“Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business,” starts a Huffington Post article*, and already warning klaxons are blazing in my head.
- First, is the death of the music industry inherently destructive of music itself?
- Second, since when is the recording industry the sum total of the music industry?
- Third, why are physical copies of recordings the sum total of the recording industry?
Record companies never saw themselves as “conduits for music,” because they are companies, not public utilities. CDs were born out of greed, yes, but so were every other form. Hell, CDs as a medium were less horrendous than the two previous – cassettes and 8-tracks – to speak of cynical greed creating consumer branded music.
Hell, the writer of this Huffington Post article basically defined his music as better quality than Spears not by talking about the creative process, but about how grassroots his marketing was, as if anti-establishment is in any way inherently better than establishment by mere dint of title.
This whole article smacks of a limited purview; pretentious sour grapes, and even while I agree with its precepts – don’t mourn the big labels – I can’t help but wince at its application of them as they make him sound like a bigger dinosaur than the one he’s burying.
*Not that I would readily admit to reading the Huffington Post.
