Check that out HERE.
He said naught wrong in the article and the podcast episode. This inspired me to take a look up out of my bubble and speak on the state of the music industry. This essay is going to take more than one bit to get it over with.
So, let's start with how we got here. Then I'll move onto the ramifications. Finally, I'll finish up with what does all of this mean for Joe Music Fan in 2020?
Well, just how did we get here?
If you ask this question in an online forum or in a room of music fans, you'll hear two answers:
1. Napster.
2. All music sucks nowadays.
These are the easy answers, and yes, the first one has some truth in it, but it's just not that simple.
We're going to have to go back in time a little bit here to really set the stage. In the 1970's, the gods of rock were riding across the earth and selling millions upon millions of those spinning black circles.
An LP cost anywhere from $2.98 to $5.98. In this time, the minimum wage was $2.10. One could theoretically purchase a record in less than two hours of working. If you wanted to buy Wish You Were Here the week it dropped, it might take you up to 3.5 hours though.
When I was of part time job age, it was 1992. In those days, the mighty gods of metal were riding high and burning cities in their wake. At that time, the compact disc was the king of the castle and how much did Sam Goody charge for one of those?
Seventeen Dollars.
Well surely the minimum wage had risen enough to combat this disparity, as we all know that inflation is a real thing and things always cost more than they used to.
Well, to buy Metallica's black album, a McDonalds worker would've had to put in nearly 7 hours of labor. In 15 years, the labor cost of an album doubled for the purchaser.
Well, as wages have remained largely stagnant and have not kept up with inflation in all of those years, there's going to be less albums being sold. In the 70's, there were oodles of albums that sold Diamond quantities...but in my youth...
Not that many.
Now, let's fast forward to 1996.
Before this abortion of a bill was signed, a media conglomerate wasn't allowed to own more than one newspaper, television station, and radio station in a single media market. Ergo, the radio stations on your dial were all owned by separate companies.
Same with the TV stations and the newspapers.
We're going to ignore the newspapers and televisions though, because the radio stations are the big ones, but we'll get to TV in a bit, at least a certain kind of television.
What did this deregulation do?
Well, here's a real world example.
In St. Louis, Emmis Communications used to own the venerable KSHE95. It's currently the nation's oldest rock station and if you turn it on now, you're very likely to hear The Stroke by Billy Squier and unlike 1995, you won't be hearing any new music by new artists.
Those days are dead in Rock Radio.
Well, why don't I just give a call to the station's program director and complain and demand instead of hearing that same damned song from Lynyrd Skynyrd AGAIN today that they play Crobot?
(They just dropped a great album by the way...)
Well, because KSHE 95 doesn't have a program director. Instead of every station in the country having one, there are now only basically two. Only Emmis and Clear Channel are the ones programming your radio station.
So, if you listen to rock in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Honolulu, or New York City, you'll be hearing the same radio playlist. Isn't that just fucking awesome?
Well, how did that happen? Why did all these stations do this?
Because instead of competing with other stations, the media conglomerates just started buying up other stations and killing them. In 1998 when the changeover was still taking place, a new station cropped up in St. Louis.
97.1 The Rock.
They played Ronnie James Dio, like all the time. It was great. It was a really nice alternative to KSHE. (Remember, this was before MP3s or even CD players in all the cars.)
Unfortunately, The Rock crossed the line. They started vying for the love of Sammy Hagar. Hell, The Red Rocker even had one of his shows brought to you by them.
Well, two things happened because of that war between these two stations. The first is that I can no longer stomach Hagar solo or with Montrose. Van Hagar is still the shit though.
The second thing is that Emmis Communications purchased 97.1 The Rock. Instead of leaving it as a competing hard rock station they changed it to Fake News Talk Radio.
That's right. It became Fox News 97.1. Real Fake News.
Considering that Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House, I'd hardly say it was an unintended consequence.
Now, on the TV side, music was good business as well. In the early 1980's something new came to be. Concept Videos.
Now instead of watching the band miming to the single on Don Kirscher's Rock Concert or American Bandstand....You could see the band acting out the song.
Since it was the early 80's....they were replete with zombies more than you would think.
This was how I learned about many of the bands that I still love to this day: Kiss, Iron Maiden, Quiet Riot, Morbid Angel, Metallica, and the list goes on and on.
WTBS showed Night Tracks and NBC had Friday Night Videos. If I were to guess, there's probably about another 4,000 television programs that showed music videos as well.
In 1984....MTV premiered.
It was 24 hour music videos. Oh hell to the yes! It's basically a radio station that's on my TV! They also even showed concerts. It was truly a wonderful time to be alive.
Well, MTV grew in power and influence. White Zombie had a video on Beavis & Butthead. Because they proclaimed it didn't suck, the record blew up and earned them heavy rotation on the channel, even outside of the metal programming block.
Just having a video shown once in off peak time could garner 250,000 units sold.
MTV had untold power. They took over the music video. They broke up their programming into pop blocks, rap and hip hop blocks, rock blocks, and then there was even a metal show for a minute.
In the 90's though...they changed. They started showing original programming that had naught to do with music.
The Real World.
Road Rules.
Head.
Liquid Television.
The State...but I won't fault them for that because that was a great, great show.
Well, as MTV stopped showing music...it got harder for new bands to break. This also took place around the same time as the radio stations choosing to no longer break new artists.
So, here we are. It's harder to get noticed. Your prospective customers have less money with which to buy your albums and concert tickets...
Well, what else could happen?
Of course I knew about all of the other preceding video game consoles. I was routinely beaten up and called a nerd for playing them.
No one did that over the Sony PSX though did they?
That's right, video games went mainstream. Not only did they go mainstream, but they also cost 3 to 4 times than a CD. This is of course after you purchased the box that played them....those were about $300 as well.
So, what happens when a 20 year old spends $450 for a Playstation, Madden Football, Gran Turismo, and a second controller to play with his buddies?
Well, that's about 35 CDs he's not buying.
Wages are stagnant and millions upon millions of dollars have just been removed from Americans' collective budgets for music and movies in order to buy games.
After ALL OF THAT, an easy form of piracy arrives. This of course gets some artists mad, but who really gets upset is the recording industry.
Sony and their cohorts had always made money off of pirated music in the past...why?
Because you had to buy the blank tapes.
But now? You can just play them on your Zune or your iPod and Big Music is cut out completely.
Then you have to remember that Americans learned in 1992 that it only cost $1 to manufacture the CDs we were paying $17 for.
All of a sudden, the piracy is easily justified.
In the 1990's, there was a greats swirling of events that cut the head off of new music. It wasn't just a single thing but several.
Up next.... The Ramifications.
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