80s bands now the only way to fill venues

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

There’s a real whiff of denim jacket around here at the moment. Middle-aged Hot Press readers giving out about modern bands not rocking hard enough. How they saw Fatima Mansions play in McGonagles, and Phil Lynott turned up afterwards sort of stuff. The ‘everything was better in my day’ brigade, tutting away in their Avensis as Coldplay comes on the radio.

The question is still out there, give a list of modern bands that match those of the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's for longevity?

bands in the past decade cant always get the publicity and finance to become household names like older bands do. If it annoys you, slap the next person who tells you they get all their music on spotify for a tenner. musicians cant survive on that kind of money

The Golden Miller wrote: »

The last era of original music from bands and acts making it to the mainstream in big numbers was up until the mid/late 00's. From say circa 2010, what acts have made you go "wow" specifically?

This thread has veered so wildly across subjects and prerequisites that it'd be impossible not to get grasped by some "Gotcha!".

Is the benchmark arena gigs? Mainstream? What do you consider mainstream? Whatever turgid **** is on Today FM? Or whatever **** is on the front-page of Pitchfork - which is by and large this generation's Rolling Stone magazine. Is that mainstream?

Look at the Slane headliners of the past - did the majority of those acts make you go "Wow!" or was it mostly a crock of shíte where even if the acts were good at one stage their appearance at Slane was well past their creative heyday?

There are too many variables at work and you're acting like kids don't go out to watch good bands in fields any more - there has NEVER been this many festivals with sales figures through the roof and great acts playing across Ireland. Never, ever, ever.
Ye're just getting old tbh, either try to do it gracefully without whinging or try to find good music - there's ****ing mountains of it.

Joanna Newsom, Kurt Vile, Father John Misty, Caribou, Four Tet, Swans, Wolf Alice, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus are all huge, have all had critically acclaimed albums... Stop listening to the radio - it's been honed over the years to be shít, the point of radio nowadays is to be shít, lowest common denominator crap.

Not everything needs to be able to headline Slane (Nirvana wouldn't have been able to when Nevermind came out) and it's not saying much for an artist when they do. The Verve? Robbie Williams? U2? RHCP? They can put on a good show but I don't know anybody who thinks they're musically "Wow!".
Maybe When Flea and Frusciante go on a solo, but not the actual songs.

Older bands get huge amounts of advertising because they tour less frequently. They arrive once a decade, take a big wedge of cash and then disappear again until they've racked up another divorce and need more money.

Newer/younger bands by contrast tour more frequently and so are back every year or two.

The nature of how music is consumed has changed a lot. After WW2, thanks to the mass production of electronics, it became possible for artists to make a single recording of their works and then take a continuous income stream from it. This is not something musicians could ever do before. Their income came from commissioned pieces and public performances. If they didn't play, they didn't earn.

With the mass uptake of record players in peoples' homes you had a scenario where someone could write a single Christmas song and retire on the income. Which is insanity for a couple of days work.

All that has happened is that normality has been returned. Artists can no longer cream an extraordinary income off a single album, which they may have spent a month or two writing and recording. Now they have perform if they want to get paid.

And rightfully so. But it means gigs are so frequent for younger bands that they're not much of a special event.

Older bands don't actually have to perform, they have lots of money already. But they will of course want to get in on the action.

The Golden Miller wrote: »

The likes of Coldplay aren't the problem, they predate the last decade. The problem is that there's no new bands coming through since that point. Trying to say the people complaining are just getting older and are now the one's churning out the "back in my day" rhetoric doesn't hold up. Music has always had pop and manufactured music in the charts, but in every decade since the 60's when contemporary music started, there have been real, original and creative bands in the mainstream also. The last decade is the first that that has not happened to any great extent. So it's not a case of "back in my day the music was better", there simply is no music today at all, well nothing past manufactured commercialised dirt

plenty of new bands - these days you just have to find them yourself and the 'industry' cant be bothered putting the money in to promote them. good thing too. music can only get better if the focus isnt purely on generating income for large corporations

The Golden Miller wrote: »

there simply is no music today at all, well nothing past manufactured commercialised dirt

I couldn't possibly disagree more with that.

The Golden Miller wrote: »

When I say mainstream, I mean within a good chunk of the public's consciousness. The bands you named, aren't that. There's always been real bands in the mainstream and others you had to delve deeper for. But now the only bands are one's you have to go looking for, that shouldn't be the case.

Yeah, I've had these chats about the mainstream turning to crap but the breadth and variety of acts outside traditional airwaves is much greater, albums have gotten consistently better in terms of there being less filler with a couple of winning tunes carrying the product, production quality has raised almost across the board.
This is a radio problem. Nobody really gives a toss about the radio anymore, Spotify and YouTube dominate instead of the radio nowadays, the NME and other rags have been replaced by a combination of online tastemaker sites/sub-forums/reddits.
Good music on the radio has taken a dwindle, but good music in general has never been more abundant. It's hard to keep up with to be honest, I keep finding things from a year or three back that I fall in love with.
The bands I've mentioned are just the most well known or acclaimed. I'd rather this version of reality than going back to the 80s or 90s where the majority of our tastes came about because of the radio playing one good song out of every ten or twenty.

I can see something like Slane becoming even more irrelevant but festivals themselves are packed out with the main problem for Ireland being (a) too many festivals, (b) higher costs for said festivals and certainly (c) stingy festival organisers who in turn are being strong-armed by (d) 360° recording deals meaning fees are astronomical. So many factors at play but music is better than ever, albeit much less of an earner for musicians who have to work harder/more frequently than ever, plus they're forced to play live to earn unless they can reach a certain niche audience of collectors.

The Golden Miller wrote: »

Of course there's good music if you go and dig deeper, but you shouldn't have to

I kind of agree, but this isn't new. The radio and the mainstream has been trash for decades (including the 70s and 80s and 90s some here seem nostalgic for - clearly forgetting the despair of Mark McCabe or Aon Focal Eile), it's just more homogenised now. There was always a bit of a dig necessary to hit the really good stuff and it's easier than ever to dig across a wider array of music with tools available like rateyourmusic [filter out metal and rap unless you love those - those fans tend to be overzealous with the auld 10/10s], playlists across all genres by a variety of labels, magazines and tastemakers that put every last radio station to shame.
Radio's only valid use nowadays is for local topical subjects/news.

Turn the radio off and dig, or give me a list of musicians you like and I'll dig for you. There's no need to feel like music has gone downhill when it's simply a case of distribution channels changing or a case of the largest channels merging together repeatedly until they're practically identical Sheeran/Sheridan/Swift-spewing fúckfests.

eviltimeban wrote: »

As someone on the periphery of the Dublin music scene, what's interesting is that there's a TONNE of bands around the local area. Go into any venue like the Workmans, Taproom, Grand Social, upstairs at Whelans, Fibbers, and you'll find these bands. They are passionate and into what they are doing.

The irony is that no one seems to care. I've often played gigs where the only people there are the other bands on the bill. Without this level of interest it'll be very hard to build any momentum or create a fan base, if the prospective fans aren't even going to see bands in bars / small venues.

Yes this is a huge issue, and that's Dublin I can tell you it's worse throughout the country going to see some original bands was common practice years ago now the opportunity is less and less as pub/venue owners opt for cover bands, so many ten a penny wedding bands clogging up the venues.