The Decline of the Music Industry

@simao haha!  Tipper Gore is on her way. 

Nobody was ever able to predict what would hit. There were some notable record men (I can’t think of any women who ran labels back in the day) who had a good ear, or were artist friendly. Mo Ostin at Warners in the ’70s built a substantial empire, and those young guys he hired produced some great records. That company was regarded as artist friendly. Chris Blackwell was adventurous in his musical tastes and signed a lot of different acts that helped define the sound of several different genres: from Crimson and Tull to Bob Marley (throw in Traffic, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, U2 and a whole catalog of others). He was regarded not as a suit but as a guy who respected the artist. There were others.
There was always a tension between the artist side and the bean counters. That was true in the cigar chomping days and was true even during the late ’60s. The ’70s seemed to reflect a shift from London to LA and the singer-songwriter scene (I’m leaving out The Band, who were regarded as musician’s musicians by many and did sell records, but that whole LA mob become a "thing" in the ’70s). I kind of dropped out in the ’80s-- I listened to everything from Bad Brains (Rastafarian punk played by fusion guys out of DC to audiophile crap. I really didn’t have time for music because I was working in a profession that serviced the music industry. Most of the people I dealt with were suits. Artists who made big money had day to day lawyers, agents, managers, PR people, personal assistants, and almost all the folks who serviced them had lawyers, accountants, PR people and personal assistants.
The bottom dropped out finally in large part due to a combination of things, not the least being the Internet and the ability to file share, the reliance on catalog and established artists rather than the risks associated with new acts (although I gotta say, I remember in the ’80s how much money was thrown at totally unknown artists to fund them through advances). There was push back against "the industry" that kind of peaked during the Napster era and by that time, the industry was effectively gutted. They weren’t selling as much in the way of physical inventory, albums weren’t even released on vinyl in the US-- you had to buy an EU pressing to get some stuff if you were into new music and there were so many other diversions for the youth market, including Internet gaming.
Music was no longer a thing you focused on as an activity but something that got played while you did something else. It was a cheap commodity, made cheaper by how it was delivered. The expectation of "free" music made it hard to compete. It became even more niche as we turned the millennium.
I don’t pretend to completely understand any of it, though I witnessed it, was part of it in some ways and have some ideas about how music reflects culture and how culture can change music. Can music change culture? Yes. I think so.
In a way, and this is way beyond the scope of the thread, I think we are between epochs; we have lost some or much of the old, and the promise or potential of the new has not been fully realized. I had hoped to be driving a jet car by now, based on watching the Jetsons in the ’60s. The younger generation? Man, I know a guy-- thirties- majored in music in school, plays, but not for a living--huge knowledge of jazz, eclectic modern stuff, old school funk, etc. We trade listening notes.
I can still get excited firing up a record I haven’t heard or listened to in a long time. That, at this point, is largely what it is about for me, but I’m from an older generation of audiophile/listener. We’ve been talking about the death of the high end audio industry for decades, but through thick and thin, it’s still there. Stuff changes. C’est la vie.

audio2design943 posts"I don’t remember (and I remember it well), people giving much attention in the 80’s to nuclear war. Not at all like the 70’s and 60’s." Oh stop. You clearly don’t remember it well. I started out wanting to take your side but the others are right, you are just making crap up....The 80’s were all about the Cold War and nuclear war. My "well regarded" college forced me (and 8000 others) to watch the crap Made for TV movie , "The Day After" in 1983 and the overtly fearmongering "Nightlight" afterwards about how Reagan was going to start WW3. Forget "Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall"? How about No Nukes Concerts and Protests in US cities, how about the Doomsday Clock which, supposedly, was at, 1 second to midnight before world destruction...lol., the Reykjavík Summit when every television "expert" told us we has lost the Cold War? Forget the riots in London and Brussels as the Pershing Missiles were being deployed to Europe? How about Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, CSN, etc leading the Unilateral Disarmament Marches? Hear of Lech Wałęsa ? John Paul II being shot by a Bulgarian Security member, the 1,000 of Soviet dissidents, the near-like nuclear flashpoint of the Soviet shooting down of Korean jetliner 007 in 1983, the tales of genocide from Siberian Gulags. You really do live in a bubble. How else could one justify such blitheful amnesia, or perhaps it’s just a blindspot for being horribly wrong about positions taken, that in retrospect, were some of the worst things to be wrong and vocally opinionated about, in any lifetime.....

We learned long ago that businesses have three basic phases and 4 steps to ruin:

1.  Genius creates whatever
2.  It sells, and genius realizes he has no idea how to sell stuff, so hires a guy to market and sell it while she/he continues to invent and improve and innovate 
3..Sales and marketing team can not manage the money, so they hire a money team to deal with it.
4.  Money people take over the organization and start telling the genius what to "invent," when to release it for maximum money making, and then begin running the business and minimizing everyone else.

Happens every time!

Cheers!

There was a time when music literacy was, if not the most, one of the noblest of all human endeavors. As recently as one hundred years ago or so there was nary a family that did not include a member who was a moderately accomplished musician; or better. Families gathered to listen to a member perform and often to sing along in reasonably decent harmony.

Irony of ironies, a mechanical device, the phonograph first conceived and intended for use in business not for music storage or playback would change everything.

John Phillip Sousa, one hundred years ago:

”The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards. Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music. The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”