Music

I think part of is that we are focused on a certain style. The Americana sound has hit big, not on the radio but sort of a not underground underground. It's sort of what hard rock was in the late 70's through early 80's, more diverse and eclectic.

I just quote Steve Lukather from an interview in 2013:
"I just want to know something. ALL this pontificating about how Spotify and the like are the ' answer ' and how ' the artists get paid' etc. How much? Really? WHO keeps tabs and accounting? Maybe I just don't know. I don't see any money and have A LOT of stuff out there over 35 years of making records.
Have you done the breakdown on what an artist get PER tune on iTunes? Pitiful. Now IF you are with a label its even worse cause they take a huge share of that. The breakdown after all is said and done for most it's pennies. TOO many people can make records. Period. No catalog artists are made these days. One hit wonders galore. Sad really.

Now rec. co's don't give budgets like the old days when the great records were made cause they cost MONEY!! They want to make money for nothing and own you for life and a piece of EVERYTHING an artist does. You can sell a million and still OWE them! My 25 year old son has buddies who have platinum records living in a one room studio apt! Broke.
Of course back 'then' rec. companies cared about MUSIC and nurturing artists for a LONG term career and long term money. Sure they got the Lions share but then they invested, believed and promoted it so there was SOME justification.

Now its ' Beats' and how many facebook hits or Youtube hits you get .. ALL which either make NO money or short term dog-**** money with no real way to account for it and truly suck for the most part. What the **** ? People want to be famous NOT good!

It is TOO easy to play 'pretend pop star' now. With all the fakery and auto tune-time correction -cut and paste etc.. **** most young people don't know how to play a song from top to bottom in a studio in tune and in time and with feeling?? Rare. I am in the studios all the time and hear the stories from the producers and engineers.. and yet NO ONE cares that ' so and so' who sold a **** load of records (how much IS that these days?) cant sing or play. They make 'McRecords' for people who don't even really listen. It's background music for people to either find a mate or shake their heads while texting or skyping or doing other things. Environmental noise for the multi-tasker.

Gone are the days of loving , dissecting, discussing the inner workings of 'AN ALBUM”… sitting in silence while it plays.. looking at the liner notes and the few photo's IN the studio .. imagining what a magic place it music be to make such music…Gone. You need a ****ing jewelers eye to read the credits IF one even cares. Most don't.

So if you keep blaming the 'old antiquated artists' who are the only REAL ones left.. who MAY make a great record once in awhile but may be overlooked cause the media chooses to care more about who is super gluing meat to their bodies and other ridiculous HYPE and ******** to get attention rather than LISTENING hard to the music being made we might be in a different place. When we were kids ( yes I will be 108 this year) there were only a handful or artists and they WERE great cause they HAD to be. You could choose not to like some but outside the teenage fodder most deserved their success and NO ONE sounded alike! No one!

We live in a McWorld that moves way too fast and now even the drugs suck. I mean when I was young and got high I never got naked foaming at the mouth and tried to eat someone's face off.

Time to put on Dark Side of the Moon and chill. Have a nice day and may real music come back and fill our ears. (there IS some great stuff but you know what I mean ..) REAL music played by REAL musicians. They ARE out there. They just don't get a lot of press anymore, or at all.”


It's definitely a mixture of the record labels not willing to invest into proper artists, rather going for some quick cash with some TV casting show one-hit wonder but also just the fast world we live in where people simply don't have the patience to properly listen to an album....or even a single song and the songs themselves are forgotten after 2 months and called "old crap" after 4. I mean outside of maybe Sail from Awolnation i couldn't even name a chart hitting song from the past 5-6 years, let alone one that had a staying ability beyond 3 months.
I mean where are all the once hyped Megastars? When you think back about how they hyped Lady Gaga to be the next biggest thing and after 3 albums that got puked out in rapid fire nobody even cares anymore. Same with people like Kesha, once hyped like crazy, totally forgotten after 3 years.

thejokeriv wrote:

Here's what I don't get - the TV and Movie industry has figured out how to deal with the illegal downloading (which is what really killed sales.) The latest blockbuster is downloaded before it is released and still makes $100 mil on opening week. Game of Thrones first 5 episodes where on the torrents before they ever hit HBO. Still a big hit for HBO. Something could come along and kill the TV/Movie industry, but they seem to have rode out the storm better than the coked up music execs.

They haven't figured out anything, there's simply a difference between pirating a brand new movie and pirating music:
- Movies that end up online before or during their Theater launch have low quality pirated versions, a crappy Screener or a highly compressed BR-version. Those files usually have 1.4 to 4 Gigabytes which will give you a bad picture. Sometimes the sound is out of sync to the picture, sometimes you have subtitles from god knows what language on there and you end up watching big pixel, hindu subtitles and compression on your small monitor.
And going to the movies is still an entertaining and comparable cheap pasttime for a lot of people. Watching a movie on the big screen with a proper audio system is just completely different. The same is basically true for TV Shows, then again TV ratings are still worldwide measured in a very crude, unrealistic way and DVDs/BR's are cheap to get and there's usually at least one retailer doing a special sale on media every other week.

Compare this to music? People don't give a uck about quality. For over 15 years generations were "trained" into accepting MP3 as the ultimate quality format to listen music in and by now people can't even tell a difference between an MP3 and a proper audio format anymore, because of course most people listen to music over their non-quality iPad earplugs or some 30$ PC-Speakers they got from Ebay. So to them, the downloaded 320kbit/s MP3 sounds exactly the same as the CD/Vinyl and they're happy with it.

007 wrote:

S.D. wrote:

I will say that I do still enjoy going to a record store though, it's nostalgia of course but what the hell.  

Last Saturday after I got off work I took the subway up to Hollywood, walked to Amoeba, picked up a copy of The Book of Souls on LP, browsed around the store for awhile and then stood in line to be rung up.  Then the wait time to walk back to the subway, then catch the local bus to my apartment before finally being able to put the LP on the turntable. Still, that anticipation is part of the enjoyment.

Plus, just walking around a real record store feels good...

That is amazing. I'd love to visit that place but seeing as how I'll probably never visit L.A., it's just a pipe dream.

I would die for a record store like that!!!

South Korea doesn't have a big disc culture like the US does. They were early adopters of the digital culture and they use streaming services almost exclusively unlike the US. Even music CDs get such low prints that unless the artist was super popular, expect it to become rare after it's OOP. I know this having dabbled in it coming from a J-music background, that even CDs by your average boyband or girlgroup can be elusive only 2-3 years after it stopped being manufactured and the most you'll get from veteran or iconic artists will likely be a Greatest Hits compilation. However, iTunes itself already has a lot of the classic k-pop stuff from the 70s, 80s and 90s (album-wise), so it shows you a foreshadowing of an almost all-digital culture. Add to the fact that their artists in the teen/pop vein put out more albums in a few years than Justin Beiber or One Direction have in their entire career thus far, is an example of how competitive it is to stay in business when you get forgotten quickly.

[quote="ShadowAngel"]I just quote Steve Lukather from an interview in 2013:
"I just want to know something. ALL this pontificating about how Spotify and the like are the ' answer ' and how ' the artists get paid' etc. How much? Really? WHO keeps tabs and accounting? Maybe I just don't know. I don't see any money and have A LOT of stuff out there over 35 years of making records.
Have you done the breakdown on what an artist get PER tune on iTunes? Pitiful. Now IF you are with a label its even worse cause they take a huge share of that. The breakdown after all is said and done for most it's pennies. TOO many people can make records. Period. No catalog artists are made these days. One hit wonders galore. Sad really.

Now rec. co's don't give budgets like the old days when the great records were made cause they cost MONEY!! They want to make money for nothing and own you for life and a piece of EVERYTHING an artist does. You can sell a million and still OWE them! My 25 year old son has buddies who have platinum records living in a one room studio apt! Broke.
Of course back 'then' rec. companies cared about MUSIC and nurturing artists for a LONG term career and long term money. Sure they got the Lions share but then they invested, believed and promoted it so there was SOME justification.

Now its ' Beats' and how many facebook hits or Youtube hits you get .. ALL which either make NO money or short term dog-**** money with no real way to account for it and truly suck for the most part. What the **** ? People want to be famous NOT good!

It is TOO easy to play 'pretend pop star' now. With all the fakery and auto tune-time correction -cut and paste etc.. **** most young people don't know how to play a song from top to bottom in a studio in tune and in time and with feeling?? Rare. I am in the studios all the time and hear the stories from the producers and engineers.. and yet NO ONE cares that ' so and so' who sold a **** load of records (how much IS that these days?) cant sing or play. They make 'McRecords' for people who don't even really listen. It's background music for people to either find a mate or shake their heads while texting or skyping or doing other things. Environmental noise for the multi-tasker.

Gone are the days of loving , dissecting, discussing the inner workings of 'AN ALBUM”… sitting in silence while it plays.. looking at the liner notes and the few photo's IN the studio .. imagining what a magic place it music be to make such music…Gone. You need a ****ing jewelers eye to read the credits IF one even cares. Most don't.

So if you keep blaming the 'old antiquated artists' who are the only REAL ones left.. who MAY make a great record once in awhile but may be overlooked cause the media chooses to care more about who is super gluing meat to their bodies and other ridiculous HYPE and ******** to get attention rather than LISTENING hard to the music being made we might be in a different place. When we were kids ( yes I will be 108 this year) there were only a handful or artists and they WERE great cause they HAD to be. You could choose not to like some but outside the teenage fodder most deserved their success and NO ONE sounded alike! No one!

We live in a McWorld that moves way too fast and now even the drugs suck. I mean when I was young and got high I never got naked foaming at the mouth and tried to eat someone's face off.

Time to put on Dark Side of the Moon and chill. Have a nice day and may real music come back and fill our ears. (there IS some great stuff but you know what I mean ..) REAL music played by REAL musicians. They ARE out there. They just don't get a lot of press anymore, or at all.”


It's definitely a mixture of the record labels not willing to invest into proper artists, rather going for some quick cash with some TV casting show one-hit wonder but also just the fast world we live in where people simply don't have the patience to properly listen to an album....or even a single song and the songs themselves are forgotten after 2 months and called "old crap" after 4. I mean outside of maybe Sail from Awolnation i couldn't even name a chart hitting song from the past 5-6 years, let alone one that had a staying ability beyond 3 months.
I mean where are all the once hyped Megastars? When you think back about how they hyped Lady Gaga to be the next biggest thing and after 3 albums that got puked out in rapid fire nobody even cares anymore. Same with people like Kesha, once hyped like crazy, totally forgotten after 3 years.

YES!!! This! This is spot on. Thank you, ShadowAngel (and Steve Lukather)


[

Fat Freddy wrote:

Some people want to see the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower, f*ck that. Amoeba Records is on my bucket list of places to visit before I die.

I was in L.A. last year on a work, so I got visit Amoeba then.

I don't go into music stores very often, because the ones in South Africa are really only good for the popular stuff, so I buy pretty all my stuff online and it's a case of knowing what I want before I buy it. But I went into Amoeba looking for one or two specific items, and came out with quite a few more that I'd stumbled across just while browsing.

And I have done the Eiffel Tower...

Interesting article

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34268474

Boris2008 wrote:

Interesting article

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34268474

I would love to have one of those 3-D printers. There goes the toy industry.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Perhaps the music has become too accessible.

How many of us have related stories of our youth when we had to wait for mom to drive us to the mall to get a new KISS record, or sat around on a Saturday night, hoping to hear or actually calling into a radio station and asking the dj to play the new Maiden tune so you could tape it. When you finally saved up enough allowance money to buy that album, you treasured it.
.

I use to mow the neighbors lawn once a week & then talk my mom into taking me to a record store to spend every penny I made on an lp.. And yes I did treasure that lp. Good times.