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It’s South by Southwest 2012, and I have time to kill between panels. So, I duck into this especially tiny 6th Street bar, whose name escaped me even then, for a beer. There’s a guy and his guitar onstage, and he’s got to be no older than 21-22. Even between me, the bouncer, the next band up, and the bartender, I served as an audience of one. With a kind of rustic charm, he performed John Mellencamp covers and Bruce Springsteen standbys between originals about prom night and leaving Charleston. Maybe I was more pacified than entertained, but for a brief period he held my attention, and I felt obliged to shake his hand.
We got to talking, and when it came out what I do for a living, he got antsy and excited. Tossing out Twitter handles and SoundCloud links, I’ll never forget when he grabbed my arm, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “I’d sell my grandma or buy you a horse just to have someone listen.” I left a few minutes later, and though I never did look him up, I still think about him from time to time.
I think about his state of mind, occupying that hazy space between determination and desperation, and I can’t help but see a sense of that throughout the music industry. No one’s offering anyone people or farm animals, but there’s this unshakable notion that the business is also struggling just to be heard. So, as the cliche goes, desperate times call for desperate measures, and more and more labels and PR reps and bands are getting clever with their album rollouts.
Then you have little shits like me, making music for fun, doing my part to over-saturate the market. I put in my 40 hours to a regular job, but I manage to squeeze out 5 or 6 singles in a year. Not that what I produce is for sale. It's free... but maybe that compounds the problem. A part of me thinks that if I sold it, people would value it more. Anyway, yeah, the music biz is evolving faster than anyone can evaluate, at this point. Good read.
There was a small period from 1970 to 1997 where people did get paid and they got paid very handsomely... but now that period's done. If you look at the history of recorded music from, say, 1900 to now, there was that period where artists did very well but the rest of the time they didn't.
So, maybe this is just me romanticizing and/or simplifying things, but that seems to coincide roughly with a "golden age" of popular music (emphasis on popular). Generally, there was a lot of originality in every mainstream genre. The quick progression of 70's funk and rock to 80's synthwave pop, 90's rap, electronica, even country music... It all happened pretty quickly. There's a lot of shaping forces that article touches on, even the social climate of musicianship has changed so much within the last 20 years. Too complex to sum up cleanly in a Hubski comment. I'm also under the impression that mainstream artists still get heavily paid. Sure, record labels are gouging them noticeably, but the artists still take away a nice slice. Mainstream music nowadays is performed by many faces, but only written by a few people, who are milking the same, tired formulas. I forget the exact statistics, but yeah. Will anyone really dispute that the quality of easily accessible music (radio, soundtracks, etc.) has declined noticeably within the last 15 years? Popular artists used to rap about shit that mattered, for fuck's sake. Dubstep may not be not my cup of tea, but it's perhaps the most obvious example of a recent progression. It's INCREDIBLE what just one person can do with a laptop and a digital audio workspace these days. We have access to tools that producers and engineers in earlier decades only dreamed of. There's a lot of innovation out there in electronic music that is completely unrewarded primarily because there is so much of it happening at once. Electronic performances are increasingly limited solely by imagination. Side note: not a Destroid fan, but K.J. Sawka playing drums in a predator suit... yep, that's fuckin' awesome. Yeah, I know, the drums are only MIDI triggers, but what a presentation. Personally, I see the whole drumset-with-bass-and-1-or-2-guitars thing as played out. I certainly respect the musicianship, songwriting abilities, lyrics, and sounds of a lot of "indie bands" (whatever the hell that means anymore), but unless you immerse yourself in the genre, a lot of it sounds the same. Electronica is absurdly diverse. Many small sub-genres have more sonic diversity within themselves than the indie pop scene. Everyone: if you're reading this, and you can afford Ableton Live, join the revolution. P.S. Feel free to rip apart any or all my arguments, I'm game for friendly banter. :)
So I agree and disagree. I think you can pretty much trace the rise of rock musician salary to the rise of A&R salary and then add 15 years. Alan Freed got filthy fucking rich off rock music; as soon as that became public knowledge, the artists started demanding their share. The whole thing mushroomed and started imploding about the time of Nirvana, when the ethic got completely reversed. Combine that with MP3 and it becomes fundamentally obvious that the true money to be made is in controlling access to music, not making it. Now that you can no longer really control access to music, you can't really make money on it - unless you're talking about licensing, which is still crazy expensive and still a rich person's game. Jeron Lanier also made the point that from about 1890 until about 1985, every generation created its own type of music and propagated it. He argues that this all stopped at rap - the last truly new thing under the sun. I really, really want to disagree with him but I just can't. In particular, I wanted to disagree with him in relation to dubstep - but really, it's anthem techno. It's anthem techno with added weirdness. I say this as a personal friend of Kevin Sawka - I've known his older brother for fifteen years, mixed the first band he was in live and watched that kid grow up. He's always been an incredible talent but I seriously doubt he'd consider himself a visionary. Damn good drummer? Hell yeah. And I fuckin' love getting Facebook posts from goddamn Hammersmith. But dubstep is not to techno what rap was to rock. I went to the first raves, back when they'd mix Skinny Puppy in with the 2Unlimited because there just wasn't enough content to get jiggy with it... and I'm here to tell ya - it's all the same stuff. I can tell you exactly who influenced the "predator" schtick. I can tell you where that came from, too.
I would say dubstep is to techno what punk was to rock. Meaning it was a logical extension of an established genre that reflected the drugs, sex and politics of the era.
Except that punk is a "stripping down" of rock, a de-ornamentation. Dubstep is a "tarting up" of techno - it's pure ornamentation. Nobody makes Goa Trance anymore because its logical progression basically hit "Industrial" and stopped. I mean, it was ornate, sample-heavy, bleepy and angry: The bands that are left are basically pure industrial at this point. Juno Reactor went from this: To this: Dubstep? Dubstep takes the corner of Jungle that Goldie and Squarepusher stripmined to death and beats it like a dead horse: