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Not for nothing do they call it "Mass Culture." The upshot though, is grimly amusing

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

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