linuxaudio.org

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 06:15:32AM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote:

quoted text
> Julien Claassen wrote:

>>

>> ... there always is the choice and it is not, that choices are hidden

>> away in dark corners. You can look on youtube, in the stores, at the

>> internet radio landscape, even at big collections of stations,

>> including pop and/or poprock. You'll find loads of alternatives. I

>> have the feeling - at least here in Germany - that among young peoples

>> more and more turn, besides their interest in typical pop, to

>> something of their own. Indi, oldies, 70s, folk... You name it,

>> they'll like it and show it to others. I've seen that in several

>> friends and friends' children.

>

> I agree with Julien. I teach 35 students per week, most of whom are

> young people (well, younger than I am). They don't listen to MSM radio,

> they don't watch television and they're not into MTV. They do almost all

> their music-finding through friends, iTunes and other such stores, and

> the social media sites. No-one under 30 brings in CDs any more. They

> bring in iPods and flash drives. There are currently NO music stores

> (CDs and other hard-format recordings) in this town of 45,000 souls.

>

> The kids bring in everything from the 60s to now. They bring in crap and

> they bring in tunes that I end up using in my own shows (I recently

> appropriated Dave Grohl's Everlong). I've been listening to pop music

> since the early 1950s, and it seems to me that there has always been a

> constant amount of shite on the airwaves. Of course there is, because

> you can easily manufacture it. You can't easily manufacture the truly

> great music, IMO it's gotta come from within the artists themselves. So

> there's always been a varying amount of good stuff.

>

> Btw, there's a strong argument that the "teen craze" sort of pabulum

> started with Disney and his ilk. Pop stars such as Annette Funicello and

> other Mouseketeers were the Britneys of the day, and manufactured stars

> such as Fabian soon took over the charts after the harder rock music

> suffered from the effects of Buddy Holly's death. Disney and Colonel Tom

> Parker determined the tastes of whole generations of listeners. They

> substituted saleability for creativity, and the rest is what's known as

> pop history.

>

> Just my two sesterces.

>

I wasn't going to add to this, but I just got into the middle of an argument between two friends on this subject on Sunday, before reading this thread.
Indeed, CD's are dead. Kids listen to iPods and YouTube, and they don't spend a dime on music except at iTunes store. The hipper music lovers in their 20's all have record players and buy vynil, which they buy at shows or from the few indie record stores left (this is San Francisco, after all), so there's some music being sold, but not much.
There's a long tail now, and the tail is HUGE, and it includes everything you could imagine, with a diversity that I never would have dreamed of even 10 years ago. The head has shrunk to a vile core of processed Disney acts, but then-- as has already been noted here-- the head has always been vile pap.
Other than that? There has always been regression to the mean, a normal distribution, no big deal.
What's changed in 50 years? The distribution has morphed from leptokurtic to platykurtic.
As a record producer and studio-owner friend put it, "There will never be a massive blockbuster hit record like Thriller again". Indeed, nor even any like its successively-attenuated echoes or harmonics either: Nevermind, OK Computer, or even X&Y. Bands will be small, records will be small, scenes and trends will be varied and diverse, and "blockbusters" will be more like isolated internet memes.
-ken

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