Right, and how many fans are there for each one, really? One can only slice the baloney so thin.
Sure, but how’s that any different than if I’d said "Well, there was a stretch in the early-mid 1990s of rock bands that were kind of like punk bands, but not really, and that were heavily metal influenced, but not really metal bands either. Bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, etc…
I don’t know if I’d call it a trend, but it was definitely quite a thing for a while there."
With the exception of a label, there’s no real difference.
And for the record, I loathe the bands I described in my first post, so I’m not trying to defend them at all, just point out that grunge bands got labeled with a popular label, while they never really did.
If I had to guess, the musical “things” that end up being labeled as trends are the ones that end up being more of a lifestyle for fans instead of just music that they listen to. I mean if you look at New Wave music, there was a whole subculture that it corresponded to. Same for grunge, etc…
For whatever reason, that doesn’t seem to happen anymore.
At the end of the day, the only difference is the number of people who care.
Well, I think more people simply cared about “grunge” (which was kindof a dumb label, but oh well).
Right. And of course we remember the genres, whatever, that people really cared about, or that otherwise stand out because of some sort of aesthetic.
I agree. In some ways it seems to have been absorbed into the larger culture of celebrity gossip/worship. So people are less interested in participating in a musical culture than in Taylor’s and Kanye’s antics, etc.
Internet access to new music that you never would hear on the radio has turned intelligent listeners off popular music and has allowed them to explore what kinds of music they actually like, as opposed to being forced to listen to whatever happens to be popular. Combined with the soulless corporate control over popular music, and you just get the same thing pumped out to satisfy the lowest common denominator with no real change. Anything that makes any sort of progress has its own small section of support, but has no real way of pushing its way into the mainstream.
I don’t know a damn thing about any popular music, but I do know where I can go to find music that I actually really like listening to. I really don’t care what happens to popular music, because the artists in the sub-sub-genres that I like are continuing to produce new music.
Right. This will lead, however, to the hobby-ization of music. We won’t have professional musicians. Or maybe a few Taylors will be left, grabbing all the goodies with none left for anyone else. This is already happening, so it’s only a matter of degree at this point.
2 Things:
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I can’t help but believe that a great song will be needed and wanted by the world, no matter what happens to the industry, or genres. There’s a pendulum always swinging. We may not see the whole picture. Nirvana was a surprise to most. I can’t help it. I’m wired to believe it as long as i’m alive.
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There is a change in that it is virtually no-cost now to make your music available to the whole world.
Well, I think you’re absolutely wrong about us not having professional musicians. It’s just that the musicians that are professional will be savvy enough business people to make themselves a living without the gatekeepers of the large labels.
First, we had professional musicians long before the gatekeepers that provided us with pop music got involved. They made their living either through publishing or performance. Not many of them did much more than subsist on their income, but that was the case even with the pop promotion system.
Second, the trends you refer to were always artificial. They’re the result of a promoter, producer or label copying an already successful act, and succeeding. It’s not purely either the audience deciding what it likes, or something being foisted on them; but it’s not a natural evolution. It’s a weird, managed thing that produces some truly awful pop music. Look back at the polls of #1 hits, and it fairly obvious that many of them were reviled by the majority.
And since that was the case, it doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans. The product that system produced was crap then and now. For example, of the songs that were #1 hits in 1986, there’s only one that I wanted to listen to then, and one that I want to listen to now: Prince’s “Kiss”. The other 29 will have me voting to sit in silence for the next half hour instead. I love music, but I’ve heard those other songs, and they’re awful. To pretend that I would have wanted to listen to something other than the bands that I did listen to (considering the bands available to me through the filter of who could get a record financed), if only Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s brand of suck wasn’t piped at me every place his promoters could fit him is condescending. I don’t need the “ground” of crap to have the “field” of things I like, the latter arises by me selecting the former. Some songs compel me to listen to them several times in a row upon the first listen, even ones released in the last year, and there are others I want to never hear again.
So, in the end, less than 1% of musicians got filthy rich off of the pop system run by a set of record companies, and that practice is ending. Your average musician isn’t really affected by this, and we’re generally better off for it. There were trends in music before recordings even got on the scene*, and they won’t stop because the gatekeepers who started chasing a set of successful ones stopped having the control they once had.
Steve Albini had a nice, long rant about how that system didn’t even usually make the people who you thought were making a living at it anything but in debt. If you ever wonder about what life was like for a musician who refused to get a day job under the old system, read it. I know people who failed and succeeded under it. Metaphorically, some of the living might envy the dead.
As to how it is now, after the internet: an article by Simon Indelicate that I read yesterday is the most accurate treatise I’ve seen. It’s long, but I think it is worth it to understand what it’s like for a band today. I have a day job to finance my musical endeavors, but I have worked with many musicians who don’t have that luxury. To make a living, you have to bust ass every day, but it can be done if you’re willing to work hard. His experience is pretty near universal, as far as I can tell.
*How else would we have the wide variety of folk music that early field recordings caught?
There have been plenty of mini-trends since 2000, but no overarching theme like there was for the 60s-90s. The 2000s are associated with boy bands, pop punk, rap getting less gritty and more glitzy, and the return to commercial viability of non-alternative rock. Towards the end of the decade Disney was selling mainstream pop rock like gangbusters to tweens with Hannah Montana and Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers. But to be honest about the 2000s, if you play any 2000s song to someone today it could just as easily be mistaken for a song from another decade. There’s just no signature sound to the decade that I can make out.
But I do think the 2010s have a very distinct sound. On the pop/rock side you’ve got a huge number of indie-style bands with some Irish beerhall flavoring and on the pure pop side you’ve got 50 different artists using the SAME synthesizer sound. Dub step has definitely come into its own and is now incorporated into a lot of pop music. R&B artists are now more into crossover music than ever to the point where you can’t even be a viable R&B singer these days without doing pop and dance and even the occasional soft rock song. That’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned, because R&B got away with being the same old crap for way longer than it should have(about 20 years of no change between the end of New Jack and 2008 or so.)
IMO, though, the song that really exemplifies the 2010s sound as we head towards the middle of the decade is the song “Geronimo” by Sheppard. I don’t hate the song, but I think every musical trend that gets overplayed ends a few years after it’s “Winger” debuts. When I say that, I mean a band, as Winger was, that is superbly talented and creates music that hits all the right trendy buttons for the masses, but also heralds the beginning of the end of the genre and ends up being a punchline within a few years. I think Bush was that band in the grunge era and I’ll go ahead and call Sheppard that band in 2015.
I wouldn’t go that far. Sure, the days where people can get fabulously wealthy off music are disappearing except for a few top artists. But in that respect it’s becoming more like the book industry has always been. There will still be professionals because the path to at least being able to live off your music is still pretty wide open. A lot of the bands I like aren’t household names, but they don’t need day jobs either. The modest album sales, the merchandise(which they usually hawk themselves), and the constant touring pay the household bills. And that’s really all you can expect. The one thing that pisses me off about TV shows like the Voice and American Idol is that these people go into it thinking it’s going to change their life, that fame and fortune wait around the corner. Even if they win, almost certainly not, but they may be able to do what they love as their day job and make about what they would have made doing the day job they used to do. And they should be satisfied with that.
You’re basically right. Allow me to rephrase. Two things could happen, are already happening:
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It becomes virtually impossible for someone playing music to live without a day job (“hobby-ization”), though there will always be exceptions. After all, cover bands are professional musicians who have been outside the gatekeeper system forever.
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We could simply lose new music as a shared cultural category. This has already happened with poetry, “classical” music, and visual art. We don’t have famous poets any more. We don’t have famous composers. There are “big” artists (you can still sell art to rich people), but they are not shared by the culture with a very few exceptions.
I’m looking at it from more of a cultural angle, rather than whether individual musicians can survive (which is also a concern, of course). But to respond to your point, I think it will become harder for individual musicians to survive the more music stops being a shared cultural element. That is to say, the less people are listening to the same crap on the radio, the less they are going to go out and support local musicians and get into music.
Why? Because people end up caring less about the category “music” as a whole. That may sound stupid for a second, but think about it. In 1956, when Ginsberg came out with “Howl” (which I’ve read was the last poem to be a true cultural event, and I concur), the average person probably didn’t buy a lot of new poetry books, but they sure as hell bought more than today. They cared more, went out to more readings, whatever. Rod McKuen was able to become the best-selling poet in history starting in the late 60s, so that culture was still there. Today, extremely few people care about poetry, I think it’s safe to say.
There’s no question that music is inherently more popular than poetry. Music will never go away. But when people stop thinking of new music as a “thing,” it’s very easy for them to retreat into the past and just listen to the Stones on Spotify. The point isn’t that you are going to lose 100% of people who currently care about new music, but what if you lose 5%? 20%? It’s a death of a thousand cuts, not a katana to the neck. You have a little smaller number of people coming to see you, you sell a little less merch, and one day you find that it doesn’t add up any more.
I basically agree, and I’m a person who despises and resents gatekeepers by nature. In our mutually hated year of 1986, I felt that corporations were completely controlling everything via their power to promote artists and shove horrible videos in our faces, all that shit. It was terribly inorganic.
Yet… the music on the radio in the 70s was pretty awesome on average, and then, in 1991, those same corporations were supporting some pretty awesome music. In both the 70s and 90s, it was still a terrible industry that cheated artists, etc., but it still served as a channel of the public’s energy and enthusiasm into something. Let me put it this way: I don’t wish that there had been no record industry; rather, I wish that there had a been a better, fairer record industry. The way we’re going now, we’re not going to have one at all. I don’t think that’s good for music.
Yet it’s easy to take that ground for granted. In 1986, I was listening to the Smiths, Black Flag, the Residents, the Dead Kennedys, 70s music from the bargain bin, etc.–all of which existed in stylistic or temporal contrast to what was on the radio and TV (videos). Plus, I was making my own music, again in the context of the time.
Losing that ground is disorienting as an artist. It’s like not knowing whether you’re swimming up or down in the ocean. We still have that ground in music, but again, look at poetry. How does one be a good poet in 2015? How does one be “cutting-edge”? What is even the style of today? Well, there isn’t one. There is nothing to follow or rebel against.
Imagine a world of music in which stylistic cues make no sense to anyone any more. Is your song bluesy? No one knows what the blues is. Is it tonally complex? People don’t know what a three-chorder is, so they can’t tell. Or if it’s stripped down and simple, that makes no difference to them either.
Again, it’s hard to imagine, since we still have that ground. But again, consider poetry. About the only stylistic cue people are able to process now is rhymed versus unrhymed. That’s it. Most people simply wouldn’t be able to distinguish free verse from the 19th century (say, Whitman) from the mid-20th century (Kenneth Koch). It’s all one lump. Kinda how people who don’t know classical music can say that Brahms sounds like Mozart sounds like Bach. To them, it’s all just “screeching violins” (as my ex-girlfriend once described all of my classical music, from Schoenberg to Haydn).
Those weren’t culturally shared trends, however. We only know about that folk music now because someone heard it and thought they could make money off it. Without the “race records” of the 20s onward, the blues (for example) would be lost and forgotten.
Everyday American music of the 19th century is largely a big blank to us. What comes to mind? Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin (who was more of a composer than a songwriter), and that’s about it. Of course, a lot of it wasn’t worth preserving.
But I have a theory about culture: that which wasn’t popular in its time doesn’t get enjoyed in the future (rare exceptions apply). The converse isn’t true: that which was popular in its time isn’t necessarily enjoyed in the future. Thus, popularity is the first filter, goodness the second. Thus, the old saw that the good gets passed down for future consumption is only partially correct: the popular and good gets passed down to the future. Thus, in poetry, people will be reading Keats and Shelley 200 years from now, but no one is going to be reading the poetry of 2015, since no one in our own time gives a shit about it.
And the same thing could happen with music. The end result of the long tail rising and gatekeepers going away is a big blank for that time period. Thus, I find it easy to imagine that, in the year 2100, people will still remember music from 1920-2015, but 2020-2100 will just be a mush of hobbyists and a couple of Taylor Swifts who are simply remembered for how famous they were.
I’ve read that, and it’s eye-opening.
Thanks, this is a really great article, and I’m going through the whole thing!
I really appreciated your post and your perspective, and despite the fact that I’m bouncing off your points, I do agree with you to a large extent. Thanks!
Well observed.
This all makes sense too. I don’t know, however, if this “distinct sound” really adds up to something new.
Haha, Bush. The song “Comedown” is really quite cool (though the lyrics end up really stupid), but I do hear you. I have also seen “Up on the Downswing” by Soundgarden (a great album, btw) from 1996 used as a marker for the end of grunge, but we are talking pretty much the same time period.
That’s the idealistic version, which I think can dovetail with the cynical version: someone’s always going to want to make money off of music.
Anyone can make professional-sounding music these days for relatively cheap, but people can’t make movies and TV shows for cheap (even if they do something low-budget, they at least have to get people to contribute a lot of labor at a low cost or for free).
So when there is a Bond movie, there will be a Bond theme, and someone’s going to try to make money off of that. That’s why there will always be at least a handful of musical stars. Even if music can’t make money in general, they will be attached to things that can.
Both of these shows are what I was talking about in my response above to you: trying to connect music to another property that can sell.
Yeah, both of these shows are big fuckin’ lies on multiple levels. I watched an entire season of the Voice (2nd, I think), and while it was entertaining, it makes no sense on any level. The first lie it tells is in the title: it implies that vocal talent is the bottleneck in the music industry, or at least that it has some substantial value. That’s a cartload. Songs are the bottleneck in the industry, and most people who have made it since the early 70s have done so because they were able to attach some level of musicianship to sellable songs. Exceptions like Britney apply. Would someone like Taylor Swift have made it without being a songwriter? Only if some Svengali thought he could engineer her career based on looks and star power. Like, well, Britney.
Those shows also represent an attempt to set up new gatekeepers: we’re going to decide who gets to be a star and make moneyyyyyy! The Voice in particular has been a miserable failure at that, and Idol hasn’t been much better.
Happens with some modern genres. Steampunk/Dark Cabaret isn’t just a music thing, for instance. although - having said that, there’s probably too much of a crossover with Goth there to consider it a true 21st C trend so much as a subgenre.
I’m not so sure it’s the presence of the long tail and decline of the gatekeepers that’s driving this phenomenon so much as it’s the EASE of getting at the long tail, that 's driving it.
Back when I was a teenager (1985-1992), you usually found out about new music by hearing it on the radio, as part of a movie soundtrack, or via a friend’s mixtape. If you liked it, your options were as follows: Listen to the band on the radio if it was released, go buy a copy from the music store, or get a dub from someone on rather shitty cassette tape. So most people were relatively restricted in that you either listened on the radio, or you were limited to what was carried in your local record store. If you wanted a tape of an early Herb Alpert album, you had to hope that it was on tape, and that you could get it at the music store.
Today, a kid probably hears about music through their friends, but for every song they find on iTunes or Amazon or whatever, there’s a huge “You may also like:” section, and it’s also very easy to just fire a pirated MP3 over as well. This makes the word-of-mouth transfer of new music a lot easier than before, when it was regulated by the commercial realities of brick and mortar stores and radio playlists. And you can do it on your phone ANYTIME- no more planning a trip to your music store, or anything like that. You hear a song you like, you can go look them up and download their entire catalog.
Services like Spotify and Pandora only make that easier- you may be listening to old Metallica on one of them because you’re an old fart, and they play a Mastodon track because it’s sort of similar, and you like it… you can have every Mastodon song in seconds. Back in the day, unless you were from Atlanta or knew someone who’d heard them, you’d never have heard Mastodon unless they hit it big. And there was little chance that even if you visited Atlanta and saw them in concert, that you could find their music in your local music store.
That, IMO is what is making the trends kind of go away; people are less bound to what’s being trotted out by the cabal of the record companies and retail stores, and therefore less likely to recognize any of them as terribly popular.
I think the long tail comprises both supply and demand elements. Your implication is that the demand for lots of varied music was there, but it was hard to get at. I had much the same experience as you in the 80s. I also would take chances on bargain bin records or sometimes even full price records to get at interesting stuff. I would eventually also start buying 78s to find older music. I agree with you that supply and getting at the music was an issue. But I would also say that demand was limited as well, no doubt in part by the effort it took to get at the music. As you pointed out, today it’s practically thrown in your face on Spotify and whatnot.
Another example: there was no technological or business barrier to the craft beer revolution starting in the 70s, but it didn’t happen. Brewing companies could have responded to demand, had it existed, but beer culture was abysmal.
I think these things are connected, and a person’s embracing variety in one area of life leads to embracing them in another. Throw in paradigm-shifting tools like the Internet that make it easy to find “the finer things” in all areas of life, and you can have a generic rise of the long tail across the board, so to speak.
- That’s been the case for the vast majority of musicians since the advent of recorded music. In my experience, almost every working musician (and I have known many) has some form of day job, even if it is teaching. This change affects a very small cadre of musicians. Lots of musicians in the '60s and '70s had to have day jobs despite having hit records.
- I think that most of those forms were supplanted by others. Classical was supplanted by other musical styles. A lot of the function of static, graphic art was supplanted by other visual methods of telling stories, or photography when it was used for documentary purposes. I think poetry was largely supplanted by freer verse in music.
The parties interested in preserving them couldn’t have done more than they have to change their fate. The public lost interest in those styles because they became less relevant and exciting. If a popular music form has a competitor such as they had, it will have the same fate.
Even without a dominant form, you’ll still have the figure/ground relationship of what you like and don’t like. Even if I’d isolated myself to the sub-genres I generally liked, there would be acts I preferred over others. You select the figure, and the ground takes care of itself.
People aren’t well versed in the finer points of poetry and classical music styles because they don’t care for the form in general. In a large sense, Brahms, Mozart and Bach are working in the same form, so were John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson. To someone who doesn’t care about classical or the blues, they’ll be hard to differentiate.
They were culturally shared trends before the recordings, they just were more widespread after them. We don’t know much about music from the 19th century because if you didn’t know how to write music, your music disappeared when the musicians who learned from you were dead. Most musicians today cannot read music, I would expect it was the same situation then. Recorded music allowed your music to live past you if you couldn’t write it down.
I think that recording (and especially the ease of recording with modern technology) invalidates your theory. Death’s recordings were made in the early 70’s, and they were broken up by '77. Their recordings were all released after 2009, to pretty widespread popularity, considering the style. They are just one extreme example, but the barrier to making a decent recording in 1974 was pretty high. In 2015, it’s pretty low. Depending on how low intensity your recording needs are, you can get away with a $100 handheld recorder.
In a similar vein, both Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Jefferson worked in obscurity, but are far more popular today. Lots of other largely obscure artists have enjoyed greater fame after they stopped being a going concern.
Hey, it’s a lot better question than “Why did people stop making good music after 19XX?”, and I thank you for it.
As to the cultural impact of all of this; I think that it’s just a furthering of a trend that started in the 1950’s with labels like Sun and Chess. That was probably the first time that a smaller artist could make a record without being beholden to a pretty large company, and could hope to sell more than a handful. As the prices of recording and pressing went down, you had more independent labels, and labels like A&M that were founded by artists.
By the time you get to the '80s and cassette tapes, everyone had a chance. Unlike LPs, you could rig a decent tape duplication system for a couple of hundred dollars. If you were really poor, you could get a high speed dubbing deck for less than the portable 4-track you would probably use to make the thing, and just keep feeding that thing during your spare time. CD’s made the same process slightly easier, and higher quality. If you sold enough of those, getting a label interested wasn’t that hard, and has gotten easier as even more labels proliferate.
Today, with recording costs so low, and distribution over the internet, the label is largely irrelevant, other than as a promotion machine. There are still trends (the giant Broadway-style shouting chorus that;s become popular recently, for example), but it’s even more fragmented. That fragmentation has been happening for a long time. There’s probably more innovation and more new music than ever before, but it’s more difficult for either to cause a sweeping change in styles.
Thanks for the continued discussion!
This is a fair point, and I agree that few musicians have had the privilege of making it.
But what if the carrots of wealth and fame were completely removed? What if it were just a given that your song was going to make no difference at all? Would that have any impact on how songwriters and musicians feel about their art?
I think it would. Again, look at poetry. I’m a poet, though I don’t identify with that title any more because nobody gives a fuck. I can’t even get my best friend, who is into quality art and music, to read my stuff. And I think my poetry is really, really good. I’ve put years of work into it. Any poet working now faces a stark fact: no matter how good your stuff is, you will never become famous for it. You can try to promote your work while you are alive, but once you are dead, it is all going down the oubliette, and no one will ever read it again.
Now imagine being a musician in which you simply know the same things about your music. No more hits are being made. No one becomes famous as a musician (aside from a few Taylor Swift brown dwarfs in what used to be a bright firmament). Just as the canon of poetry ended with Ginsberg and the beat poets in the 1950s, the canon of pop ends in 2000.
I don’t think it will be exactly like that, since people love music and it is inherently more entertaining than poetry. There will be viral hits on social media, there will bands that are locally popular. But it will all come and go like vapor with almost no one making any money. Just for highly transient fun.
I think that’s the future we are looking at, and I find it sad.
I think you are basically correct. The situation with graphic art is a bit unusual, however. Artists probably sell more art than ever, since rich people want to buy art and show it off. Despite there being a lot of money going around and the strong desire to jack up the prestige of artists (since it is from artists being “big” that the rich people’s purchases become prestigious), we have lost “famous artist” as a cultural category. I find that fact quite interesting.
I think you are right again. Even young people today are living at more or less the dawn of mass pop culture, historically speaking. From the Beatles to the current state of music is just a tiny flash of time in the long run–but we have been led to believe that past performance guarantees future results. The Beatles and Stones were big and culturally relevant, so there will always be bands that are big and culturally relevant. Yet I think it’s safe to say we haven’t seen a new performer or band of that stature rise since Michael Jackson. And now it will likely never happen again.
I think this is not true. Let’s look at “classical music” as it exists today. 12-tone music became the dominant form with Schoenberg (whom I love) and shooed away most of the listening public. Would-be composers kept at that kind of music into the 70s; people kept not listening outside of a very small circle. There are still grants to composers; orchestras still put on new pieces. But what the hell do you write? In what style? The stuff I’ve seen has been all over the place with no context. If I wasn’t told, I wouldn’t know if it was from 1930 or 2015. Of course all this goes down the oubliette as soon as it’s performed.
The trouble is, without that ground, nothing can really sound new or different. Your ground may be what you like, so are you doing, say, Beatles-esque pop in the year 2075? What does that mean at that point? You might be having fun in your home studio, but the lack of ground makes it very hard for other people to connect with it.
True. So, 100 years from now, 80s keyboard pop and 90s grunge could sound largely the same to someone: “Oh, yeah, it’s that pop music stuff from long ago. I kinda like some of that.” It will be like us trying to differentiate American clothing fashions of 1830s, 40s, 50s. To people back then, it would have been blindingly obvious how fashion had evolved, but to us it’s just “all those old clothes.”
To throw another example at you, Nike Drake because quite popular quite a bit after his death. I was familiar with the Death example too–the original punk band! etc.
But I also have about 2,000 vinyl records and know how much has been forgotten and how much great music was never popular in the first place. I think the Death example is like a cult movie: it gets picked up later and enjoyed by a relatively small group of people. I even had one of my songs from the 1980s picked up by the 365 day project, and someone’s even put a YouTube video of it up, so I have personal experience.
So maybe I need to compromise with your observation, but my point isn’t totally invalidated. I think the caveat I need to add is this: inherently entertaining media like movies and recorded music have the potential to be found later and enjoyed by a small audience. In very rare cases, as with Nick Drake, they can even find a substantial audience. But in the vast majority of cases, work that was not popular in its own time will not find an audience in the future, regardless of quality.
Another limiting factor to that compromise is that the long tail was really only begun about the year 2000. I can only imagine those small audiences are going to be chopped even finer as we accumulate 200 years, 300 years of recorded music–onward literally to infinity or the extinction of the human race…
Blind Willie Johnson and/or Blind Lemon Jefferson. 
I think that’s easy to explain by the fact that good blues records from the acoustic era are extremely limited. I’ve got the complete works of a lot of those blues guys, and often they fit on one or two CDs. Someone into the blues of that era has the potential to pretty much hear everything in not too long a time. So people go back and grab all they can.
I think this is true. Suppliers (musicians) and demanders (listeners) tastes become so fragmented that “style” is virtually erased from the market.
“But in the vast majority of cases, work that was not popular in its own time will not find an audience in the future, regardless of quality.”
That is the definition of pessimism: That there is a bottleneck on what will be remembered, and it will only be from a pool of what is popular today. If there isn’t a lot real good now then it’s a death spiral.
Apart from genre-pointing at old music you might see it as just “songs.” That is the way it is seen legally anyway, by copyright laws. If someone infringes on a beatles song that does not change its genre to “Beatles pop”. So the musician is always, regardless of genre or era, trying to make an original tune and this is a stable condition. And when it is recorded it becomes part of music history forever available.
History will turn and swerve and then someone may say “that band that I didn’t listen to bridged these two things I did.”
I take it you do not right now, but I am suggesting you should listen to Lost and Found on WMBR Cambridge. 12:00 to 2:00 every weekday. 60s and related music uncovered. Each show archived for 2 weeks. Different DJs and approaches for each day. Start looking up man!
You were on 365 days? Do you like Song-poem stuff? Rodd Keith?
I am a bit pessimistic about where things are headed for creative people. It is a “best of times, worst of times” situation. It’s very easy to distribute your stuff now and promote it yourself, but there is a proportionately much greater amount of stuff available, so art becomes devalued. As automation continues to take over and people have less actual work to do, this trend is only going to get worse, methinks.
I’m not sure about that. If you look at the links to movie reviews on Metacritic, a surprisingly large number of them are broken, even if they are a few years old. The ones from 10 years ago are almost all gone. And a lot of these were on the websites of major newspapers. I think most recorded music won’t be curated and will be lost. The same thing with all the ebooks and whatnot. Slip-sliding away, as Paul Simon sang.
The shows are only kept for 2 weeks? Doesn’t that kinda prove my point?!
But I am already a person who cares about the past, so your suggestion to “start looking up” is already being implemented.
Yes, I was in a band, actually, and my friend sent in one of our songs, and they put it up. Not really into song-poem stuff.