From you to your listener’s heart
p2pnet news | Music:- Are you a fan of music or stars? If you’re a fan of stars, despite the celebrity culture we seemingly inhabit, your legion is diminishing, music is returning.
Music is a bellwether. Music leads the way. Despite the capitulation of the industry, despite the endless polishing of vapid turds, music is the most vibrant medium, the one that we look to for truth. You can write and record a song in minutes, you don’t have to ask anyone for permission, you don’t have to hit up your parents for production fees, never mind a movie studio.
There’s a direct connection from you to your listener’s heart. Assuming someone’s paying attention.
While the film industry grapples with declining disc sales, and tries to establish another physical format, the music world knows that the disc is dead and that online is king. After all, Napster hit at the end of 1999.
Like I said, music is first.
Sure, there are ninnies interested in popular culture, who want to wear the badge of major industry hypes, but music, real music, the kind that touches people, not the momentary stop traffic hit, has gone underground. All that you lament has been gone from the game, everything from songwriting to mistakes…it’s back. Despite the major media being clueless.
You don’t follow the music industry anymore, you don’t listen to the radio and you don’t really care who’s number one, you’re a fan of an act. And those not interested in your act don’t give a shit. It’s not about crossing over, it’s about the great divide.
Don’t feel bad if you don’t like the records reviewed in the newspaper, the ones talked about by the hipsters. They think there’s a mainstream scene. But that’s gone. Propped up to a degree by touring dinosaurs and what’s left of over the air radio, but it just doesn’t count.
I was about to write about an Ian Matthews song, a cover of Jules Shear’s "Shadows Break", from "Walking A Changing Line", one of my favorite albums. And I found out that the now monikered "Iain" released a live album, you can hear the samples here, you can even buy the MP3s on Amazon.
And thinking of that long ago decade known as the eighties my mind stumbled upon John Kilzer, whose first album slayed me. It didn’t break through, but that was back when being signed counted, when it gave you a hand in the game, a shot at stardom, before the game imploded and it all became meaningless. And I learned that you can hear Kilzer’s "classic", "Memory In The Making", on MySpace, on a page a fan established for him. And, if you try YouTubing Mr. Kilzer, you’ll find not only his video for his lame attempt at a hit, "Red Blue Jeans", but a cover of his greatest song by..? 2,614 people have viewed this musician’s cover of a song by a musician who’s dropped out of sight. But the song lives on.
That’s what a great song does, live on. Kind of like Willis Alan Ramsey’s "Satin Sheets", or Steve Young’s "Seven Bridges Road", the arrangement of which by Ian Matthews the Eagles supposedly lifted and rendered an off-handed classic.
It’s not about chart position. It’s not about sales. It’s not about gold albums. It’s about hearts and minds. Are you in people’s hearts and minds? Do you touch them, do you affect them?
That’s all that counts. The rest, the trappings, are bullshit.
Bob Lefsetz – The Lefsetz Letter
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January 7th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Hear, hear…
This is why the sales are dying. Big music lost touch with the artists by screwing them over and the fans as well. Now people are looking for something with meaning. That meaning isn’t found in Big Music, they have their own agendas and those are contrary and without sympathy to Big Music’s underlying theme of money and control. It’s really difficult to control the ground under you while it is free falling into obscurity.
The sue’em is the last grasp to retain control and pull in some money, only it isn’t working out like they thought. For those 30,000 caught in the wringer, there will come a backlash not yet felt to Big Music. In another article here it is mentioned something I’ve been saying for a long time. That those will make sure to tell all around them about the raw deal that bought music is with the majors. The little fiasco about not ripping your own music you purchased as being legal will haunt them as well. Just as you can still hear the echos from Sony’s rootkit, so too will the majors hear about this for a long time to come. They will hear of it while people spend their money on games and other items of entertainment instead of over priced and underacheived product that represents the near total offerings today on the commercial market.
In the hey day of music, people would line up to be the first to have the newest album of that group they loved, whatever it was. The Top 10 would carry that tune for sometimes near a year. That lack of interest is reflected now by no record stores to line up at, if the public had the interest, which they no longer do. Big Music played it for all it was worth for the money and control, caring not for what happened as a result of those actions they are going down the toilet inch by inch.
I for one have no sympathy for them, they dug their own grave. No matter what any of us think about it, the facts are the facts and music control as well as the money is rapidly slipping away from the corporate control. That is why you see so many trolls in the music subjects is the corporations trying to maintain some semblance of the idea that they are still present and it matters to the public. When you have to buy and pay for this sort of advertisement, you know they are really feeling the heat and it isn’t creating buzz in favor of them. Instead it is further feeding the disgust average Joe feels over these gluttons.