The State of the Music Industry: Part 1

(As requested)

If we are going to make any kind of critical look at the music industry it is important to have some sort of historical reference. So, let’s fire up the wayback machine to this week in 1990, when a young EC was preparing for his senior year of high school and constantly writing and talking to a very nice blonde haired girl from Minnesota who had stolen his heart. Here’s the Billboard Top 10.

#1: M.C. Hammer “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Em”
#2: Wilson Phillips “Wilson Phillips”
#3: Poison “Flesh and Blood”
#4: Mariah Carey “Mariah Carey”
#5: Anita Baker “Compositions”
#6: New Kids On The Block “Step By Step”
#7: Bell Biv Devoe “Poison”
#8: Keith Sweat “I’ll Give All My Love to You”
#9: Madonna “I’m Breathless”
#10: Soundtrack “Pretty Woman”

Ok, so you might argue that this isn’t a good point in time reference. We’re talking pre-Nirvana here and that is a fair statement. Let’s fast forward a bit to 1995 when a slightly older EC was working at the Dresden nuclear power plant and was still trying to find a way to work things out with the very nice blonde haired girl from Minnesota. Here’s the chart…

#1: Hootie and the Blowfish “Cracked Rear View”
#2: Bone Thugs-N-Harmony “E. 1999 Eternal”
#3: Alanis Morisette “Jagged Little Pill”
#4: Soundtrack “Dangerous Minds”
#5: TLC “Crazysexycool”
#6: Selena “Dreaming of You”
#7: Shania Twain “The Woman in Me”
#8: Jodeci “The Show, The After Party, The Hotel”
#9: Live “Throwing Copper”
#10: Raekwon “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…”

Slightly better but I have to admit, I’ve posted two top ten charts and I have yet to own a single album on the charts. But you can make the claim that I was just out of college and still poor so let’s move on to 2000, when a jaded and world weary EC came back from a trip to Ireland to a job he couldn’t take anymore and decided to take the GMAT (which I did five years ago this week). Let’s see what Casey Kasem would have been playing.

#1: Nelly “Country Grammar”
#2: Britney Spears “Oops! I Did It Again”
#3: Various Artists “Now 4”
#4: Eminem “The Marshall Mathers LP”
#5: N Sync “No Strings Attached”
#6: Creed “Human Clay”
#7: Papa Roach “Infest”
#8: 3 Doors Down “The Better Life”
#9: De La Soul “Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump”
#10: Soundtrack “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps”

Moving in the wrong direction but not by much. So, where do we stand in the present as EC looks at the calendar and realizes that he will be turning 32 in, yikes, ten days?

#1: Staind “Chapter V”
#2: Various Artists “Now 19”
#3: Faith Hill “Fireflies”
#4: Mariah Cary “The Emancipation of Mimi”
#5: The Black Eyed Peas “Monkey Business”
#6: Young Jeezy “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101”
#7: Coldplay “X&Y”
#8: Gorillaz “Demon Days”
#9: Kelly Clarkson “Breakaway”
#10: Bow Wow “Wanted”

Finally, I own one of the albums. And I’ve been thinking of picking up the Gorillaz. From this perspective, the music industry has improved.

Ok, maybe it hasn’t really improved but I’ve taken you on this historical journey to prove an important point: we all want to imagine that the music from our past was incredible and unbelievably popular but when you look back that simply isn’t the case. If you look at pop charts you find a lot of popular music, much of which just doesn’t stand up a decade later. No one had problems with Hootie or Alanis Morisette a decade ago (and I could have made a case for Alanis as an important artist) but I wouldn’t even imagine picking up a used disc of theirs today. While I am going to make a case that the music industry has turned for the worse I want to base it on some facts and not on a rose colored view of the past.

If you want to make a case for a decline in music in the past decade or so you really shouldn’t focus on pop music because it is just that: pop. It isn’t meant to have any long lasting effects. It is basically licorice for the ears; it tastes good but has no nutritional values and just ends up running right through your system. We’ve had boy bands before and we’ll have them again. It’s formulaic and constant and has been since the days of Frankie Avalon. Now, sometimes it is done better than others. I still get upset when Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” is placed on those worst songs of all time countdowns that VH-1 does. It is a simple, funny pop song and doesn’t take itself seriously. That makes it work. So even silly pop songs have their place.

(And I still believe that The Monkees should be in the rock and roll hall of fame. But that’s an argument for another day.)

No, what I really feel is the cause of the decline lies with the labels. As the labels were consolidated and taken over by multi-national media enterprises the music departments have become just another business unit that is expected to show a profit, just like all the other business units. Thus, if a band’s first disc doesn’t hit with the crowd there isn’t a second. Artists aren’t given that chance to grow and get their feet under them. The U2’s of today don’t have two albums to show promise before having a breakthrough disc. They have to hit from the get go and if they don’t, have fun on the indie scene.

Plus, since the music business is definitely that, a business, you have rampant “me too” isms going on at the labels. If someone touches the cultural zeitgeist then every label immediately releases a number of clones to try to catch the wave. It makes perfect sense. John Mayer comes out of nowhere and has a number of hits. Now, John only has one disc and is out on tour so he can’t sit down and write new songs and record a new album. So clearly there is a demand for his music but he can’t create additional supply. But, all the other labels go “Look, we have a young guy with a guitar” and push all of their music. Sometimes this is actually beneficial. If John Mayer hadn’t broken big then I doubt that I’d have been able to hear Howie Day or Damien Rice. On the other hand, it can also be awful. Case in point: the execs in Nashville who decided that since the Dixie Chicks are popular then any three girls singing would work and giving us Shedaisy. That band wasn’t an insult to music fans, it was an insult to warm blooded creatures.

The other big thing that has happened with the labels would be they have gotten rid of their bench strength. That is, those artists who can be counted on to record solid albums consistently but not create a hit have been pushed to the side. This happened a lot a few years ago. The Cowboy Junkies, who have been performing and recording for a decade plus, suddenly found themselves without a label. The most famous case is Wilco, which was even documented in the film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Throughout the 90’s Wilco was a critic’s darling but not what you could call popular. They’d release an album like Summerteeth and it would sell about 60,000 copies and be on every critic’s top ten list. The label made money on them but not too much. In the old days, a band like Wilco would be a prestige band and kept on the roster for the awards and the internal artistic pride of supporting such an act. Instead, they were dropped by the label (though were eventually signed by another label with the same corporate parent. Make sense of that one for me.) If you can’t keep Wilco on board, you know there is a serious flaw with the major label system.

I also have to place some blame on MTV (and VH-1). It’s been said before and I’ll say it again, whatever happened to the videos? Ok, I take MTV being more of a culture network now but I have MTV2 and they don’t even show videos. I appreciate the fact that they show old Beavis and Butthead episodes and the occasional Jackass rerun but that still doesn’t solve the problem. For music you really need to turn to the Fuse network, which is received by upwards of a dozen households. What this means is that a major channel for a band to get discovered has disappeared. I don’t know of a modern equivalent to 120 Minutes or Alternative Nation. I have CDs solely because of videos I saw that caught my eye (case in point Cowboy Junkies “A Common Disaster”, which has now resulted in my buying about a dozen discs of the band and one concert attendance). That to me is a serious problem.

(Side point: what I am mainly arguing here is the decline in the two guitar, bass and drums genre of music. Hip hop doesn’t have the exposure problems and while I have some complaints about the genre (mainly that I preferred bands like Public Enemy and De La Soul to what is out there today), it is probably stronger than ever.)

This leaves us with the question: where has all the good music gone? Are we going to be forced to attend Rolling Stones concerts to get our fix (concerts in which you attend not for music but for the ability to say that you attended)? That is what I’ll tackle tomorrow.

(Now, if I could just find the phone number of that really nice blonde girl from Minnesota…)