Where music was once seen by many as one of the highest callings possible, that perception seemed to die with the 90’s even as the music business hit its peak. It’s been all downhill since as the brain drain and lack of incoming talent has only helped to accelerate the industry’s fall to where it is today at about half its all-time high revenue.
So how could this happen? How could a business that was once the centerpiece of so many people’s dreams suddenly become as tarnished as a piece of neglected silverware? If you take a step back and look at the problem from a macro perspective, there seems to be four primary reasons.
1. There’s no glamor in music anymore. Once upon a time it was considered cool to hang out with musicians in general, and even cooler to hang with rock stars if the opportunity presented itself. Musicians held center stage in the entertainment universe, as they were always in the news and in the middle of the conversation on every college campus.
Today, music is a seldom featured asterisk to most people’s daily lives. It no longer has the cultural significance that it once had, rarely influences fashion or lifestyle, and has increasingly lost its cool factor, at least to the same degree that it once had.
Tech, on the other hand, is everything that music today is not. It regularly influences fashion and lifestyle, and it’s executives act like the execs of the music business of the 70s and 80s did, playing it (for better or worse) generally loose and free. Ironically most music execs these days now act more like the corporate suits that they tried so hard to avoid in years past. Read more on Forbes.
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1 comment:
How depressing and unfortunately, realistically true in many ways.
It's very discouraging and sad that such a uniquely special art-form as Music itself, as well as so many people's dedicated and committed musical ambitions in life have been swept aside and relegated to this.
Actually we're all to blame long ago by letting the Digital Genie out of the bottle in the first place, to run rampant and becoming so reliant to ride the soul'less binary wave of convenience, portability, storage and the combined negative consequences of the growth of digitized information and it's corrupting influence on Music.
Pirated catalogues and entire collections of years of blood, sweat and tears of work by artists, their producers and engineers past and present.
.99 cents for a song? What a steal in every sense of the word. Unless one is a musician or involved in the incredibly detailed and disciplined artistic song-writing and recording process, the average consumer has no clue how much this literally devalues everything once so highly esteemed.
If all this isn't already an example of how we've hit rock bottom, is it even possible to be optimistic for whatever the next musical cycle will be?
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