To all my Facebook peeps: For young musicians dreaming of getting themselves out there in the music business, the model used to be: bands would try and try and try to get heard by record companies, some A&R guy (usually with no real musical background) would decide whether a band might do good for his company, a very few bands would get signed to a recording contract, and record company would produce an album, possibly promote it, and possibly promote the band on a tour, and if the album was successful, maybe the record company would make that all happen again, and just maybe the band might make some money. Now that model’s gone. The “record industry” has largely collapsed, and deservedly so. Except for a small handful of “performers,” the industry doesn’t really promote anyone anymore. CDs are a thing of the past, and music is shared for free. Bands handle the recording themselves. Since the music itself is no longer the source of revenue, bands now look to touring and merchandise sales to feed themselves and pay their bills. One thing that hasn’t changed is that young players still want to play, and play well. There are more young female players edging their way into previously male-dominated slots than ever before. The internet has made it possible for us to see and follow musicians that we’d never have heard of when the record companies had a strangehold on deciding who we were going to listen to. There is a very exciting international grassroots music scene where there was none before. However, now it’s all done on the ultra-cheap. Promising young musicians with great talent work day jobs as they try to scratch their way onto the scene and achieve fans on Facebook and Youtube. These are the Eddie Van Halens, the Jimmy Pages, the Chick Coreas, the Herbie Hancocks of tomorrow. Many of them are playing a very hard-edged but technically demanding form of metal music, and this is where they are blossoming as players. My personal belief is that at some point in the not-too-distant future we’ll start to see some of these players collaborating with great jazz musicians as the genre evolves. This is where the new stuff is happening, and it’s exciting to watch, especially considering the terribly stagnant doldrums in which popular music is currently mired. These young players are becoming proficient on their instruments, and are composing and performing their own music – they are not the boring, tedious, half-naked, over-produced, pitch-corrected, lip-synching divas who dominate a pop music industry in its death throes. My son Matt is involved with a small startup company that handles merchandising for a number of bands in this genre. One such band, “Lifeforms,” is trying to join a tour covering the Midwest and West Coast states. These are young guys. They work random day jobs like most of our kids, and make the same kind of money. They need to raise enough money to rent a van and a trailer to be able to go on this tour, and are trying to do so through Kickstarter. They figure that this will take about $3,500. If you’d like to support these young players, it would be a great kindness if you pledged a few dollars to their Kickstarter campaign. If enough of us do that, we can help not only Lifeforms, but have a hand in shaping a music industry that rewards musicianship and accomplishment. And when in our lifetimes have we ever been able to do that?
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:12:15 +0000
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