How do you see the future of music?

[Barkless Dog]

How do you view the future of music?

Some personal long-winded observations-

Large chain, major industry CD's & music stores going away very fast

Free broadcast FM top 40 radio is going to have to change radically or die.

All music will be downloaded- cars are already merging to built in hard disc players & sirius music stations

If CD's & radio stations (as they were) are gone, what are corporate record companies going to sell and where, faceless music down loads?

Everyone and their mother producing their own CD's, Films and visual art. It is diluting the industry.

Because of this GLOBAL music saturation and lack of places to sell their products, record labels are dropping major & minor artist like flies.

Music, Film and entertainment is stagnant because the further we go, nothing is new anymore, now it's just how you combine what’s all been done before in new combinations. Everything is derivative.
You can't tell what’s real, in what you see and hear animated, sampled.

Because of this everything can be done electronically and most could not tell the difference. Musicians, artists, actors are not needed in the roles previously. Play this sample, do this voice over.

Big money companies say they are looking for the next NEW thing, but really they are looking for more of the same because it's less risky for the huge amounts of money it takes to do a REAL launch of anything today. There is no ONE PLACE to spend advertising $$$. So it takes major money to cover so many advertising avenues today.


Playing live is the best way to build a fan base and sell your stuff. The Internet can only take you so far.

Live Music is the artist’s last frontier. People still like real music with real performances. This I see never ending, only changing, like all these rich people that pay mucho $$$ for major artists to play at their 13 year olds birthday party. Forget about big music companies paying for your major tour, you are going "Mike Watt's Econo", but it's still the way to go.


MTV is so stagnant you can put a headstone on it.

America's biggest asset is its creativity & innovation, no matter what area. But....

China is working day & night to own our industry. They will keep trying no matter how much money they loose. They are like ants, they do not care about the year’s bottom line, and they look to the very long-term government backed future, what corporate America does not do.

To get around the creative America thing, they are hiring US creative development for their companies. A friend of mine was hired to do just that. Paying him big bucks, giving him a condo on the Kowloon bay, female assistants, perks, free massage club membership, etc. He has assembled a creative team of people he knows, all US designers to work for the Chinese company. Chinese companies do not know the word "No" or "we can't do it". They find way through slave labor or WHAT EVER IT TAKES that do not have to follow our rules. I'm not sure how this factors into the music world, but I imagine in the future it will. China & America are already interlinked, we stand and fall together ecomonically.

Apple has changed the modern world like no other company since Henry Ford (Personal Computer, The Mouse, Windows, I pod, I Tunes)

The future does not have to be bleak, as usual it's what you make of it.

Where do we go from here as musicians, artists & film makers as we look to the future?

[lug]

Big bands consisted of people who studied their craft for all their lives, constantly improving. As Fock and Roll started to become previlant, the actual mastery of the instrument in some cases became secondary to other issues such as good vocals, flashy appearance, and a percieved push against the system. Disco further simplifiied music to emphasize a constant beat without rhythmic changes that would effect the dance aspect. MTV brought the look, dancing abiltiy, and pop appearance to the forfront. It was now just or more important to LOOK the part as play the part. This was seen in a lot of Spandex rock, etc. The Grunge movement further simplified the music down to just a raw emotion, and Rap has taken music down to an extemely simple melody with a beat to accompany what would be called street poetry. I figure the next step is to start selling an A440 tone frequency as long as it has a NIKE swoosh on the top of the CD.

[Barkless Dog]

I remember Todd Rungren & maybe Peter Gabrial's vision of future music as customizable programable sampled electronic music that people listen to. Both failed with it, but maybe they were just too early. They did it as it become possible, not widespread, years ago.

A lot of the Cable internet stations already have faceless music stations of every genre. With Garage band anyone can sound good with the complete music samples that fit the mood, they provide.

Again it does not replace live music, but 90% of people spend little time seeing live music.

[TeeMartin]

Opeth will take over the world.

[Shoewreck]

We'll return to the roots one day...

[pporter]

Originally Posted by TeeMartin

Opeth will take over the world.

I never liked her, OR her talk show. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you said Oprah.

[Kronde]

Another observation of taking a band on the road is the price of travel these days. It is extremely expensive to keep a 4 piece band on the road even somewhat comfortably (hotels and fuel etc) for any length of time...

[JimmyM]

I think the original poster is spot on in some ways. The music industry as we know it is dying. However, considering that there are still million-selling albums (most are crap but they do exist), there's not a shortage of people who want to hear recorded music and will pay for it. And Youtube and Myspace won't ever be big forces because people don't want to wade thru 1000 bands of crap to find one band that's good. So the industry is in flux and it'll be a while before we achieve a new working model, but it will happen.

[lefty007]

Originally Posted by Kronde

Another observation of taking a band on the road is the price of travel these days. It is extremely expensive to keep a 4 piece band on the road even somewhat comfortably (hotels and fuel etc) for any length of time...

Tell me about it. . . I do penny-pinching travel with a 10-piece band. We are lucky if we get more than one room for all of us. Ever smelled 10 grown-up-men farts at the same time? And we are lucky if we break even after each show.

[Barkless Dog]

I have a big business client who a couple of years ago, told me about his son. He was all proud of him. He showed us a web page of this band of his son’s; he was a longhaired hippie. I was kind of embarrassed for him, but he really was proud and supported him. His mom did not feel the same. He told us he went to college, but joined a band of druggy non-bathing hippies. They have no money and all live out of a van or camp at people’s places. They were a NY based band from Brooklyn? They kept at it and the bass player from Maroon 5 became friends with the band and took them under his wing. This was about 4 years ago or so.

He told the bands name was Vietnam. So recently I'm reading Rolling Stone and I see a review of their Cd produced by the bass player of Maroon 5. They gave it 4 stars and said it was Fresh and getting back to rocks roots. Other reviews I have read in big magazines are likewise very positive.

I guess the point of all this is to make it today, you need to sacrifice a lot, like money, job security, a family or come from nothing to loose nothing. A read about how the Allman Brothers started that way, Living below poverty.

A lot of it is being at the right place at the right time, making that connection and playing live to the right crowd, building a following.

In many ways the road to success is still the same as it always has been.

http://roughmix.livedaily.com/blog/i...h_vietnam.html

[JimmyM]

Barkless, great post. You are right, it's always going to be about payoffs, bribes, payola, or having a well-placed friend in the industry who supports you for his own benefit.

[GobBass]

john myung and Dream Theater will rule the airwaves because of their recent move to Roadrunner (you know how popular they are) but of course that won't happen because John hasn't grown a beard like the rest of the band.

[lefty007]

Music labels have long been nothing but banks with connections in the media. Product placement is everything. It has been several years since musicians have needed a label to have access to a professional studio and make a quality recording.

But playing out and having a page on My Space will not do much in terms of real, sustainable success.

You'll always need the connections in the industry for major exposure. It is how to get TV, promoters, booking agents, etc. Music will all be downloadable in the very near future, but how do you get your music to appear in iTunes' front page, or in favorite's lists, etc? Industry. . .

Labels will always be the force behind mass promotion.

[Barkless Dog]

Who's profiting from this new future?

I'll tell you, it's places like Guitar Center, Musicians Friend & E Bay - The suppliers to all the billion arm chair global musicians that are out there now making their musical expression. You really need those dozen 15 string triple laminate bubinga kevlar, 15 9V monsters in every wood type to make it, dont you?

We could all get by with that Squire bass and be just as good or bad, but no we have to have the latest or rarest shiny bass, don't we?

Marketing at it's best.

I bet Vietnam started with what ever equipment they could scrounge or steal.

[roadkill2309]

Uh, another thing Asia has going for it is the US dollar. Or specifically, the fact that Beijing and Tokyo keep buying Greenbacks on the exchanges to keep the US dollar inflated (because at the moment, it is *definitely* inflated). The simple reason is that they (and us up here) need the US dollar to be worth what it's currently worth.

That, plus the fact that the far east manufactures better product than we do here in North America in some industries (Titanium mountain bike frames is a good example), and you start to see that in some ways, they're already stepping into the driver's seat. Hell, even before the Chinese company Lenovo bought IBM's PC business, they'd been building IBM's laptops in china for years.

Is this a bad thing? I don't know. Slave labour wasn't a foreign concept over here at one point, either, and child labour laws came into effect for a reason. What I *do* know is that Canada is signing deals with China every chance it gets, and trying to get ethical labour clauses into the contracts. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

But make no mistake. China will be the next superpower.

What does this mean for music? Well, there's no enforceable copyright over there, but China will likely have less of an impact than computer technology and the Internet did. Barkless Dog is right about Apple changing the world, and Apple's iTunes model seems to be Big Business's best chance at not losing the game completely.

I make my music bucks by gigging, so I could easily say that this doesn't affect me, but at the end of the day, technology has made it affordable for my three-piece pub band to record a good demo, and hopefully a CD later this year.

And I also think that the implosion of the music Industry that we're watching right now is good for the artist. Prince went indie after his label messed with him, and didn't die of starvation -- though I *think* he might actually be with a big label again. There are lots of examples of artists leaving the labels, or of small labels starting up all over to give musicians some more control (and more than 0.0001% of each sale) over their music.

So I think that the future looks generally up for small guys like me, and kinda grim for the Suits.

And I have no problem with that.

[JimmyM]

Originally Posted by GobBass

john myung and Dream Theater will rule the airwaves because of their recent move to Roadrunner (you know how popular they are) but of course that won't happen because John hasn't grown a beard like the rest of the band.

Right! Great post!

[Barkless Dog]

Because of the global market place, America is loosing it's heritige quickly through E Bay or the "everything is for sale American mentality".

Because the dollar is so weak, first the Japanese and now Europe is snapping up all the Vintage equipment/cars/our toll roads & ports (had to throw that in) that will be lost for a long time or forever.

America, it's history and it's self is up for sale/lease if the price is right.

Our corporations & politicians do not care about the long term, only how to make a buck or please their interest group/stock holders while they are on this rock.

We are lucky that american made instruments are still THE sought after brand around the globe, although it is certainly not for being better quality, sounding, playing etc.

[BassicJohn]

Music is both art and entertainment. The entertainment side usually wins over the art side. There are true artists with little or no following while great entertainers with little or no musical talent are vastly successful. The winners will always be those whose music and performances resonate with the listeners and bring out a postive emotional response in them. The music industry may change but this will remain the same.

[Baryonyx]

The future's bright, the DJ's orange.

[JimmyM]

What's with all the non-sequiturs in this thread? John Myung doesn't have a beard? The DJ's orange? What the hell is that?