[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Interesting how much confidence a group of musicians is putting in record company executives to know and deliver "what's good." Who here has not had the experience of having music thrown in the trash without being considered by some executive type or other gatekeeper? Certainly not a way to discern its quality. When you realize what kind of marketing philosophy drives so many artistic executives ("if they bought it once let's sell it to 'em again") it's absolutely specious to assert that it's artistic quality that moves them. I'm very thankful to find the independent artists of all types who can get their work out to me and the rest of the public without being censored/straightjacketed by some who "knows better." It does occasionally happen.
No, actually in spite of my comments on the record companies' filtering of what was available, I have never thought they always knew or delivered what I considered "good." I know they missed a whole lot of stuff and for whatever egotistical or political or legal reasons there is a whole lot of terrific stuff which they refused to deliver.
But my point is/was that I never had access to that other stuff, so I didn't have to spend my time wading through all the stuff the record companies didn't release to find the good stuff.
With the internet I DO have access to all the stuff that labels won't release. The problem is that I don't have any more hours in my day, nor years in my life than I probably would have had back in the 60s when I was in my LP-buying heyday.
Sturgeon's law applies everywhere (as many of us have already pointed out) but if there are 1000 albums released every year, it's possible to sift through them to find what I like. If there are 1,000,000 songs released on everybody's individual web-sites and at iTunes and CDBaby and CDnow and Facebook and MySpace, I just don't have the time to go through them all to find the good stuff.
The total pile of available material has mushroomed exponentially to the point that I don't even bother trying to find new stuff anymore because so much (90%) of it is crap and I just don't have the time. Yes the record companies weren't always the best arbiters of what was good, but at least they made the available pile of stuff to sift through manageable.
It all comes down to time -- I've got what I feel are much better things to do with my time than to search the internet in the hopes of finding the next Louis Armstrong or the next Bob Dylan or the next Beethoven.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
