Ted Gioia: The history of music innovation [video]
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I think there are many people i the industry that wax poetic about how things work and success principles, but we never acknowledge how much the music industry is based on subversion of everyone else to promote and victimize major (manufactured) pop stars and to subvert independent (unsigned) artists unless they are willing to submit to the larger industry's bidding.
Songs like Party in the USA are what gets millions of views, while the local guy playing guitar in a coffee shop pays money to publish his music on spotify, and only gets 4 streams and quits after 4 years of losing money. There has really not been innovation within music anywhere but the indie market, but big industry (The guys with huge houses and record labels downtown) are the ones collecting a lot more money than the artists, and they keep innovating ways to keep that the norm.
I'm a realist, not a cynic... I've been making music and working within the industry for many years now and it's what keeps me alive. I've seen known musicians dealing drugs just to raise money to promote their albums, I've seen singers doing "very un-desirable" things just to get an album completed because they don't have the money to getting things done, seen nightclubs that solely thrive to sell drugs because the music does not make money. I've avoided all of the negative aspects of working in music.
There is no trend to revive the past in music, it's large companies and rich old investors that own the catalog rights to music that are promoting old songs on platforms by paying for promotion and then getting their other rich film industry buddies to throw those vintage songs into their reboot movies to try to generate buzz for songs that were already hits from the past. Very little innovation involved in that.
This might be true, but it only happens because those musicians put all their financial eggs into the music basket. If you have some kind of simple "big bucks" income like engineering, that basically removes the need to do unsavory things in order to make music.
And not everybody gets a big bucks job -- many entry level and lower skilled jobs are not far removed from sweatshop labor, and involve work schedules that preclude being able to perform.
Notable in Gioia's History of Jazz is that quite a few musicians were mentioned as having day jobs. But while they got good enough to be recognized for their proficiency, the move that got them into the history book always involved quitting that job.
In my own case, I've never been recorded, except a few demo's that I've done as a favor for friends. I've turned down offers to tour with bands that already had decent album sales. My day job affords me those luxuries. But I also haven't developed any musical ideas that would be missed.
Well, yeah, sure...but it shouldn't be that way. Labels have been the gatekeepers for well over half a century and have barely budged in terms of their dominance. It's largely like every other entrenched industry in the country: they're literally too big to fail. Any "innovation" is either sued out of existence or bought out.
It would be very interesting to see a survey of how many actual dedicated musicians succeed, but I'm already pretty sure it's less than 10%, and for those who work day jobs, I'm pretty sure the percentage is even less. I work in IT, and every single job I get is like walking away further from any hope of music success. I took the past year off IT work (very fortunate to have been able to do that) just to work on my music, but even now, getting my music to people's ears on the Internet is a massive hump to overcome, and it costs a lot of money.
Artists like Prince and The Weekend have backstories of being literally homeless before being discovered. These days, especially during the pandemic, the idea of homelessness is far more deadly, and those guys and many more from the past would likely never even succeed, which is very grim.
The monopolistic route to success being through gatekeepers and big industry is really even more toxic and harmful to our future than ever, but in reality it may be the only possible way to become a full time musician. I'm happy making music that I like, but it's not a hobby for me, it takes significant effort, expense, and time to make and promote it... So when I work my also very demanding day job to pay bills (which also takes significant time, effort, certifications etc...) there is no reasonable way to fit in social media, studio time, networking with musicians, interviews, touring etc.
Citing all that, I can't simultaneously work a modern day job and physically, or even in essence, also be a professional musician with all the modern hurdles of maintaining another entirely different career.
Mini-review of The History of Jazz so far: It is a deluge of names, many that I recognize, but far more than I will ever remember in terms of how they fit into the tapestry. This is what happens when you cram that much creativity into such a short time period, probably similar to trying to write or read a history of computing. So I can only read it in a couple of ways: First to refute many of my misconceptions, and second, as a springboard for choosing an area to dig deeper into, either through reading, listening, or playing.
For actual reading, his “How to Listen to Jazz” is probably much better - and covers quite a bit of the same ground.
I was surprised to even consider Jazz as THE most important artistic innovation (I can think of a few more, e.g. Modernism, or "The Greatest Artistic Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century" [1]), but in a way, I can give the theory some credit.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Conte
[1]: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c5787/c5787.pdf
His book "Delta Blues" got me started on his writing and I've followed him for over 10 years now.