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The Way the Music Died
segfaultcoredump writes "Frontline just released a show entitled The Way the Music Died, an in-depth look at all that is wrong with the music industry. The show will be available for online viewing on May 29th. Their website includes the full text of all of the interviews done during the show, including a very interesting one with musical legend David Crosby, where he hits the reason the industry is having problems right on the head." Reader robl adds "This is a good sequel to the 2001 Frontline episode, The Merchants of Cool which showed how the music industry markets its wares to teenagers and how it hypes artists."
I was searching the page for quotes from people that I believe are the best ones to be asking for information. I don't see any artists on there that openly support free music. Why not? Those artists are the ones that you should be supporting... They are the ones that are comfortable enough with both themselves *and* their fanbase to believe that they can make it without having to worry about being backed solely by the money-grubbing conglomerates.
... The people who run record companies now wouldn't know a song if it flew up their nose and died." Crosby also argues that the quality of music has suffered because of corporate interference. "It doesn't matter that Britney Spears has nothing to say and is about as deep as a birdbath," he says.
David Crosby is a music legend known for his solo performances as well as his work with the Byrds, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In this interview, he recounts how the music industry has changed over his career. "When it all started, record companies -- and there were many of them, and this was a good thing -- were run by people who loved records," he says. "Now record companies are run by lawyers and accountants.
I can tell you the way the music died... It died when the musicians became the money-grubbing motherfuckers that most of them were told to become. They want to make millions of dollars and they have the conglomerates brainwash their fans into thinking that it is acceptable! Music is now a business, of course it isn't run by the people that care. Why should it? People that care don't worry as much about the money. They worry about what matters... Pleasing the people that enjoy music. Everytime you plunk your change down for iTunes, CDs, DVDs, whatever, remember that a portion of that goes not only to supporting multimedia conglomerates that control everything it also goes to supporting DRM, lawsuits against others, and lavish parties where people enjoy laughing at you for buying their shitty music.
Music that is controlled by the conglomerates is now not created by the musicians it's created by the conglomerates. They decide what's going to be a hit and what's not. Billy Joel and his "cut it down to 3:05" bit. Do you really want to listen to music that is price-fixed, controlled, and owned by people that don't give a fuck about anything except how much Grey Goose they can drink out of ornate ice sculptures while crying about how much money they are losing because they refuse to ship as many CDs as they used to?
Music is magic. It's been mankind's magic since the first caveman danced around his fire going "Ugga bugga, hugga bugga!" That was music, and he was happy. And we're still doing it, and it makes us happy.
;-)
I think he means European dance music is still doing that
iTunes is a good idea. It delivers the music to you cheap, pays us, doesn't cheat anybody, and it cuts out all middlemen -- very good
I don't think so, Mr. Crosby! Cuts out all middlemen? The RIAA are still there taking their fat chunk. The artists get a tiny chunk. Of course, if you're smart enough to release tracks directly to Apple (like Ben Folds has been doing lately), then you can get a lot more.. but most RIAA-promoted artists can't do this.
The music "industry" is a temporary phenomenon brought about by the original expense and difficulty of fabricating and distributing recorded music. As this expense drops to zero, we *should* go back to the way things used to be - professional musicians making a modest income providing live entertainment for live audiences. Unfortunately, people don't go out that much anymore (except to the mall) but electronic distribution can compensate. The music industry is dead; long live the music profession!
One of the quick ways of spotting this is to compare a song that you enjoy to its live performance. It should sound better live, but if the artist is just a commercial pre-packed product then they will probably sound like shit. -- Very true quote though.
... if music be fruit of love, play on
I was always wondering when somebody respectable and intelligent would note what the majority of America can't see: music today is CRAP. I don't care what my friends tell me, or what the TV tells me, there's no way around it. You don't get the studio mastery of the Beatles, nor do you get the sheer energy and excitement of Zeppelin.
I see two types of music industry, one marketing orientated type (MTV basically) that panders to people that don't actually like music. (they just like the imagery and style associated with thier particular flavour of pop, the 'Hip hop' guys like eminem, the 'punk' girls like pink etc).
The other type is that real music industry, where bands aren't marketed as a way of life. What is an Aphex Twin fan like? What kind of clothes should i wear if i like Amon Tobin or Sabres of paradise?
Seeing as I am firmly in the second group, I don't care very much what happens to the MTV industry. They never got any of my money, and they probably never will.
just my 2 centi-'S
That's right, I hate to say it, but recording killed music as it existed. Now, we have 2-3 minute soundbites that are played over and over in replication on thousands of cd players and computers. Gone are the complexities of performance. We've abandoned a culture of performers for a culture of listners.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I saw most of this show on TV last night. I found it interesting that they did NOT mention the Internet or P2P file sharing as a cause for poor music sales. Instead I think they nailed it when they said - More lax regulations on radio station ownership is to blame. Now that everything is Clearchannel, you can only play what they want. Artists used to get their big break by a local station playing their music. - Video is also to blame. You can't just sing any more, you have to look good too. They used Brittney Spears as a prime example--nice to look at but can't sing her way out of a paper bag.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Music will always live.
What is dying is the way big record companies make business (I know.. it's not disappeating any time soon, but anyways, it's dying slowly).
But around the world there will always be people willing to make music, perform music and freely share music.
We've known since the early 80s that video killed the radio star.
Read any good sonnets lately?
I suspect that there will be a "sea change" in the music industry as well as big paradigm shift. Things do tend to find their way even through the tumbles to the extreme. In the meantime, I'm glad I'm 46 because I grew up when great music, by and large, made it to the radio (yeah,yeah, I know, I'm a cranky old fart).
Keep smiling!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
1) I am encouraged by the amount and quality of home-recording equipment around these days. For $500 or less you can get decent microphones, and for another $500 you can get decent editing and processing software which surpasses last decade's state-of-the-art. To my mind, this gives me as a musician a whole lot of freedom to make music the way I want to.
... like government, or ethics?
2) However, I couldn't make a living like that, unless I were to be picked up by someone. And the point of the Frontline show is that the "someones" willing to pick up new artists are diminishing in number. In the long run, I believe that the problem will be solved by a shift in the market; after all, musicians receiving patronage has a long and glorious tradition.
3) But, in the short run, the situation stinks. What is interesting here is that we have gotten exactly what we wanted, so to speak. Music marketers discovered what types of music people were willing to pay for. The majority of us said "Yes" to 3 minute singles with catchy choruses repeated ad nauseum, sung on video by sexy-looking stars, and we said "No" to 20 minute explorations created by groups like Yes, Kansas, or Rush. Which raises an interesting point: if majority rule and utilitarian thought produces such obvious garbage in the music realm, what garbage can it produce in other areas
/ramble
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Finally a post where I can do some blatant self-promotion of a music site I've been working on. It's called cStream
http://www.cstream.com
Unlike most sites, we don't charge artists to post their music (i.e. like music.download.com, soundclick.com etc...) and we provide them with unlimited storage for their music. We don't believe in DRM, all our files are distributed as MP3s. After all DRM is not really effective if you can Buy. Rip. Burn MP3 from any music store with DRM (Buymusic, iTunes etc..). Thus DRM is a really weak level of protection for music.
We've only been open for a couple of months but already have a few hundred songs. We try to sell artists music and give them 50% of the revenue. Our problem is that because our music is independent music generally no one has heard it before. Because we only give away 30 seconds of the song in high quality our sales are fairly low.
We've been thinking about switching our model to providing full length lower quality copies of a song with the ability to purchase high quality versions of the song.
Read the article. He really does hit it right on the head.
"You know, you'd go to a meeting with a record company and it wouldn't be a guy there who knew that you had written a new song and thought that was cool. It would be a guy who knew that he had moved 40,000 pieces out of Dallas this month, and he had no idea, pieces of what? None."
"Look at it this way. A couple of years ago, somewhere between a fourth and a third of the record business was owned by a whiskey company, who shall remain nameless, but were notably inept at running a record company. And they sold it to a French water company, who shall also remain nameless, but knew even less. Now, those guys haven't a clue! [laughter] They haven't a clue. And they don't care about having a clue. They are trying to run it as if they're selling widgets, plastic-wrapped widgets that they can sell more of. And they want easily definable, easily accessible, easily creatable, controllable product that has a built-in die-out, so that they can create some more."
"It doesn't matter that Britney Spears has nothing to say and is about as deep as a birdbath. It matters that she has cute tits, and that's all that matters."
"Now they're going in the tank, because the world has changed, and they did not change with it. They bit the poison pill, without realizing it, when they went digital. Once a thing is in digital domain, it can be copied as many times as you want. And there is no system that can keep it from being copied. You can devise the most clever one you want, and I will bring some little geek with a pen protector in his pocket into the room and he will fix it in a minute."
-- David Fucking Crosby
One 1987 Washington Post article reported that record executives believed that the price of a CD would eventually settle around $10.
Twenty years later, production costs have come down, but consumers are still complaining about the cost of CDs, which now are priced at upwards of $16. The industry's main lobbying arm, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), responds that prices have come down. According to an article published on the RIAA's Web site, "Between 1983 and 1996, the average price of a CD fell by more than 40%. Over this same period of time, consumer prices ... rose nearly 60%. If CD prices had risen at the same rate as consumer prices over this period, the average retail price of a CD in 1996 would have been $33.86 instead of $12.75."
Anyone who has burned a CD on his computer for less than a dollar may still wonder why a product that is so cheap to manufacture could cost so much. The answer is that while the cost of physically producing a CD has dropped dramatically over two decades, the costs of marketing that album have grown tremendously. For example, in the early 1980s, music videos were an optional route for the industry to promote their artists. Now labels are expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars producing music videos for all of their major artists. Even marketing a major album to radio can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if an album is unlikely to get on radio or MTV, some labels have decided to launch costly television advertising campaigns to gain exposure for their artists.
However, the price of a CD isn't just paying for expensive marketing campaigns; it's also subsidizing releases by other artists that will never sell enough to make a profit. An artist at a major label may need to sell more than a million units before the venture ends up in the black. Most albums never sell anywhere near that. According to the RIAA, only 10 percent of albums ever achieve profitability.
Until music is considered and treated as an artform first and foremost, the commercial music industry will remain permanently broken as their priorities are transposed.
The early masters like Mozart and Beethoven were supported/sponsored by patrons thus freeing them to indulge their creativity and create truly legendary music that has outlasted their mortal lives and should last long after the members of commercial music industry sponsored music acts meet a similar fate....
I'll be the last one to criticize him for smoking dope
Looks like you're the first in this forum at least. I don't see how his personal habits have anything to do with his credibility as an expert on the music industry.
Why don't you come up with some counter-points to his arguments, rather than just saying "He smokes dope, so he must be hallucinating all this stuff about the music industry..."
Probably more damaging is the fact that the music industry he's most familiar with is that of the 1970s, not that of the contemporary industry. Sure, he's involved, but as a veteran/player, not as an up-and-coming musician.
Quite the opposite, as a veteran he is in a perfect position to comment on how the industry has changed over the last 35 years. See, older people often accumulate, through experience, this thing called "wisdom".
It was a good show, the reasons they listed why the music industry is in such trouble:
CD sales in the 80's caused a massive boom in the industry because everyone was replacing their older records. This caused major industry corps to come in and gobble everyone up, because they wanted in on the action.
But the new corp culture revolved around quarterly reports and set schedules. So musicians are pressured to produce on a schedule to meet profit quotas. This doesn't make for good music.
MTV also changed the face of music. If you can get on MTV you get massive exposure. The problem with MTV though is that it's about image as much as it is about the music. So we end up with pop stars like Britney Spears who's pretty to look at but sounds like drek.
Clear Channel now owns a significant amount of radio stations and they will only accept so many new songs in a week. Record people now look for a "sellable" song that the stations will play(basically something just like they're playing already) because you want that mass exposure to hook people into buying your album. It's not about good music, it's about having a hit single.
From the David Crosby interview:
That's not a good thing, because it means that anybody that looks good in a well-shot video is suddenly at the top, whereas hugely talented people, who are great musicians, can barely get arrested.
Don't sell yourself short, David. You are hugely talented, and have no trouble getting arrested.
So what's preventing some of the big names (like Crosby) who "get it" from starting an iTunes-like service where they cut out the middlemen, and give 80% of the proceeds to fellow (up and coming) musicians?
I'm 33 and have newphews and nieces that are 16-22. We're basically a generation apart, but the sad thing is that I listen to the exact same music they do. Do I listen to the same music my parents do? No. Why? Because the music I listen to is very different.
But music hasn't evolved much since the 70's, so bands today sound like they did then. If it had evolved I'd hate the music my nieces and newphews like and they'd lament that I just didn't understand it.
A new video game I bought, Battlefield Vietnam, featured select tracks from songs from the early 70's. While playing it I was shocked at how good those songs were, not because I could recognize good music when I heard it(even though it was good), but because you could drop any one of those tracks on a modern alt/rock music station and it'd sound like any other song on the radio today. Music just hasn't evolved much in the past 30 years.
Now labels are expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars producing music videos for all of their major artists.
Really? Everybody I know says the artist pays for the music videos - the labels simply front them the money.
The truth is that as long as the RIAA can make the fistfuls of money they will continue to do so because they are a business. As soon as that business model become unfeasible, for them, not us, they will switch and find alternatives. Even with the piracy and decline in music purchasing they are still raking it in. There are too many 12 yr olds with disposable income that simply must have that latest Britney, NSync, or Avril album and will get it.
I also liked his comment that VH1 and MTV have unwittingly made music more about look and feel then about music. Most of my music dates back to before the 90's, with some notable exceptions.
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
Here in Europe, it is truly heartbreaking. As I travel around, I find out how every european country has some great hits. But these are, at best, exported to a few neighbouring countries, e.g. inside scandinavia, or Germany-Austria etc. Instead, we get Bronx-rapper 'hits' shoveled down our throats with which we have absolutely NO cultural link. The chinese probably have great musicians, but if I forced you to listen to chinese music all day long... It just shows how the big labels put all their money on a few big cannons, and everything else just gets pushed aside. Listening on the net is great and all, but not everybody has time to do research and until I get ADSL in my car....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
> Not unless he bought Sony records. They released "Musicology" by "Prince" on April 20, 2004.
Yeah, they *released* it. They didn't produce it, they don't own the masters, they had no hand in any of it. They pressed and distributed the cd's on his terms, and that's all.
> Looks like the temporary independence was just another PR stunt, like the temporary name change.
The whole "symbol" era, while bizarre, was hardly a PR stunt. The whole thing started when Warner (his label at the time) wanted to put out more albums and he balked at it because a) he was getting increasingly frustrated with Warner's focus on "product" rather than music, and b) he's one of those guys who won't put out an album until everything's perfect. (This is the guy who, weeks away from releasing "The Black Album" suddenly decided that he didn't like it, scrapped the whole project) Warner knew that he had *tons* of stuff in the vaults and since they owned not only the masters of all of his unreleased material but the *rights to the man's name*, they started releasing Prince albums that weren't really Prince albums. It was his music, but it was just songs they threw together from whatever he had on tape. Basically, they were bootlegging his stuff. He got sick of it, released the Black Album, and ended his Warner contract. Warner threatened to (and may have, I'm fuzzy on the timeline) keep releasing more "Prince" records, so his only real choice was to change his name - which he did, in classic Prince style. Admittedly he could have said "This is why I'm doing this, people!", but he's always been more than willing to let the public speculate if it'll keep him from having to do an interview.
You got it. On the head. Last night i downloaded two full length albums, legally, in ogg vobis format, for nearly half the price of what amazon was selling the CD's for. Definately worth it.
The thing is, I think, people these days don't want to go and FIND innovation. They want it fed to them. They want to turn on the radio, tune it to whatever radio station is most convenient, and hear good, intersting, complex music. That's not going to happen, though. People's tastes are way too varied and eclectic to all enjoy the same kind of interesting music. I happen to like hardcore and klezmer/persian/greek music the best. A lot of my friends can't stand hardcore, and find the latter boring as all get-out. This is why bad music is so pervasive in our culture. It's not interesting, complex, or even musical by any means (since so much of it is canned in the case of pop superstars, or just down right simple in the case of blink 182 and all their sound alikes) because interesting and musically complex doesn't appeal to a wide audience.
Unfortunately, though, when the indy revolution hit hard a few years ago, the "Big 5" picked that up and repackaged it under spiffy new subsidiaries to stave off the perception of a monolithic record company. Now the term "Indy" is starting to apply to a particular sound, not as whiney as emo, but just as annoying, and with the same volumetric crap content.
If you ask me, the only answer to the music problem is a decentralized means of producing music, like ardour or, for the not-so-hungry college student, protools, and a centralized means of conveyance like CD Baby or audiolunchbox. Artists know how they want their music to sound. Record company hired slag producers do not.
The bottom line - in this day and age you can't be lazy when it comes to music. You have to be pro-active, seek out new genres and sounds, listen, enjoy, repeat. And support organizations that are trying to break out of the recording industry's mold. Buy from independent artists, and refuse to buy from major labels. Buy from local, family owned-and-operated record stores. OK, i'm done. I gotta gets to school.
cheese.
Go to your local bars at about 9pm-11pm (and today is Friday -- Friday is great for this) and see some bands. (Obviously, not all bars have live music, so ask around if you don't know.) Some of them are pretty lame, but overall, they tend to be better than you'd expect, if you haven't done it before. They're almost always better than radio stuff.
Are they dying? I don't think so. Attendence does vary (at least here in ABQ). Sometimes a show will get flyered and well-publicized and there will be a couple hundred people there and the fire marshall will make the bar turn people away. And sometimes on a Tuesday night, once you exclude the band members and their girlfriends and the bartender, you'll see there's only three extra people there to drink and see the band. Most the time, it's somewhere in between.
Most of them are not making money, and they know it. They're doing it for fun. I've seen a few bands come and go, and the breakups seem to never be about, "Well, our marketing just wasn't successful." When I ask 'em why they broke up, it tends to be about the personal relationships. I get answers like, "Because Heather [the guitarist] has her head up her ass!" Okaaay.
There's a lot of variety (at least in my town). I still have just barely scratched the surface. I tend to just concentrate on one genre (metal) but even I sometimes get distracted. There's this one band I saw, that at first thought was a Rolling Stones tribute band. Then I realized the songs were original, so I decided they were a Rolling Stones parody. I snickered with amusement. Then I realized they were serious. About the third time I saw them, the true horror of the situation dawned on me: I was starting to get into 'em. D'oh! ;-)
Music will always be around, because some people enjoy making music and they don't care if they make money at it. They would like to, sure, but they have their day jobs. You can't kill something like that. It can be defeated in a market, but that doesn't really stop it. Just ask Microsoft about GNU/Linux developers...
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Anyone who's tired of overhyped, overplayed cookie cutter music should try listening to KCRW. Even though they are an NPR affliate, you'd only know it because of the news at the top of the hour. They play many different kinds of music and things you probably haven't heard. There are so many new artists to discover and new music to hear, and KCRW is one of the few places where you can do just that. It's good music.
Music sales are ultimately driven by quality. The music "industry" is heading down the road of destruction if they think they can promote themselves out of the abyss.
I've recently started teaching my son to play the guitar. He's had 6 years of experience and lessons and still couldn't play a decent lead. After looking through his music books (all popular rock bands) I figured it out.
Train Song by Phish - 10 chords
Last train Home by The Lost Prophets - 7 chords
Would by Alice in Chains - 7 chords
Cold Hard Bitch by Jet - 7 chords
Strong Enough by Sheryl Crow - 6 chords
No wonder they sounded the same (and boring) to me. On top of that the rock bands were over compressing the signal, great sustain but no musical dynamics. It was all stomp box distortion.
I started off by teaching him a few decent songs (although we had to work on technique, he had never had to do a string bend, hammer on, or pull off).
Dust in the Wind by KANSAS - (to learn to play clean)
Desperado by The Eagles - (to learn to play with feeling)
Stairway to Heaven - 23 chords
Roundabout by YES, 40-43 chords (its how you play it)
Clap by YES - 56 chords, and fast tempo
When I was learning to play you'd be laughed at for playing chord progressions and calling them songs, now people play big bucks to hear what oughta be an improved lead.
"C" was right, but he didn't take it far enough. I see the major labels limping along as the smaller companies with TALENTED MUSICIANS like GOTEE keep making a killing off each record they release because IT'S WORTH HEARING!
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs