80s bands now the only way to fill venues

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

Auld lads have been lamenting the death of music since Mozart was a child. Where there is human creativity there will always be great music.

That's an easy argument to make, but today's popular music is extremely homogeneous and creativity is seemingly at odds with the profit making potential of what is now a much smaller industry compared to what it was over the past half century or so.

Anyone over thirty will have experienced a time when popular music was perhaps the biggest influence over culture and will be conditioned to think in terms of that being a perpetual notion.

Ultimately music is less important in this day and age and the industry is desperate to retain any profit they can muster from it by only bringing the most "safe" products to market, but in doing so they are making music even less interesting and in turn less important to the point where the model of artists, record labels and publishers that worked to successfully in the past will no longer function in the near future.

I remember reading an article in Q magazine about twenty years ago about how the Internet could potentially affect the music industry and they were reasonably accurate in as much as they fore saw the death of the hitherto untouchable music retailers in favour of at that point unspecified online alternative.

Maybe napster was the beginning of the end in a way but the Internet created a situation in which the money available to artists would never be the same as it had previously been. Bands/artists would never been given the freedom or financial backing to create things in the shape of the great experimental albums of the past that pushed music into different directions and widened the breath of what popular music could be. The Internet is no longer waiting in the long grass to ambush the music industry it is reality and demand has created a situation where nobody purchases music as if it were a precious art form but rather it is rented and is never the tangible thing it was in the past, no more carefully crafted sleeves, just a jpeg on your phone. The days of letting artists explore and experiment are no longer financially viable, artists who try different things still exist but they are no longer the concern of an industry who can ill afford to gamble on something that isn't immediately bankable.

You can't really blame a business for wanting to make money, but these people are painting themselves into a corner and I personally long for a time when the lumbering corpse of the music industry as we know it is finally buried for good. Where popular music goes from there is anyone's guess but the business model of the twentieth century is in its death throes and its current output is akin to a death rattle.