The Loneliness of the Long Distance Rocker
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
The downside in the new arrangement is that you're expected to do more of your own promotion. However, as your visibility grows you can hire someone to do that.
In terms of human connection, there's still plenty to be had in the act of performing music.
When it comes to starting to learn an instrument, I agree that there are fewer role models around than when I was young. However, popular music moves in fads. Where I'm from, guitar-based music was last "in" in the late 00's, I'm sure it'll come around again.
The real downside is that with no gatekeepers there and so many acts (orders of magnitudes more) you can make and release albums that nobody hears at all.
Whereas in the past, if you made it to have an album out, you had a small following almost guaranteed.
At least back when you couldn't even make the album without being picked by a record company, you could blame your failure to those A&R guys that failed to appreciate you, or get your lack of contract as a sign that you're not good enough to begin with.
Now that you can easily make an album, everybody both feels more entitled to success, but also gets to see firsthand how the audience just doesn't care.
Though I get what you’re driving at, there have been companies that will press your basement demo onto a vinyl LP almost as long as vinyl records have been made (and later cassettes and CDs, of course). They’d do the artwork, too, from “we’ll have an in-house artist do it for lots of money” to “we’ll put your camera-ready art on it for a little extra”. But pre-internet, that meant selling the hard copies at shows and maybe the local indie record store. What one is missing, of course, is the promotion from a label. But the production of hard copies of music hasn’t been a barrier for a long time.
How many copies must one have ordered up front? I'd guess it was so many as to have been prohibitively expensive for a fledgling artist to handle.
Prices have gone up a lot in the last 5 years. I think it’ll run at least $2,000 to get an LP pressed. Plus a year wait. Probably half that or so for a 7”.
Depending on the label youre with (theres a ton of 1 person labels), you can split the cost. If theyre bigger, they’ll just pay for it.
This was 1980, 7 inch 45, we sold about 800, gave away the rest over the next 20 years.
Total cost of production and pressing was at least $5,000, which wasn't a sum any random garage band could muster up. We broke our piggy banks and hit up our friends because our success was a sure thing.
The good old days, I guess.
Whereas in the past, if you made it to have an album out, you had a small following almost guaranteed.
Taste seems to be a commodity that no one wants to provide anymore. Because it isn't a commodity at all. It's a craft. It's something that specifically requires human attention, and until AI progresses some more, attempts to mass produce and make it a commodity will just produce annoying doppelgangers of it. The difference is still like those pink styrofoam grocery store "tomatoes" and garden grown tomatoes.
The former is only pleasing to those who don't know what the real thing is actually like!
During the rise of Napster we all liked to paint the record labels as evil. What we all failed to realize was how important labels were to seeking out and developing new talent. We’ve seen the last Bowie or Radiohead for a very long time.
But the next thing you talk about creates an environment not conducive to developing really tasteful ones.
The problem is the absolute flood of garbage produced in bedroom studios. Cutting through the noise to find what’s good has become near impossible for everyone. Popular music used to focus on scenes, the internet made sure to stomp that into the dirt.
Given an environment like that, how is someone going to develop good taste? There are still music scenes, BTW. They are distinctly non-mainstream, however.
There's a bit of survival bias in that observation. Of course we all think the bands that we like and know about are talented. But how many among we don't know about were talented, and of those how many were passed over by record companies?
For reasons of cost and access, as a consumer I certainly have the opportunity to listen to and discover far more bands myself than in the pre-internet days, and do so without needing to rely on curators and gatekeepers like record labels and reviewers. I can go directly to the source and sample the music from bands directly, without all of these middle men.
I'm a much better judge of what I like than any record company could be, because my own taste in music will never perfectly match up with anyone else's. So at least as far as discovering "talent", I'd trust my own taste far more than that of any record company... as long as I make the effort to actually seek out new music.
As for developing talent, we may have lost the multi-album development deals that allowed artists to take risks whilst still being supported financially, but the development of artists doesn't have to be confined to music studios. Artists get real-time feedback on their music when they play live, and they can still make a living doing so.
The last point I'd like to make is that the services labels used to offer are still available, and there's greater flexibility for the artist when it comes to picking and choosing which services to use. Want someone else to handle distribution? It can be done. Want someone else to handle promotion? That's possible too. Want to hire a studio and a music producer and an engineer? All fine if you've got the money. Previously, if signed to a major label (some indie labels had different business models), you gave up your song rights and part of your creative control in order to secure a loan to make an album, a loan which you'd then be obligated to work off. Nowadays you have no obligation to go into debt in order to release music, it's completely up to the artists to choose how much they engage with the labels.
Not much. And indeed, kids todays are much less invested in music than kids where in the 60s till the 80s or so.
For one thing, there are now tons of competing outlets that weren't around then: tons of movies of all eras available (and most current top-tier movies made for teenage sensibilities, less All ), great TV series with huge production values, Netflix and co, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, the web at large, texting, computers, mobile apps, and games.
Besides, there's less mystery in music acts (total transparency and 24/7 social media exposure for any fan who cares who check), less exclusivity (all music available on online services), and less ubiquity (each act gets a much smaller of the attention pie, and can even have a top-10 hit nationwide that half the nation haven't even heard or knows -- something impossible when there was huge radio and only a few TV stations and outlets and hits were hammered constantly without other recourse to everybody).
Second, incredibly well-written. Very persuasive.
Third, it's been clear for a long time music was going to only get harder to succeed in, for the sole reason that as time goes on you are competing with the entirety of music history. Your recorded music is competing with everything ever recorded, Beatles, 80's glam rock, Mozart, and rain forest nature sounds. (Live music has magic, yes, but people are getting immune to it.)
Fourth, the 60's-00's was a golden era where technology made it just barely possible to record and distribute music, in a way that required a lot of labor. That labor made it more collaborative, and served as a kind of distributed gate-keeper to the market. Now, technology is too good, and unless an EMP pulse from a solar flare or nuke destroys all digital recordings of everything, it's not going to turn back.
Fifth, I think the solution is to embrace and extend the modern trends. Get people to collaborate with you on stage using their cell phones. As a performer, connect your phone to the PA, then run a webserver that people in the audience can access over the local subnet. They can then affect the sound in arbitrary ways (perhaps most simply by making beats).
Being at the concert but doing something else seems like they are doing it to say they were there, and there are are always other ways to signal status people can fall back on.
Same thing could apply to some other object. I've seen it done with USB sticks and business cards. Some sort of physical media is still useful for that purpose.
This piece was written by Rhett Miller of the Old 97's, who are a similarly great live band who are absolutely worth seeing if you can.
Nice username by the way, but I hope Metheny does not die for some time. :)
The diy hustle of making mix tapes and homemade videos is how the current stars of rap, Migos, blew up.
SoundCloud rappers are a thing. It's a drug influenced, dreary subgenra that's launched dozens of stars, lil uzi vert or for example.
Everyone who told us musicians that flattening the barriers to entry would lead to more income were either ignorant of economics or willfully ignoring it further their interests. Few bands make more money off of Bandcamp then they did flogging their CDs.
Perhaps idols have network effects.
Do most people actually want independent structures? They're available to use if you do (see: bandcamp).
I assert most people would prefer a musical common knowledge (even if banal) over more interesting yet isolating music.
In a sense, musical isolation outside the mainstream has gotten worse over time, as the internet has made it easier to follow your aesthetic judgments into deeper and more disparate rabbit holes. The idea of a subculture seemed a happy medium, but these have mostly become "atomized" out of existence. There does still exist an "indie" alternate-mainstream, along with a few others, but for the more engaged music fan it's somewhat of a lonely world.
Hopefully the pendulum will soon begin to swing back toward shared experience and music creation as a means toward community-building (see: prayer), rather than as an end in itself.
There's always been pop music. More people were listening to Ace of Base and Hanson in the '90s than to Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
I get it's a personal essay, but I wish he had spent some time talking to young people who are making music about their actual practices.
To bring it back to HN, nobody's typing Basic code out of Creative Computing or swapping homebrew code on the local BBS anymore, but there are more people making video games than ever.
Keep in mind that dance music is fundamentally music for a club and designed to be experienced on a loud system in a dance floor full of people.
The process of making and distributing the music may be digital and remote, but the intended way to experience it is as social as it gets.
If you want your music to get attention one of the best ways to do it is to go to a lot of clubs, and meet promoters and DJ’d face to face and to DJ yourself.
The music that dominates the charts simply cannot be performed. A concert of this music is more akin to a pantomimed multimedia presentation.
Because the care and feeding of an actual musician is quite high, I think we are undergoing the end of musicians, as a category. This is the end of an ancient practice. It’s a kind of singularity, of unknown outcomes.
This is not to say there won’t be some musicians, but the cultural weight of this activity is being drastically marginalized.
Performing music with others is a wonderful activity, that provides rewarding connections with others unlike anything else I know. Soon, people won’t know what they are missing.
I think this is a false dichotomy - it's often both. Even people using completely digital sources (like electronic musicians) still perform live, and not all just press play.
I'm also reminded of Bret Victor's demos in Stop Drawing Dead Fish; programming and performing can be intertwined into new art forms.
Christopher Small's Musicking[0] has influenced my thinking on this topic. The gist of the book is to understand music more as a verb ([communal] activity) than a noun (product, object).
[0] https://www.amazon.com/musicking-meanings-performing-listeni...
For some kids, the fact that it spans multiple age groups is a plus. When I was a teenager, I enjoyed mixing with my own peers but also adults who had a lot better stories and jokes, and who had really experienced life in the trenches.
I've noticed that among the people I know who played music as kids and actually kept with it into adulthood, virtually none of them play rock music.
Years ago, I used to use the "similar" feature in Rhapsody and found some music that way, not sure what people use today.