I just read a great analysis of the current state of the music industry that John Mellencamp wrote for HuffPo. While it doesn’t surprise me that many of the problems affecting hip-hop are common across all genres, it really opens my eyes to how widespread the problems with this industry are when we’re all basically saying the same thing regardless of age, genre or years of tenure in the business.
Here’s a few excerpts that really stood out to me, but I suggest reading the entire article to get the full analysis.
On the corporate influence in the music business:
Reagan’s much-vaunted trickle-down theory said that wealth tricked down to the masses from the elite at the top. Now we’ve found out that this is patently untrue — the current economic collapse reflects this self-serving folly. The same holds for music. It doesn’t trickle down; it percolates up from the artists, from word of mouth, from the streets and rises up to the general populace. Constrained by the workings of SoundScan/BDS, music now came from the top and was rammed down people’s throats.
On the creation of the CD:
The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased. They used to call this “planned obsolesce” in the car business. Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn’t very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.
On success in the modern industry:
Sadly, these days, it’s really a matter of “every man for himself.” In terms of possibilities, we are but an echo of what we once were. Of course, the artist does not want to “sell out to The Man.” Left with no real choice except that business model of greed and the bean counting mentality that Reagan propagated and the country embraced, there is only “The Man” to deal with. There is no street for the music to rise up from. There is no time for the music to develop in a natural way that we can all embrace when it ripens and matures. That’s why the general public doesn’t really care. It’s not that the people don’t still love music; of course they do. It’s just the way it is presented to them that ignores their humanity.
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Whoa, J.M. kept it all the way real, very good read.
On the creation of CD's: They actually do sound better and can stand a little bit more wear and tear than a record album. I think advances in technology should not be looked at as a "con" or "get rich quick" scheme. There are many advantages to Compact Discs that albums do not afford.
On success in the modern industry: To say that "there is no time for music to develop in a natural way that we can all embrace when it ripens and matures" is entirely based on individual wants and needs from the artist. An artist would understand what it means to grow and learn AS an artist. The outcome of artists trying to get rich quick is just like any mans goal of being successful. If given the opportunity to become CEO of a company, not many people would pass the chance up and say, '' I would like to pass on the opportunity and start in the basement moving boxes and slowly build my way back up to CEO…..
I think you make great points Matt, but may be over-thinking the point he's making. He's not really encouraging the industry to go back to the vinyl, but pointing out the fact that the record labels did a lousy job of keeping up with technology and hedged their bets on the notion that the CD would be around for 50 years.
Right now the industry is really fucked up because of these labels and their poor management. It's fine to say an artist can mature on their own before needing a label and can still be successful in doing so, but I find it impossible for an artist to make a decent living as a musician without some sort of corporate backing. These days artists are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to dealing with labels because they have the choice of taking the shitty deal being offered by a label or waiting for the landscape to improve while trying to grow independently in the meantime.
That shitty deal may end up being the only opportunity an artist ever gets to achieve a higher level of success in the industry, as the shelf life of artists these days is short and like many other fields of entertainment, once a performer hits about 30 years old- their stock starts to slide.
I really like what Mellencamp had to say and believe that more artists need to step up and put the labels in check.
Yo that's true too. Thanks for following up. The only thing I would say about that would be the shelf life is the consumers fault… Americans are always searching for the next best thing. We go through music like piranhas to an unsuspecting cow stepping into the Amazon River….haha. Always searching for the NEXT big thing.