What really happened to the music

I have signed on to a management role at a music website for which I've been a contributing writer since 1999. Its founding was actually an act of prescience; the editors / owners foresaw the tipping of the music industry's balance away from the record label / radio / fan infrastructure including a press establishment / all-purpose management agency model to that of the DIY approach, in which a musical act must be a business organization and a publicity agency as well.

As a writer during this whole period (dating as it does back to the Clinton era), I've seen predictions and forecasts come true and fall flat. I've seen sub-sub-genres come and go. I've seen new models for all the components of the biz - radio, labels, touring, recording, distribution - prove their efficacy and / or fizzle.

Fifteen years ago, such modern-day music-biz conventions as street teams and album release parties were in their infancy. Musical acts still regarded signing with a major label as the pinnacle of their careers. Radio, increasingly in the hands of big congomerates that kept excruciatingly precise data on the consuming behavior of every imaginable demographic comrpising the American - indeed, world - public, was still the arbiter of which music was going to herald current paradigms and stake a rightful claim in the pantheon of timeless classics.

Much literature about the industry's convulsions has been published over that time. While it would be too broad of a brush stroke to declare mass consensus among these numerous books, a theme does emerge to some extent. Authors inquiring into all this generally believe that it is somehow the greed, and resultant short-sightedness of those at the top of these huge recording / concert-promotion / radio organizations that did the old model in, and that the indie model is democratizing everything for both music-maker and listener, and that much exciting artistic activity is taking place even as uncertainty reigns over the whole field.

While the shift from old-line ways to DIY is undeniably dramatic and full of exciting stories such as rock groups suing websites such as Napster, and interim models such as My Space rising and falling in the space of, really, mere months, there is much that hasn't changed at all.

Think about what a beginning musical act needs to consider. It needs to play some shows in the biggest venues possible, give those who become acquainted with it some reason to become familiar with it, and even become fans, and it needs to get some professional recordings made and get those played on appropriate radio stations. Twenty, fifty, seventy years ago, acts delegated much of this to others who specialized in these areas, but the checklist of what needs to be accomplished remains the same.

A lot of how-to articles on sites catering to the indie / DIY sector exhort musical acts to build a fan base with street teams and social-network contact lists and the like. Much of that kind of activity passes on the exhortation in the form of slogans like "Support local music."

Well, just what kind of person in our modern society is really that interested in going out and consuming live music on a regular basis? Who are the die-hard fans of the handful of acts that comprise the music scene in any given city? For that matter, who goes to all these festivals and showcase conferences one sees advertised on indie sites? Is the mortgage-apying parent of three with a demanding career more or less likely to seek out live music on a frequent, regular basis than, say, a single person in his or her early 20s living alone or with friends in an apartment?


I'm aware, given that in my role as an adjunct university instructor in popular-music history I research this stuff, that some of the richest treasures in American music came out of the clubs and ballrooms of Harlem, Beale Street and Watts, the honky-tonks of Texas, the auditoriums and tent shows of the gospel circuit, and the festivals at Newport, Montreux and Monterrey. Furthermore, I'm aware that the venue owners, booking agents and even musicians themselves that made for that era's greatness were often as driven by greed and hedonistic impulses as their modern counterparts.

What was different about that earlier time is really pretty simple: the music was better. Even the most raucous of the R&B or the most rural of the honky-tonk music expressed an implicit awareness that a listener expected basic human dignity to be conveyed in the art being made.

I'm not saying the greed of those clawing their way to the tops of big corporations wasn't a factor. It most certainly was. What happened was that that greed reached a critical mass at exactly the same time that the boomer generation, which made the consumption of music into some kind of statement of self-importance, basically overdosed on the sheer amount of product that was out there. this would have been about the mid-70s, when the market for contemporary musc fragmented and each demographic wore "its" music like a badge. If you were into, say, southern rock, or disco, or heavy metal, or straight-ahead jazz, or fusion jazz, or introspective singer-songwriter music, the industry's infrastructure was there to affirm your keen aesthetic discernment and bolster your sense of self-worth.

Maybe it goes back a little farther. I think of how EMI producer George Martin sweat bullets in the winter of 1966-67 as he acted as the go-between for the record company and The Beatles as that group ran up huge budget overruns and insisted that the Abbey Road studio be available to them at all hours of the day and night. They had arrived, you see. They sat atop the worldwide entertainment field and could basically snap their fingers and get whatever they wanted. At the same time, they were following a pseudo-spiritual charlatan (the Maharishi) and indulging any whim they harbored so much as momentarily.

That's really the story of the whole music business from about then to about 2000 in microcosm. The industry was awash in gravy, and everybody was mainly concerned with self-gratification.

It made for a jaded bunch of people. How were the heads of Warner Music or EMI or Sony in any position to hear - and recognize - something that was of true musica value, that is to say, ennobling, deeply, sonically rich, expressive of recognizable human passions? They weren't. They were too loaded.

So I don't put much stock in those studies of the whole thing that go back, say, thirty years and, because that allows for a discussion of big hits and phenomena such as MTV, Madonna, Prince or Michael Jackson, assert that that was such a different era as to really characterize a different music industry. The fact is, that by that time, the music was nearly all awful. Michael Jackson was awful. Madonna was (and is) awful. Ditto Prince, Metallica, Garth Brooks, whoever. These people rpovided the soundtrack to the arrested development of every living generation of Western civilization.

It's important to mention the confluence of the extolling of informality as a virtue with the collectivist ideological impulse, and to trace the development of that, we may have to go back farther still. The folk boom of the 50s and 60s really just brought what Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax and their associates had been doing for a while to mainstream America's attention. Rock and roll came along at this time as well, and the notion that music need only be a matter of a small vocabulary of chords and melodies played on highly portable instruments such as guitars, took hold on a mass scale. The notion that one ought to be at least rudimentarily familiar with the way musical principles had been codified into notation and theory was going by the wayside. I remember a few years ago doing a phone interview with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls - for the very site I'm now getting more involved with. I asked her about what, during a given day, motivates her to pick up her guitar. "Do you run through some scales to warm up?" I asked. She said she didn't and muttered something about not really beeing a great guitar player. That exchange spoke, and speaks, volumes about the place aesthetic standards has, or doesn't have, in our culture now.

Couple that with the notion that the "folk" ethos, broadly understood, contributed a sense that it was appropriate for popular music to be "topical," to address societal ills. Again, we are back to the late 30s, when the Communist party members and fellow travelers congregating in the Greenwich Village hub of that world were playing labor rallies, and when Communist high-school teacher Abe Meeropol wrote "Strange Fruit" for Billie Holiday. Cut to the present, when politics seems to permeate every note of what musicians - both indie and big-shot - play.

So it doesn't matter that now we have Spotify instead of Columbia Records. When you hear the term "music" or see the little icon for it on the toolbar of your web browser, it has the same dreary set of connotations it has had for decades now.

Shifting business models and changing technology are not the core issue. What we should look at squarely, since it's facing us squarely, is a culture in which even something that had, until about forty years ago, been one of the most sublime realms of the human experience, has become a mere orgy of infantile self-congratulation.

Now, I have to scour the music sites for some hot news and trends.