The music industry is finally going the way of the comic book with a new all-time low week for sales. Why? americansongwriter/2014/09/worst-week-album-sales-decades/ As a confirmed game music composer, I see that young generations spend their time with apps and video games (duh).... because they dont want to be bored (more on this later). Yet, from my perspective, there were a few major contributing factors to the demise of the music business. 1. Songwriters have burned us out. Four chord songs and overproduced, plastic autotune misadventures are the norm. A hit song these days comes from a sample about an anaconda. True talent, they say. Anaconda... youtube/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs Four chords... youtube/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ 2. Mass media aint so mass... The Corporate Media no longer has the ubiquity it once had to push a zeitgeist onto the innocents. (Who actually listens exclusively to terrestrial radio? There are zillion net solutions for finding any sort of music.) Even Apple, a new form of Mass Media, couldnt convince more than 200,000 people in 24 hours to download the free U2 record this past week... which was shipped to 500 million users (albeit at electronic gunpoint). 3. Ignorant record execs who push crap (see #1)... The gatekeepers, the record companies, are nearly exclusively run by people that have no formal musical training--all the way down to A&R. I certainly know this for a fact as I had a three year stint working with several of the majors. One of my bosses, who was head of A&R, instruments of not one did he play. So, as a result, he lacked a basic understanding of the cognitive interplay of the brain as it pertains to music creation. Music is brain technology... its science. But like any science, music can only be advanced when past concepts and ideas serve as a basis of reference. Yes, really. But how do you steer a record company with this golden ray of vision when youre ignorant? Ask anyone in the pop music business to name two facts about J.S. Bach and youll get blank stares. Why does this matter? Bach is dead you say? Ok....Again, if music is a technology, the music industry has not advanced whatsoever on the basis of past science/music when it comes to pop and mainstream music. They keep making rock wheels (from the daycare bunch of 17 years ago) and calling these tunes a revolution... which is the antithesis of real science. Of course, true science pulls from the knowledge of past greatness such as Tesla or Einstein. And in this case, the past scientists of music very much include Bach or Beethoven. So, in other words, just as science can advance upon past knowledge, so can music, as underlying ideas found in masterpieces of centuries ago can contribute something to modern songwriting. Yet, Gaga be would damned if she knew ANYTHING about music written before 1980, but her record bosses are ever so the more ignorant. But lets be honest, whats the real issue? I believe our brains are simply bored and distracted with the null knowledge bestowed by the record gods--especially when put against the likes of software toys. So to hell with the music industry. An industry that bores us to death deserves to go extinct.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 02:07:20 +0000
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