The State of New Music

Lately, I’ve noticed a spurt of thought-provoking articles on the current state of music and its corporate-sponsored nemesis, nostalgia, and I’m trying to wrap my arms around this multifaceted topic. Before I get started, I encourage you to read the following three articles I’ll refer to in this essay. They are:

1)  Is Old Music Killing New Music? By Ted Gioia of The Atlantic

2) Spotify backlash offers rare insight into reeling music industry — and struggles of working musicians
 by Travis M. Andrews of The Washington Post" 

3) Hindsight is 2022: The Psychology Behind Our Cultural Nostalgia by Kyle Chayka of Town & Country. 

This is complex stuff, and I’m not an expert in the business of music, but I’ve got a couple of key takeaways from the articles I’ve been reading:

1) Nostalgia is BIG BUSINESS, and it’s only going to get bigger as corporations seek to recoup their recent investments in the back catalogs of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, and the like. Expect more and more oldies gracing the airwaves, be it on radio, TV shows, film and commercials.  I imagine tribute bands will become an even bigger deal than they are currently, with exact recreations of specific tours from decades ago. According to The Atlantic essay referenced above, older songs now represent 70% of the U.S. market, and the market for new music is shrinking. This is a problem if you’re in the business of making music or are a lover of new music.

Nostalgia also comes in the form of books and documentaries about older artists. I should know, because I love this stuff! Books by Steven Hyden, David Hepworth and Rob Sheffield are among my favorites, and don’t get me started on movies like 20 Feet from Stardom, Summer of Soul, Searching for Sugar Man, etc. But where I differ from many of my peers is that I still seek out new music, which brings me to my next takeaway.

 2) The music market is fragmented like never before. I cry bullshit at the old geezers (or people my age who act like old geezers) who claim that there isn’t good music being produced today. I make the counter claim: there is as much good music out today than ever before, but it’s harder to FIND than ever before. Gone are the days when I could turn on the radio and hear a couple dozen new music selections of different genres that were making a significant cultural impact. Now I have to make an effort to find new music, and virtually none of it will have a significant following. Instead, it will have a small but dedicated group of fans that might be large enough to support a small tour in the country’s largest cities. If I live in a smaller city, I may never have an opportunity to see the band. It may also be true that the band I like can’t last beyond a couple of years due to the awful reality of today’s music industry, and the band I discover will likely be one that none of my friends are aware of, making the experience of listening to their music a very lonely endeavor. Sure, it’s cool that I found the artist Sammy Rae recently, but I can’t name any friends who have heard of her. I’m a fan on an island, at least in my demographic.

As Gioia states in The Atlantic article: “I know that plenty of exceptional young musicians are out there trying to make it. They exist. But the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.”

Instead, they devote resources to repackaging older music. And why shouldn’t they? They’re in the business of making money, and as long as we as consumers are willing to accept hearing “Piano Man” for the billionth time, these corporations will do more to sell old music and do less to sell new music. Until we as consumers demand better, we will get nothing better.

3) The ability for new artists to make money is largely limited to touring, and even this isn’t all that lucrative for most artists. Streaming services pay a pittance, and physical product sales – while climbing – are a shadow of what they were in the 90s. For bands to make money, they have to tour and sell merchandise, and it’s an awfully tough way to make a living. Studio bands like Steely Dan, The Alan Parsons Project or XTC would not be able to exist as new entities today – with no physical product to sell, the only way to survive would be to tour, and touring takes its toll, especially when you’re playing at small clubs that charge $30 for a ticket. 

I recently saw the aforementioned Sammy Rae in Milwaukee, and I tried to calculate how the heck she and her band were making a living. I concluded that they probably weren’t. Consider this:

The concert I saw was attended by about 200 people at around $35 a pop. That’s $7000. But the venue has to be paid, and Sammy had a four-piece band open for her, not to mention the 6-piece band supporting her, a roadie or two, plus a sound guy (maybe one person managed all of this?). Then there’s the van or bus to take them from show to show, food and gas, and I would hope an occasional stay at a hotel to freshen up. And I haven’t even mentioned the band manager, the promoter, the cost of making her recordings, the rehearsal space they probably had to pay for to get prepared for the tour, etc. I can guarantee you this: no one is getting rich off of this endeavor. So the question is, how long can Sammy Rae endure before
a) by some miracle she makes it big; or
b) she decides she actually wants to live comfortably and pursues a saner occupation?
I fear it will be the latter, and we as music lovers will be the worse for it.

4) Back to streaming services. According to the Washington Post article referenced above, for every dollar of revenue Spotify earns, a songwriter might earn as little as 12 cents of revenue (assuming there are no co-writers). “Not bad,” you might say, but it takes somewhere around 20,000 plays to generate a dollar, so if you’re lucky enough to be an artist who has a song that gets a million plays, congratulations, you may have earned approximately $6. I may have some of my math wrong here, but the truth holds: streaming isn’t really lucrative except for the upper echelon of artists. 

The Washington Post article states: “According to Spotify’s data, 13,400 artists generated more than $50,000 and 7,800 generated more than $100,000 in recording and publishing royalties in 2020. The musician would most likely receive a fraction of that amount.”

A fraction of $50K isn’t making a living. It’s barely surviving.

So where do we go from here? The pandemic made it all too clear just how important entertainment is. There are days when it’s the only thing taking me to the finish line. But aside from the biggest musical acts selling out shows at $150 a person, we don’t seem to put our money where our heart is. I used to spend all of my spare money on albums. Now I can pay $10 a month for immediate access to almost every song I’m inclined to hear. And when I see a new vinyl release for $30 I say to myself, “No thanks.” Never mind that when inflation is taken into account, this is actually cheaper than the $9 album I used to buy in the early 80s and that I have way more disposable income.

Bottom line: if you love an artist, buy their products. Buy a t-shirt, a CD, a record, and go and see them when they’re on tour, even if you have to stand among drunk 20-somethings in a crowded club. Better to spend $30 a piece on six new artists than $180 to see that aging rocker one more time at an arena show.

Be comfortable with urging streaming services to raise your fees for the purpose of paying artists better. I know that income levels vary, but for me personally, I would be happy to pay another $10 a month IF that money went to artists and not to the streaming service.

Seek out new music. Yes, nostalgia has its place, but as the Town & Country article suggests, it’s also keeping us from life-fulfilling experiences. And it’s making corporations rich instead of musicians.

I don’t know what else to say. But as Pete Townsend sang in 1978, “The music must change,” or maybe it should be rewritten as “The music business must change.” Either that, or we’ll all be singing the same damn songs for the rest of our lives. How many more times do you really need to hear “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” or “Can’t Buy Me Love”? Isn’t there something more out there?

Guitars, Gibson and Sonar

Last summer the rock music industry was all abuzz after the Washington Post reported on the decline of the guitar, an instrument whose sales are down by a full third in the last decade and whose retailers are drowning in debt (don’t be surprised if Guitar Center and Sam Ash go the way of Blockbuster and Circuit City). Virtually every musician I know read the article, and many agreed with its conclusion: that music today isn’t generating the guitar heroes necessary to sustain sales. Gone are the days of Hendrix, Clapton, Page, Vaughn and Van Halen, and as a result young talent is gravitating toward beats and loops rather than six stringed instruments.

There’s another issue that wasn’t touched on in the Washington Post: why buy a new guitar when the market has been flooded with superior used instruments? Poke around on-line forums and you’ll find a universal conclusion that a new Gibson Les Paul is widely inferior to one built three decades ago, and as the aging baby boomers shed the guitars they used to shred, there are deals to be had.

I’m not really a guitar player, so the above would seem not to have a direct impact on me, except that I am a DAW user (that’s Digital Audio Workstation for you novices out there), and last week I learned that the software I’ve been using for over twenty years is being discontinued by – of all things – a guitar manufacturer: the aforementioned Gibson, who bought out Cakewalk – the company that produces its flagship DAW software, Sonar – in 2013. Guitar sales had been declining, cost-cutting measures had already been adopted, and the thought was that Gibson needed to diversify into consumer electronics and software. Since then, it seems that in addition to screwing up their guitars, the company is now screwing up other sides of their business.

At least that appears to be the consensus on-line. Check out this blog and you may agree that Gibson – in addition to bungling a valued piece of software – handled the discontinuation of Sonar poorly, giving little notice to its users and collecting money for recent upgrades and “lifetime” subscriptions for products that were about to be shelved.  

Depending how you look at it, my having to learn an entirely new DAW at a point in my life when all I want to do is record music without having to think about it can be directly attributed to the dearth of guitar heroes today that resulted in the diversification and mismanagement of the premier guitar manufacturer.

Damn you, guitarists, or lack thereof!

I purchased my first Cakewalk software in 1995 (back when the company was called Twelve Tone Systems), and four short years later I was producing entire albums using Cakewalk on my Compaq computer running Windows 97. It was a time of slow processors and tiny hard drives, when each song I recorded had to be stored on rewritable CDs costing over $20 a piece (remember the CD manufacturer, Smart and Friendly?). We’ve come a long way since then, and early next year I’ll complete my tenth and last album using Cakewalk software. Then it’s off to new horizons as I devote valuable time to learning another DAW – likely Cubase. 

It’s been a good run, but it’s a run that shouldn’t have ended this soon.

Our Kids' Lives: Regimented and Expensive

I spend a boatload of cash each year for my son to do something I did for free as a kid. And it annoys the crap out of me.

On Facebook a friend of mine recently posted the following article from the Washington Post:  “I send my kids to sleep-away camp to give them a competitive advantage in life.” These kind of headlines are meant to elicit a response. One camp might be thinking, “Holy crap. I’ve never sent my kids to over-night camp. Could I be denying his opportunity to get into an Ivy League school?” Another camp might think, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Whatever happened to sending kids to camp so that they have a great time?” 

The content of the essay is more thoughtful than the headline, and the takeaway is this: some of the basic things we did as kids for fun may have been beneficial for us in ways we didn’t even know, and it might behoove us as parents to – as the author Laura Clydesdale writes – opt out of the "things-to-put-on-the-college-application arms race.” Instead of creating walking, talking resumes, why not nourish thoughtful, creative, independent human beings? That’s really the goal. The fact that a thoughtful, creative and independent human being will invariably have a competitive edge over robotic peers is icing on the cake.

Several years ago I read an excellent book called “The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit disorder.” In it author Richard Louv creates a compelling case for allowing our children to break out of the regimented lifestyles we’ve created for our kids – much of it indoors – and instead give them more access to nature, which not only feeds a child’s development, but can also help alleviate symptoms of ADD, obesity and other widespread ailments of today’s children. Even something as basic is going camping as a family can provide a huge benefit for children, and ultimately provide a huge benefit for nature, as people who have a relationship with nature are far more likely to fight to save it. Time spent at a camp, where a kid can break away from wired worlds, take some time to reflect, and experience activities that are foreign to a life in the city or suburbs, can be as mentally and physically beneficial as it is downright fun.

Now, here’s my beef with all of this. Today, every activity our children are engaged in seems to be planned and administered by adults, and overnight camp is of course no exception. This also means it costs money.

My son plays drums in a band. I played keyboard in a band when I was a teenager. In my son’s band, adults pick the players, adults pick the songs, adults pick who plays on which songs, adults provide the equipment, adults plan the gigs and adults provide logistics. In my band, adults did nothing except provide a space for practice and offer an occasional ride. My son’s band costs me thousands of dollars a year. My band cost me nothing except an occasional headache as we tried to figure out the lyrics to songs pre-Internet.

I learned a lot by being in a band with other teenagers. I learned how to compromise, I learned how to not overplay (though this took several years), I learned about how to get along with different types of people, and I learned about my limitations as a performer, as a musician, and – at times – as a human being. My son has learned some of these things too, but nothing that he’s experienced can compare to sitting in a room with four other musicians and saying, “Okay. We need to learn thirty songs and find a gig so that we can play them. Ready?” There’s no doubt in my mind that my experience was richer and more developmental than my son’s has been.

Similarly, I never went to camp as a child. But I did ride my bike constantly, I walked my dog through the expansive fields behind the middle school near my home, and I played in numerous forests in my hometown, where I would make up games with my friends, climb trees, get into arguments, injure myself or others, and – on a particularly lucky day - discover a Penthouse that a classmate kept hidden in the hallow of a tree. Again, I did this for free. And as cool and rich as my children’s camp experiences have been all these years, I’m not sure the adult-supervised activities provided the same benefit as my independent ventures did.

What’s particularly problematic is this: unless you reach critical mass, “opting-out” simply means your kid spends time alone (which does have some benefits but also its limitations). I would like my son to quit his organized, adult-supervised band, but unless I can convince other parents to do the same, it will lead to a band of one. Not so much fun. Breaking away from regimentation only works when you convince others to do the same.

So what’s the answer? Well, I am going to make a concerted appeal to the parents of my son’s band to quit organized music and have our sons and daughters move forward on their own. Will I be successful? I kind of doubt it. But our kids know how to play their instruments, they know fellow musicians, and now it’s time to sink or swim. My son will be richer for it, and if I succeed, so will his parents.