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In Reply to: RE: The Death of Music Sales posted by jedrider on January 26, 2015 at 13:07:02
Not for nothing do they call it "Mass Culture." Streaming is more convenient than downloads, which were more convenient than CDs, which sounded better than cassettes but which were also more convenient than LPs.
The upshot though, is grimly amusing--at least to me.
I make the bold claim that in the 1950s and 1960s, when there were only three commercial TV networks (plus the fledgling "Educational TV" network), the average TV viewer had the opportunity to be exposed to a wider range of musical styles and genres than today's Wi-Fi generation, who can listen to the Lumineers sing "Hey, Ho" (Or is that, "Hey Ho!"?) on nearly everything they own except their electric toothbrush.
In the 1950s, there were live TV jazz specials with Miles Davis and with Gil Evans. And programs like The Bell Telephone Hour would feature violinists such as Elman and Menuhin. Jazz was not only the theme music of "Peter Gunn;" it was environmental music too--Gunn's girlfriend worked in a jazz bar. There was opera. Less choice in theory, but more diversity in fact.
So the executives at the major labels today consult with their soothsayers and read entrails and strive mightily to come up with a new hit band that will be... "Wait a minit! I know! Let's cross the Lumineers with Mumford & Son!"
Too much of the modern music business is about asking people who are not really musically sophisticated what they want to hear or what they like, and then trying to give them exactly that. In a business where the top 1% of artists get appx. 88% of the revenue, and where hits stay on the charts far longer than before, the rewards at the top are far too great to risk anything really new.
So I read the magazines like Mix and see the news stories on million-selling bands I have never heard of, and they for the most part are nearly identical in ethnicity, gender, age, body type, hairstyles, in wearing clothes that are too small, and in wearing asinine little hats--nearly all of them. Here are two examples:
This is NOT a cultural environment that will support a new Joni Mitchell, and the old Joni Mitchell could not have flourished to the extent she did, had things in the 1960s and 1970s been as they are today.
Today's media scene is not Bruce Springsteen's "57 Channels (and Nothin On)," but rather, "This streaming service has access to 400,000 tracks, but people want to hear fewer than 1/100th of 1% of them."
The real problem is, that for the art of music to thrive requires a lot of things, and one of those things is a discriminating audience--an audience that can tell the difference between Donny Osmond and Nick Drake (yes I am intentionally semi-undercutting my point in the interest of intellectual honesty--this is a fallen and imperfect world). Or at least can tell the difference between Joni Mitchell and Leslie Gore.
If the audience's expectation gets petrified into, at a concert we are going to hear only things that are like the playlists we ALREADY have on our smartphones, that removes a major incentive to artistic progress, and probably damages another major incentive, that of wanting to impress or one-up one's fellow artists (as was the case with the Beatles and the Beach Boys).
As shown by the kerfuffle at the Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan played an electric guitar, dragging an audience along as you choose a new path has always been challenging. But the cards are now stacked higher than ever in favor of artistic wheel-spinning in a familiar rut.
Who would have thought 30 years ago that technology, far from liberating music, would shackle it?
Ironic.
jm
Follow Ups:
we have no culture to carry on.our songs/lyrics today will never transcend like early r&b,rock,and folk.we are an empty shell...just look at our politics.look at the media.. "honey bobo" "duck dynasty"et. al. these are the new benchmarks folks..we are doomed.
jim buck
I was pumped to see netflix revive Arrested Development. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but I found the show to be significantly wittier than 98% of sh*tcoms Ive had the misfortune of seeing recently. Point one for tech having a brain and an audience.
Now I fully realize theres plenty of crap on netflix but there is and always will be in any medium, old or new. Theres also greater access to good shows there too.
Also youtube. Im a huge fan of YT. And if one talks original content IMO its a mecca. And yes a mecca of crap too. But the amazing lectures, past and present. Music artists, again old and new. The ability for anyone to put themselves out there with nearly anything. Then possibly find an audience. Thats great IMO.
One other dimension that is rarely mentioned in these talks... Ever look at just what demo these polls are reflecting? Much of these sales and measured views are often that of very young / young folks. Thats good and well but I know I listen to FAR more than I did as a teen. And much different music at that. Its well known that the older folks get, they often "purchase" less music on the whole. I personally couldnt care less what some teen girl bought or streamed. What you and our folks dig is of far more interest. We are a small demo. Also, Id venture to guess many of us and others now in their 30s on up are unique in that, we are a new example of people who CAN become self sufficient in acquiring music. Right or wrong, I know many folks my age and older who ripped their library. Know of web access to places to GET music. Have friends pass their library on to them if asked. Again, right or wrong, it does make for a sizable amount of folks who wont measure on a grid but have and listen to allot of possibly great music. Not Iggy Azalea! I see this as a not so well understood and measurable demo that is skewing the way we see the mass audience.
Today I fell in love with a CD I picked up at a thrift a few days ago. George Winston - The Music of Vince Guarladi. Very well played and recorded album. Bought 2nd hand and listened privately by me. Guess that doesnt count on the mass audience spectrum. Reminds me of a great Bill Hicks line. "well you dont know our audience. I watch your show. Im a person. I am your audience!"
FTR I get where your coming from. I just think the cause and effect is a bit more complex. And MAYBE not as grim.
And Im suddenly treated by seeing the underused Michael Madsen in an homage to Quentin and Kill Bill. Then it gets worse and I see Paul Sorvino, quite a refined gentlemen, in what may also be a nod to Scorsese.
AHHHHHHH!!!!!! Why cant I just hate on the Iggy ;)
While Fancy just turns my stomach musically and the vid, you see stuff like this. Also, love it or hate it, Lady Gaga. Who can in real life play piano well enough, and sing for real. No auto-tune and dreck music for her to slum along with. Too bad that album with Tony didnt do better for her. Or Tony. May have started something with these pop icons.
I imagine many of us see these folks as entrepreneurs rather than artists. Not to state the obvious.
Are they really any worse than the corp exe giving the green light to their antics in music???
Anyway, theres good in some of em. Of a genuine art nature. Maybe they will start doing more projects of substance in the future. Again, start a movement of sorts.
BTW if your gonna give a nod to Madsen and QT (my least fav QT works are Kill Bill, tho entertaining) you have to give the shout out to Reservoir Dogs IMO. To each their own.
"This is NOT a cultural environment that will support a new Joni Mitchell, and the old Joni Mitchell could not have flourished to the extent she did, had things in the 1960s and 1970s been as they are today."
Are you sure you didn't mean "business environment"? I'm 60 and grew up in upstate New York. When I was 15, I had to hitchhike 35 miles to Ithaca to buy the "earlier" Joni Mitchell albums (or Dan Hicks, Muddy Waters, Jethro Tull, etc., etc.) I think maybe it was even the store in Ithaca where Michael Fremer supposedly used to work. My local stores didn't carry those artists.
There wasn't a cultural environment that supported these new artists when they came out back then either. Luckily for me, I had a friend whose big sister lived in Greenwich Village, and she would turn us on to different artists, but those artists were never part of mass culture in the beginning. Nobody heard of them, they had to be sought out. Joni didn't get lots of airplay until she jazzed it up with Court and Spark.
I think that there are current day artists--and I'm sure you know this--that exist today and receive about the same quantity of devotion from a culturally supportive group of "non-mass-culture" fans as Joni did back then--say someone like Sarah Jarosz. It's just that the mass culture delivery system--TV--has made such a juggernaut of current tastes that business is less likely today to put money behind anything but a sure thing.
I'm at work and realize--just now--that I've probably written myself into a corner and haven't completely or succinctly expressed my argument, but I'm going to have to leave it there with the hope that you at least see my concern about the statement of yours that I quoted above. Happy listening...
Tom
It's been a reality for a few years.
Nt
.
I see more and more members of this forum streaming music from websites, including some of our classical music lovers and performers whom i respect a great deal.
I certainly stream music of newer performing artists to find "new" music for myself - some of it dated, some of it recent. But, then, if it shows promise i buy a CD to test the waters.
Observe, before you think. Think before you open your yap. Act on the basis of experience.
The music that is being created is more similar.
jm
Ha. Except for those audiophiles that buy all of the reiussues of the same RCA, Mercury, Blue Notes etc.
The death of culture to the rule of pop is not a new phenomenon. See Ben Yagoda's recent book re: the transition from the "American Songbook." In any event, to me, the concern is overstated and the issue oversimplified. Great new music is still widely produced and available. The process is probably more democratic now than ever before. With newer artists like Bon Iver, The National, Sigur Ros, I'm going to sit back, stream, and not worry about it. Yes, awful pop music dominates the industry at large, but that isn't it directed at a certain age range. People grow up and tastes inevitably change. There is a market (and supply) for those over 16.
...wasn't Joni Mitchell the new Judy Collins?
Things haven't changed that much.
There are at least three types of popular music today - Indie, Pop and Rap - and they intertwine sometimes.
Maybe like folk, classic rock and Motown in my day.
Many people use streaming services like Pandora to discover new music in the genre they prefer.
Many of us older far...folks may listen to the same 500 songs streaming over and over - that's called car radio.
Internet radio and Sirius have expanded on that somewhat.
We do have many more choices today - we just may not use them.
Eric Hoffer once wrote:
“Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.”
Want to see AWFUL conformity? Tune in to ANY of the singing 'talent' shows'.
Too much is never enough
Funny quote, but of course, a clique of non-conformists is more oxymoronic than paradoxical. The equivalent to a squad of hermits. Cheers.
You might want to look in over at the CABLE section. Just TRY to be a non-conformist over THERE.
The push to conformity has turned what is still, for many persons, an open issue, into writ.
Too much is never enough
the same reductionist stuff 40+ years ago, too: too wide pants and too long hair!
That said, I absolutely agree with you. I have god knows how many cable channels and never find anything amusing; I always end up watching some foreign or art house film (okay, I confess to the occasional viewing of a sporting event or a "reality" crime show such as Homicide Hunter: Joe Kenda is one great personality, reminds me of a very large Basset Hound).
Edits: 01/27/15
A Cadi sitting under a plane tree, I am not... .
jm
nt
... and is much older than you, all I can say is ... so?
We all missed the opportunity to hear all those greats, on whatever media, and managed to survive without guilt and certainly never obsessed about ...hats.
I tried unsuccessfully for more than two years to get my jazz-loving friends to listen to Billy Taylor at the Kennedy Center broadcast on NPR every Saturday night at 8 P.M. (WETA in the Washington DC area). Phenomenal performances broadcast in phenomenal fidelity. Did any of my friends listen? Of course not. So I have 75 of these performances recorded off-air. They enjoy hearing them, after the fact. So?
It is what it is, If you're open and imaginative and not consumed with angst, you can find plenty of great things to hear and enjoy, via all kinds of media. Don't be surprised if future generations look back on today as a golden age, Or not. But you can certainly make it your own.
Dunno 'bout "much older," though.
I am not angst-ridden. However I am concerned that pop music has painted itself into a corner. Anyone who doubts that should go to YouTube and listen to Janis Ian's "Seventeen," and then listen to Taylor Swift's "At Fifteen."
And on the jazz front, the same "clumping" effect has taken place, but not of course to the same extent.
Years ago I had a chat with Michael Tilson Thomas who told me that his view was that classical music was in a bit of a fallow period, and that people who (my words not his) succumb to the deterministic fallacy that the success of Bach or Mozart was inevitible forget that the history of classical music is full of fallow periods where the greats of the past generation have died out, this generation has not achieved on their level, but the new art has not yet appeared on the scene.
My concern is that by the time the new art gets here, there will be no venues for the new art to be performed in.
I also will note that the areas of classical music today that are the most vibrant, managing to combine innovation with accessibility, are choral music and string-quartet music.
Both those are forms are similar in that they do not require huge amounts of infrastructure and backoffice costs. For years before they filed for Bankruptcy, the Philadelphia Orchestra paid their General Manager about $500,000 a year. To "manage failure" all the way down.
A choral group or a string quartet does not need a $500,000/year General Manager. They can connect directly with their audiences and build bonds of trust so that the audiences trust them when they say they are going to perform something new, and that it will be good.
So, "The Arts in an Age of Institutions and Cultural Homogenization" is not a totally insoluble problem, but the solutions are not likely to look familiar, I think.
ATB,
John
art schools, critics--- and I'd have to say, justifiably so. Video is the preferred "way," and it is, from all I've seen (and it's a lot), quite shallow compared to film (meaning a lengthier work with narrative, dialogue, editing, etc.).
We've seen the death of popular music. Certainly, there's plenty of listenable stuff out there--- LOTS of it.
But is it something I'd pay to own? That I'd listen to next year--- or next week when Pandora (or another service) provided me with new options?
Black culture, that rescued white folks from the terminal boredom of their watered down music for over a century, similarly has no answers: hip-hop is musically stilted; rap is ugly and toxic lyric spread over boring music.
Look further afield: architecture. No lack of ingenuity in Gehry, Piano, Koolhaas, etc.
But after Bilbao--- what's left to say?
If Frank Gehry painted a painting:
It would arrive years late;
It would be shockingly over-budget; and
It would leak.
jm
from pulmonary disease.
Fallingwater had massive design problems (roof, too, if memory serves).
Film is the only major art form in which greatness still resides.
Painting.
Sculpture.
Architecture.
Music.
Dance.
Literature.
I can think of several interesting members of each of the other six, but this is in relation to dozens of remarkable and original artists, in earlier times at random fixed points.
It is hard not to succumb to the hangover of the fin de siecle blues.
It is no small consolation to me, as a geezer, to look back (not in anger) and be glad to have passed my salad days in earlier times.
Edits: 01/29/15
When Joshua Reynolds died all nature was degraded;
The Queen shed a tear in the King's ear, and all his pictures faded.
(William Blake, poet and seer)
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