles. “And when I listened to what they were doing, it was okay, but it wasn’t brilliant. It was okay, but I thought, ‘Why should I be interested in this?'” Even at that time, Martin was a highly revered producer working with some of the finest virtuosos on the British scene.
“But the magic bit came when I started to get to know them because they were terribly good people to know. They were funny, they were very clever, and they said all lovely things. And they were the kind of people that you liked to be with. So, I thought, ‘If I feel this way about them, other people will feel this way about them’. And therefore, they should be very popular,” Martin concluded. Take the heart and humanity out of that, and you have something not too dissimilar from the criticism hurled at industry plants owing to their commercialism and manageability being favoured over ‘talent’ and ‘originality’.
From the get-go, The Beatles were hyped up by Parlophone despite not being much more than a marketable boyband with middling musicianship singing pretty generic songs about hand-holding romances. And yet, somehow, within two years of signing, they had billboards plastered all over the cultural hive of America, stating: “The Beatles is coming”. This industry promotion helped to create a fan-driven hysteria that pushed them far beyond the profundity of the music they were producing at the time. But they had touched on a niche in society, and while some purists may not have liked this, they were a monumental success.
Liberated by this support, their talents continued to grow, and they rightfully earned the lauded place that had been set up for them. Does this make them an industry plant or just well-managed artists primed to ride the wave of the zeitgeist?
The Sex Pistols
There are two ways to look at the Sex Pistols: the band who revolutionised culture, wrestling the world away from virtuosos and opening the door to those who have something to say rather than merely the means to say something, or, they are con artists who were assembled by a mogul and a fashion boutique who stole The Ramones’ sound and Richard Hell’s look then just wheeled out incendiary songs to serve as self-promotion all while having very little instrumental talent.
In many ways, both are actually defendable stances… which highlights the fact that our view of artistic validity is dependent on our respective tastes rather than any sort of conspiratorial ‘truth’. Ultimately though, no matter how engineered and full of artifice the band might have been, they undoubtedly changed culture forever after the fact, and that is an artistic feat beyond the slings and arrows of the naysayers.
Sid Vicious was a bassist who couldn’t play bass, Johnny Rotten was plucked off the street on the strength of his T-shirt and look, and Steve Jones’ book reveals that they a mob of caricatures dreamt up by the wealthy music and fashion mogul Malcolm McLaren and the designer Vivienne Westwood. By today’s standards, it doesn’t get much more industry plant adjacent than that, but because the Sex Pistols predated the current faddish narrative, they are rightfully heralded as clever liberating subversives who saved the world from dreary cheese-clothed prog and middle-class culture.
David Bowie
One of the more peculiar elements of the industry plant argument is that an act can not justifiably be unsuccessful in one genre or project and then change tact and suddenly find success. The implication is that a change of style is either synonymous with the sale of the soul or evidence that the industry has picked up a musician-like blank canvas and puppeteered them thereafter. David Bowie would certainly fall victim of this pointless finger-wagging if he was a rising star today.
Initially, Bowie was the proverbial disaster artist. However, in many ways, his flops tell you more about him as an artist than his fame. Now the term ‘influencer’ is riddled with all the connotations of social media, but when Bowie was trying to burst through onto the scene, pop culture had barely been around long enough for people to even grasp the notion.
In the beginning, he wanted more than anything to be an architect of change in some way, and everything else was secondary. He merely wanted to be an influential figure. He once stated: “I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture I was living in.”
Whether through music, his understandably short-lived multimedia mime act or some other means, Bowie was more concerned with “becoming” rather than “being”. He yearned to be a star and exercise his creative influence on society, but does that mean that when he was handed the chance to do so by teaming up with industry hotshot Tony Visconti that the successful work that followed was hollow and invalid?
When he found success, people would also disapprovingly ‘find out’ that he had also worked within the industry as a songwriter before getting famous himself. The bastard had actually dared to establish pre-existing ties through hard work that eventually gave him a leg-up! Ultimately, Bowie honed his act towards something more mainstream and the millions of fans he gained through this – whose lives he has blessed with his brilliance – would proudly state that there is no problem at all with that or conspiracy afoot in his success.
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