fuzmeister: Late-To-The-Party Music Industry Rant
Hot on the heels of reading Rolling Stone's recent article on whether or not Adele's upcoming record can save the music industry, I felt it was my duty as an avid music listener to toss my two cents into the proverbial fountain of conversation.
Let me start off by stating that this post is not an attack on the music of Adele or Adele as an artist. I think she's a talented young lady and would probably go on a curmudgeon-esque rant regardless of who the article was putting up on a pedestal. Secondly, I know Rolling Stone needs to sell magazines and get clicks - regardless of whether the author of this article believes what he or she is writing is ultimately irrelevant to the goals of Rolling Stone magazine - selling magazines and advertising to profit.
Now that that's out of the way, allow me to sum up very briefly what I perceive to be wrong with the music industry today. We live in an era of immediate gratification; anyone trying to tell you otherwise is an idiot. I don't want to argue the long-term psychological effects of living in this sort of society, but I do want to mention that this shift in thinking was likely the initial catalyst for the decline of the music industry. It would be easy for me to say piracy was the root cause for this decline, but I don't believe that's the case. I think piracy coupled with an attitude tied to instant gratification gradually caused people to devalue music and buy less and less of it. The recording industry did eventually embrace digital media, but, even then, DRM and artist-compensation issues have kept digital music from really having the same punch record sales did decades ago.
At this point you might be commenting to yourself that you'd be more likely to buy more music if so much of it didn't suck. That brings me to my second point on the decline of recorded music in the 21st century. Around the same time the internet started allowing us to be slackjawed morons, I believe the music industry wanted to increase their profit margins to try and proactively counteract the red menace of music piracy. I'm sure increasing profit margins has always been an active goal of the record industry, but the stakes likely seemed much higher at this point. As sales continued to decline (cut in half between 2000-2010), record labels were less and less likely to take chances and make risky decisions. This has led to mainstream music's current state of homogenized music...
Now, I'll be the first person to tell you there is still good music coming out in 2015. You have to dig a little deeper than the pages of Rolling Stone to really find it, but the internet has allowed some fairly creative groups and artists to have a voice in this sea of sheer mediocrity. So, let me tell you, if you are sick of most well-known music sounding like the white noise of a window air-conditioner, do something about it. Buy music you enjoy. Teach your children to value the arts and music. Just try something. We the listeners are as much at fault as the music industry itself. If you value music as an art form, challenge yourself and others around you. Don't accept the status quo and ho-hum drivel that plagues virtually every media outlet today.
Until then, we can continue to speculate if Adele can save the music industry because the majority of us have no idea what the actual problem is...
Mood: Crotchety
Music: The Mars Volta - Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus
Tags (beta): music, rant
Hot on the heels of reading Rolling Stone's recent article on whether or not Adele's upcoming record can save the music industry, I felt it was my duty as an avid music listener to toss my two cents into the proverbial fountain of conversation.
Let me start off by stating that this post is not an attack on the music of Adele or Adele as an artist. I think she's a talented young lady and would probably go on a curmudgeon-esque rant regardless of who the article was putting up on a pedestal. Secondly, I know Rolling Stone needs to sell magazines and get clicks - regardless of whether the author of this article believes what he or she is writing is ultimately irrelevant to the goals of Rolling Stone magazine - selling magazines and advertising to profit.
Now that that's out of the way, allow me to sum up very briefly what I perceive to be wrong with the music industry today. We live in an era of immediate gratification; anyone trying to tell you otherwise is an idiot. I don't want to argue the long-term psychological effects of living in this sort of society, but I do want to mention that this shift in thinking was likely the initial catalyst for the decline of the music industry. It would be easy for me to say piracy was the root cause for this decline, but I don't believe that's the case. I think piracy coupled with an attitude tied to instant gratification gradually caused people to devalue music and buy less and less of it. The recording industry did eventually embrace digital media, but, even then, DRM and artist-compensation issues have kept digital music from really having the same punch record sales did decades ago.
At this point you might be commenting to yourself that you'd be more likely to buy more music if so much of it didn't suck. That brings me to my second point on the decline of recorded music in the 21st century. Around the same time the internet started allowing us to be slackjawed morons, I believe the music industry wanted to increase their profit margins to try and proactively counteract the red menace of music piracy. I'm sure increasing profit margins has always been an active goal of the record industry, but the stakes likely seemed much higher at this point. As sales continued to decline (cut in half between 2000-2010), record labels were less and less likely to take chances and make risky decisions. This has led to mainstream music's current state of homogenized music...
Now, I'll be the first person to tell you there is still good music coming out in 2015. You have to dig a little deeper than the pages of Rolling Stone to really find it, but the internet has allowed some fairly creative groups and artists to have a voice in this sea of sheer mediocrity. So, let me tell you, if you are sick of most well-known music sounding like the white noise of a window air-conditioner, do something about it. Buy music you enjoy. Teach your children to value the arts and music. Just try something. We the listeners are as much at fault as the music industry itself. If you value music as an art form, challenge yourself and others around you. Don't accept the status quo and ho-hum drivel that plagues virtually every media outlet today.
Until then, we can continue to speculate if Adele can save the music industry because the majority of us have no idea what the actual problem is...
Mood: Crotchety
Music: The Mars Volta - Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus
Tags (beta): music, rant
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I've always enjoyed watching recording artists bite the hand that made them famous, but now that hand is becoming less and less relevant. There are hundreds if not thousands of individuals and bands just as talented if not more than the ones who become household names. It was never a meritocracy.