At 9:31 AM -0700 5/17/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>The big damn joke is that the PRICE OF RECORDED MUSIC HAS COLLAPSED. The
>middlemen are on the ropes. Technology giveth and technology taketh
>away. Tough shit.
>
>So we're going to see all sorts of bizarre, fascist and futile attempts
>to prop that price back up.
>Monitoring at ISPs, special taxes on HW and media, attempts to morph the
>home PC into something that guarantees remote control by corporations,
>hell probably even a few dynamic entry fatalities to create an example
>where someone's ten year old serves up MP3s from home.
>
>The artists who make money will be the ones that people want to go see
>live. I'm looking for some good outdoor concerts in the Bay Area to take
>my kids to this summer. Too bad the Sex Pistols and the Ramones are
>gone. I hope the artists we see aren't paying a cent to the labels or
>the studios when they do live performances.
I think there are multiple reasons for the current trends in the
music business. The MP3/recordable CD technology effect is only one
of the reasons, and, IMO, not nearly the most important.
There is less excitement/interest in music today. Wandering recently
through a Tower Records that in its heyday was _crowded_, I saw far
fewer teens in the store, and almost no adults over 30 at all.
Fifteen years ago this same store was generally crowded with folks
stocking up on the then-new CD format. (OK, CDs appeared in 1983.)
Even MTV has switched from playing mostly music videos to various
execrable "reality" shows. (What little I see of it when channel
surfing is bizarre.)
Pop music is now mostly a series of one-hit wonders. The latest being
some bleached-blonde black chicks who sound like chipmunks and are
called "Destiny's Child." (Most of these new groups don't actually
have _vocalists_, in the sense of singers who can really sing, or
even good guitar players and such...they have young boys and young
girls who are "staged." That they come out sounding like chipmunks is
because their voices really don't have range. There are exceptions,
of course.)
Now, is this malaise--which is confirmed by recording
industry--caused by rippers and burners? I doubt it. Music is all
around us, more so than ever, but it no longer creates the buzz it
once did. (And there's the Toffleresque issue of "overchoice": Tower
Records is jammed with more tens of thousands of CDs than ever
before, but the choice is overwhelming to many. Maybe this is why
people order CDs to complete their collections but less often browse
these mega-stores.)
I think much of the focus of pop culture has shifted to movies.
Movies are much more talked about today as a "common cultural
experience" than they were in the 60s and 70s. Maybe the trend
started with "Jaws" and "Star Wars" and other blockbusters; just
speculating.
DVDs are flying off the shelves the way CDs did a decade ago.
Too soon to conclude that technology has killed the music business.
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
