I was talking with Simon E. and Robbie H. tonight about music.

The three of us are all musicians and we talked about why music today seems to not be so good.

I blame EVERYONE!

The public stopped thinking about what is good music, and started buying ‘lifestyle tunes’, utterly disposable and vacuous tracks. I think it was probably the first real big superstars that are to blame for this, once Elvis became a hit or something (probably going back further than that) the marketing people got involved. It’s just been a slow devolution to this point since then.

Music production stinks. When I was in high school I liked hip hop, hard rock and metal. The newer stuff is all homogenized. It used to be that a band would have a signature sound, now not so much. You’re lucky nowadays if you can tell the singer apart from another band’s singer. On my iPod I have tracks by famous artists that are awesome, but that would never get released in this day and age. You couldn’t release anything that sounds that bad now. Now it sounds like an engineer goes through each instrument’s track, and messes with all the EQ and levels to take all the personality out.

You can record an album in 2 months now. Before, recording was a laborious process. Now, all you have to do is get a copy of ProTools, some VSTs and a singer. Oh, and for the important parts maybe a studio player. An increasing number of pop, rap and rock songs feature blatant samples from original songs in order to cut down on writing time, speed up time to market and maximize revenues.

Marketing is hard. It used to be that a band would go on tour to promote itself. Now, you make a website and hope that one day someone will find your stuff. Of course since you won’t have a marketing budget or any marketing reach there’s no chance of that happening. Or, you sign to a big label which has the big budget but is going to force you to make a homegenous record. So it’s a no-win situation.

Categories: Music
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