Music is either a business, or it’s an art. Virtually none are both. And 99 percent of the music posted on music sharing sites is neither.
The music business was made possible by advances in communication technology, and a demographic revolution in the second half of the Twentieth Century. The core clientele of the music business is young people. Popular music takes hold of people when they are teenagers, and the type of popular music they listen to remains relatively unchanged throughout their lives. The result is the generational differences in music genre that persist today.
Young people are an easy target for exploitation. Since the times when men learned to stand on two legs the purpose of childhood was to become an adult. But the boom in economic prosperity in the Twentieth Century freed children from labor, and consequently resulted in teenage idleness. Gradually, the purpose of childhood in society became an indulgence in fantasy. On the other hand, teenagers are the most powerless people in the world. They come into a world in which everything belongs to someone else, and they have no say in how the world works, and they don’t have the foggiest idea what to do about it.
Music, and the entertainment business in general, offers teenagers the illusion that they have the real importance in the world, and that older people can be dismissed as “not current.” Success in the music business lies in the ability to identify how to enable that illusion to the tune of millions of dollars.
The first step is to encourage them to thumb their noses at their parents. Take a look at how album covers evolved through the 70’s, and 80’s, and 90’s. The faces of the musicians staring back at the camera have to be characterized as defiance, or maybe as the popular kid looking down on everyone else. The teenager can unconsciously read the message, “Like hell I’ll be home by 10!” The pop star takes the place of the parents as cultural influences. The kid wants to be part of it, and be accepted, and go to the concert, and shake her booty. That’s success in the music business.
Naturally, it happens that young men notice these circumstances. It occurs to them that they want to be one of the teenage idols and thereby enjoy the rewards that popularity confers. The means to that end is to join a band. It’s ego, not music. There is music there, after a fashion. But the problem for them is that they are not star material, or they have no talent, or both.
It’s a crushing blow to realize that you are not star material. For example, in the hard rock genre you have to be tall and skinny. Short and wide looks comical on stage. You have to look like you’re from Great Britain or Norway, not from Romania or Russia. You have to have the right tattoos and the right hair style–the right persona. And you have to be young.
The advent of the internet has made it possible for the army of wannabe music idols to saturate the music sharing websites with their crap. This is the 99 percent that are neither of value to the music business or to art. Anybody can open an “artist” profile on one of these sites and upload their shit. Before the internet you had to jump through the hoops of talent show auditions that eliminated the fakers. Or, your band had to do essentially the same thing by playing shows and gradually acquiring a following–if their band had the right ingredients.
So where does that leave music as art? It’s buried somewhere beneath all the crap. Only one percent of music sharing has either commercial value or art value. Of this, maybe one tenth has any art value. That’s about one in a thousand artists offer anything of art value on the music sharing sites. How on earth can someone sift through all that whale sperm looking for something interesting to listen to on a human time scale?
The music sharing sites could offer some help with more sophisticated search engines. But that would be work. Music of art value almost always has no “followers” on these sites. They end up with embarrassing little notifications at the bottom that “It seems a little quiet here!” The music site could be a great help to us by just adding a button that shows only these pages. It would say, “Show all artists with no listeners”, because that’s where the interesting music is going to be hidden.
The musicians who are artists need to realize that their audience is other musicians. It’s not entertainment, it’s an avocation. You create because creation is what an artist does, and any other expectation will just result in disappointment. A “performance” for music artists will ideally be more like a professional conference or a trade show, in which artists congregate and interact. There is no other audience for your creation than other artists. If you have other expectations then you might need a reality check.
And this is one reason why I started a new page for artist reviews. It’s the world according to my opinion, but perhaps it will help other musicians in their search for art.