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Music For The Masses

found this VERY interesting article by Alan Wilder (ex depeche mode member) and his thoughts on the future of the music biz. its worth the long read believe me;

http://www.side-line.com/interviews...=29640_0_16_0_C


I find the last paragraph sums it up well;

quote:

So who shall we blame for the whole mess? Do we stick two fingers up at the record companies who have sat around twiddling their thumbs, peddling overpriced re-issues for years while their A&R men bombard us with shallow, faceless pop idol, X factor boy bands? Is it fair to say �... well, you had it coming�...? Or do we accuse the casual 'non-listener' with the attention span of a three year old living in a disposable, homogenized, Paris Hilton-obsessed society, over stimulated with too much life choice? A society that places value in triviality and accepts mediocrity without much question? Or perhaps the devaluation has evolved from the cult of the DJ, where anyone can regurgitate the very essence of rock 'n' roll by lifting an entire 70's funk classic, adding some rap drivel over the top and calling it their own work? Is modern music regarded as an art form at all anymore? Or is it just another business now?

take from it what you will.

i like this bit:

Because the likes of Radiohead and Prince can afford to give their music away as a cheap promotional gimmick in order to create publicity for their respective machines. They get noticed for doing so and benefit in other areas. So with everyone now expecting free music, all the other artists lose what little income they could expect from record sales, even though the love and money spent producing their product hasn't changed.

A bit of a sidebar from great Alan Wilder piece...imo the Computer and the evolution of technology in music has thrown a wrench into the music industry's previous business model, which is well known by now, but more importantly its hurting the art form. There is a gateway to free music and an abudant amount (dilution) of music through the internet and computers which holds back the truly talented artists from evolving the art form. Those people are being replaced by The Joe Blow's of the world. If people are spending their time and money on any artist who can make a beat on the computer and use a compressor then not much room is left for the truly talented to push and evolve the art form that is music.

The computer/internet is hurting the art form, it is also holding the cultures back, the cultures that supplement the art forms that artists take inspiration, influence, experiences from. People are spending more time behind the computer than outside amongst friends or on the block where in essence culture in any corner of the world has errupted from and evolved. This evolution of art and culture is simply not happening in the ways it use to, in the way that took us from blues clubs to jazz to rock and roll and hip hop music, and house being all of that rolled into one. In the future modern culture will evolve from soul-less virtual worlds. Actually it will be a fight between the TV and virtual worlds on what paves culture. It use to be our families, the block we grew up on, and the TV moving up the ranks on creating culture. In the future the essence and evolution of culture which inspire art forms will be a tug of war purely between TV and Computers/Internet.

An argument can be made that the computer/internet has empowered a bigger worldwide music culture to exist, many of us would not be here posting about EDM or would not be listeners of EDM if it were not for easy accessibility of the music on computers, EDM does not have mass media exposure in many places in the world. Accessibility has pushed people to create EDM music on computers, or as listeners going to EDM shows supplementing a culture that has grown through the computer.

My question is...how long before we have a revolution against computers? Will it ever get to that point? Or will we as concious humans continue to make computers a part of the creation of cultures for the forseeable future.

::back to carving Lions Lair - Shadow Boxer::

I totally agree i what he is saying in general as in music going from an artform to a blatant money making scheme. I see it this way take art (pictures , not some sellotape on a lamppost and calling it the 'sticky post piece')once one is complete it is sold and the money comes from the collectors and its artists income is determined by how many good peices they produce. Music should be this way!. Instead pop music is rammed at us from every angle TV ,mags , newspapers obviously radio aswell.To extract the last coins out of a teenagers pocket.

BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT ANNOYS ME MOST! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

In the UK we have Radio 1 and one DJ played cascada--everytime we touch in the top 40 countdown and he said '' For some reason that song is still in the top 40'' ,some reason???????
Maybe people are sick of pop,indie, rock and when some EDM comes along (even though if its pure cheese)It is different and people respond better.

BASSHUNTER - NOW YOUR GONE

5 weeks at number 1 in the uk , not a good song but EDM nevertheless
The radio , papers, mags went to town on the bloke , a sure sign that the big record companys didnt want to be undone by a little known label but they did

Obviously EDM is still popular and its starting to come out the woodwork and if we could go back to a stage like 1998-2000 when EDM genres were massive.

And finally ive never liked a song that is being peddelled to me by a freaky looking long haired spotty grease ball and bawling about his failed life.

If there was a time for a push to re popularise EDM genres it is now
And this time do it for the music not the money

Taking the money out of the business means taking out the people who are in the business for the money.

Of course, this makes a lot of people really angry: label managers and every artist who isn't satisfied until his listeners become buyers.

Yeah, I know, artists need to put a roof over their head. Fair enough. And if their art gives them enough to live off of, they can spend more time perfecting their craft, resulting in better art.

But I wonder how true this theory is in practice. It seems to me that as often as not the stuff that musicians make in their early years while working at some crap job stands up pretty well to the stuff that they make later on when they're sitting on a mound of cash, supposedly living the dream and living for their art.

I'll repost some stuff that idoru wrote in another thread:

quote:

Originally posted by idoru If there has been one factor in the bastardization of most music it's money. I think Chris Rock put it best... �Music kind of sucks. Nobody�s into being a musician. Everybody�s getting their mogul on. You�ve been so infiltrated by this corporate mentality that all the time you�d spend getting great songs together, you�re busy doing nine other things that have nothing to do with art. You know how shitty Stevie Wonder�s songs would have been if he had to run a fuckin� clothing company and a cologne line? � Rap sucks, for the most part. Not all rap, but as an art form it�s just not at its best moment. Sammy the Bull would have made a shitty album. And I don�t really have a desire to hear Warren Buffett�s album - or the new CD by Paul Allen. That�s what everybody�s aspiring to be.� ...So where, then, does the creativity lie? In the artist that works at a fucking McDonalds 30 hours a week, goes home, sits in his studio in front of gear that he busted ass for years to earn (instead of having some big label go, "Okay, here, you can have all of this awesomeness for a few hours on this day."), and makes some fucking quality music because he wants to, not because some label is demanding that he meet deadlines. This guy will get off of their shift at 9PM on a Friday, bust their ass over to the club by 9:30, spin from 10:00-12:00, stay at the club until it closes at 2:00AM, help tear down gear until 4:00AM, and be back at work at 8:00AM. That is where quality music comes from; someone with a passion for it, a desire for it. Not some fucking asshole who signed a major label contract because they want to be famous and are willing to sacrifice creative control over what essentially made them who they were in the first place.

Good read.

quote:

Originally posted by pozz the internet has opened up possibilities for many people, and i like it that now anybody can grab a program and make music in their spare time. the reason all that music is garbage is because of commercialism: if you only hear the shit on the radio, that's the kind of shit you'll make.

I disagree, just because anyone can make music now it doesn't mean it's a good thing, infact it's bad just as the shit that we are forced to listen for few past years. And who listens to the radio anymore ? When it comes to dance music, majority of it is now online which is not a good thing either, as someone mentioned you used to be able to hear it on radio but not anymore. Commercialism is still alive it just changed playgrounds.

Any time it becomes possible for more people to make a living from a scene, that scene starts to accumulate large amounts of derivative crap. This derivative crap comes from people who make music not just out of love, but also out of thoughts of paychecks and being a "star." Why do dreams of paychecks and stardom turn music into derivative crap?

Because for most people the surest path to paychecks and stardom is to duplicate stuff that has already earned other people lots of money and fame.

"The real moment for me was staring down from the [Hacienda] DJ booth one night when Mike Pickering was DJ-ing and suddenly going, 'Oh fuck, now I get it, the democracy of the art experience, its everybody - the people who made the record, it's the DJ, it's everybody dancing - and it isn't four guys on a stage with white lights on and everybody in the dark.' What dance music has become is one guy with a white light on him and everyone else in the fucking dark, which is precisely how it wasn't meant to be."
- Tony Wilson

I totally agree with Alan Wilder!

but this is the most exciting time for the music industry. We are witnessing a revolution made possible by digital music. Now cd's are a thing of the past and producers can now sell their music as an independent artist more freely than ever. i think that its a great evolution all in all. Although the side effect of this digital music revolution is that there is so much garbage being releases because its so easy to make music on a normal computer these days.

quote:

Originally posted by pozz I'll take that quote as my sig if you dont mind

Don't mind at all.

It seems like the sentiment in what Wilson said has been forgotten, pretty much. As far as I can tell, hardly anyone even cares about that sort of thing anymore.

Think about it, though. For thousands of years many art traditions (especially the Western classical one) have set up a hard dichotomy between performers and audience. A performer sits above the audience on a stage and does his thing, and the spectators look on passively. They are there for him. The performer is the "expert," better than everybody else and more worthy of attention. The rock concert basically carries on this same tradition, although it has more audience participation than a classical concert.

And then there come along some crazy parties with a really crazy premise: the performer is not the center of attention. There is music, and there is a person providing it, but this person, the DJ, is merely instrumental to the real purpose of the event, which is for people to be in one another's company and have fun. He is not "special" or the "reason" for the night. The point is not to stand around and watch the guy who's playing the music, but to use the music as a catalyst for enjoying yourself by dancing, being with friends, and quite possibly getting fucked up. DJs were just "freaks in the corner who provided the music while other people had fun," like Paul van Dyk said. The audience is no longer merely a set of spectators, but participants.

And then eventually marketing forces figured out how to attach "big names" to the music and got everybody to think of dance music nights as occasions for everybody to gather into a big mass and gaze at some guy up on a stage. Events moved more and more into big, heavily-regulated clubs with liquor licenses and the legalistic, profit-minded mentality that entails. The promotional tactics of pop music, the emphasis on the glamor and specialness of "big name" performers, were applied to get everybody into the building and drinking lots of alcohol.

I think about it often. Its the reason I listen and love electronic music: it has no objective referents.

Progressive objectification of the world in the Western liberal ideology is what is destroying such an experience for the general. Since a higher purpose really serves no appreciable economic purpose - it really is only sentimental and principled - then considerations of an ideal "party", where anyone can participate and feel free in, are really useless in such a perspective. I find it funny when people tell me that you always have to consider the economic element because its the only real reason for anything, although money itself in an abstract notion. Mind control (aka advertising) is really the ruling force right now, and asking "pointless" questions with "useless" ideas attached is the only way to break it.

I might be naive for saying this, but I really want an ideal world where one can be as free as one wants (considering the constraints of discourse and materiality). Even though such a world is a utopia (or a dystopia depending on how you look at it), it won't stop me from making music and promoting parties where this is so.

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