I am a music fan and a record collector, and I buy lots of CDs, but in my tens of thousands of LPs, singles, tapes and CDs, I don't have a single thing by Faith Hill, Britney Spears or any of the other flash-in-the-pan no talent rappers and hip-hoppers with their MTV-ready looks and tuneless, say-nothing songs that are being shoved down the radio listeners' ears. We're told that the labels push them because that's what people want, yet all of them are suffering from free-falling CD sales.
Meanwhile, here's a list of some people I consider to be the biggest talents in music, and whose CDs I always make it a point to buy. Best country singers: Don Williams and Lacy J. Dalton. Best pop songwriter: Marshall Crenshaw. Best female singer/songwriter: Amy Rigby. Best alt-country band: the Lucky Pierres. I could go on and on, and everyone I listed would have one thing in common: not a single one of them has a major label record deal. And until big time record executive weasels once again start signing and promoting artists based on their musical talent rather than their looks, fashion sense, attitude and age, they will continue to see their sales fall until they go bankrupt and have to stand around begging for cocaine on street corners. Can't happen soon enough to suit me.
I hear people say that all the time, but it's demonstrably false. The record companies are putting out what people are buying. It's just a sad commentary that the majority of the music buying public's taste runs toward pre-fab pap.
I'm still waiting on the RIAA to explain why the viewership for the music industry awards shows is falling through the floor despite the addition of every "popular" music act to the program.
the label formula is broken. the more big hat soap opera stars and fat boy hip hopera rap they throw out there the worse it gets. a couple of young independent bands might eventually sweep the net and put more of these music mafia out of business eventually.
I too have an enormous music collection - nearly 1,000 CDs and at least twice that many LPs and cassettes. But the vast majority of my purchases lately have been for either classical music (where very good values can currently be found) or "catalog" rock music - that is, rock music that is not current (i.e. from the 1960s or 70s).
I look at my music collection and I realize that most of what I listen to is "real." What I mean by that is, the music I like to listen to and go out of my way to buy is music by recording artists who are generally not "slick" and "packaged" like so much music is today. The "rock" or "popular music" portion of my collection consists of recording artists such as Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Allman Brothers, Waylon Jennings, Jefferson Airplane, Bruce Springsteen, etc. These are artists who put passion into their music and don't care about how they might look on MTV or how coarse and "unprofessional" their singing might be. None of the aforementioned artists would make it in today's music industry because they are not the "eye-candy" that record companies are looking for.
Now that recording industry has always been sort of a cookie-cutter industry. There were just as many faceless singing groups from the 1960s and 1970s (1910 Fruitgum Co. and Bay City Rollers come to mind) but the focus of the music industry was promoting talented recording artists with long-term potential such as Dylan, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, etc. Despite the higher promotional costs in getting those artists established, these artists continue to sell truckloads of albums today and their albums will be selling decades from now while on the other hand, those albums by Bay City Rollers and 1910 Fruitgum Co. aren't even available anymore, except as collector's items on E-Bay.
Well starting about a decade ago, the music industry decided to put all their eggs in the teeny-bopper basket, promoting a whole slew of belly-buttoned Madonnas and Britney Spears for short-term gain and stopped developing serious recording artists who might not look good on MTV and sell a million albums off the bat but would have established loyal followings that would have translated into decades worth of revenue. The music industry is now reaping the results of this misguided short-term strategy.
Screw file-sharing as being the culprit. If anything, file-sharing is keeping the music industry alive. It's the only way most of us can find decent new music now that radio stations have come under the control of anal-retentive program directors who only care about reaching the lowest common denominator and thus only program music that is bland and unlikely to challenge the ear. Like the recording industry itself, radio stations have become slaves to mediocrity.
The recording industry are killing themselves. Popular music is at a creative low. Hopefully what will emerge is a new industry that will rejuvenate creativity and nuture talented recording artists of the future instead of taking a bunch of talentless kids, dressing them like hookers and hiring whiz-bang producers to disguise their lack of talent by producing soul-less but slick and clean recordings for them that everybody forgets about 12 months later.
If no one wants it, why are people working so hard to steal copies of the stuff?
That album grates on my nerves, not because of the music but because of the production. Whoever engineered/mastered that thing must have been tone deaf, and you can actually hear converter "overs" in the tracks. Incidentally, reduced production quality is another complaint from the circles that actually care about such things. I own recent commercial CDs where you can hear things like reverb processors clipping. WTF? I thought these people were paying good money for studio time. It really irritates me that they push stuff out the door with these very audible (and very preventable) production flaws.