This is something I've been wondering for a while. Music seems to be greatly proliferating in the previous years, and surely in the years to come. It's cheap, mass-produced, and pretty much anyone can do it start to finish now. You have the instruments, the skill (this can be anything, essentially), the ability to record, and put it out yourself. With all this, and the vast sea of people who are now doing it, what will happen as we know it? Will there still be popular artists, and how will one become popular/well-known? What about playing live? With so many acts, do you think people will still look into trying to book gigs and go on tour? If instead there becomes a mass explosion of small, local artists rather than fewer, larger well-known ones, what do you think this will mean for the record industry? Or the way people see live music, or the number of venues there are to experience them?

polymath wrote:what do you think this will mean for the record industry? Or the way people see live music, or the number of venues there are to experience them?

I'd say that since pop/popular music/popular culture is significantly about a shared cultural experience (at least for the young, who have historically been the consumers/creators of it), there will by necessity always be a few central repositories for popular music, be they MTV/YouTube/major record labels/something not yet imagined.

Without a sense of buying into a larger (global?) movement/marketing-attempt, I think that for many young people, fashion/pop/film loses it's raison d'etre.

Something that I regularly complain about is the conflict (as I see it) between the ability to write/record/release music that is now available to most, and the notional democratisation of music. There seems to be a growing rejection of the importance of intent in music, and it is becoming increasingly unfashionable to suggest that there is any inherent value in the stages prior to the realisation of a record.

To put it more crassly; we are now (I think) entering a time where music/music criticism appears to have embraced the previously (presumably) rhetorical idea that a baby's scrawl is of equivalent potential artistic merit to the (intentional) scrawl of a 'visual artist'. That what is in place on record is all that should be considered and then (necessarily) on a purely aesthetic basis.

Where's it heading? It's been in the shitter since at least 1998.

There was a pretty good little blurb in our local weekly about how since everyone can do it (be in a band) there is no one with the time or energy to see other peoples shows live cause they are to busy with their own shit. It makes me sad. I love to see live bands and support my friends in their endeavors however I rarely see it reciprocate when im playing.

The crap is getting 'hyped' more intensely and more widely than it was ten years ago.

Anybody with ears and something between them knows that The Streets, Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen are crap.

This style of urban-detail lyrics, delivered with strong accents in vocals that are very prominent in the mix, has been promoted by critics who should - and perhaps do - know better; the skeletal music is just a backing to this 'street poetry'.

The preceding refers specifically to the scene in England; things are better in the U.S.A.

I've heard close to zero musical pieces in which the creator(s) could hide a lack of talent in the new fancy pants technology.

Adam CR wrote:

polymath wrote:what do you think this will mean for the record industry? Or the way people see live music, or the number of venues there are to experience them?

I'd say that since pop/popular music/popular culture is significantly about a shared cultural experience (at least for the young, who have historically been the consumers/creators of it), there will by necessity always be a few central repositories for popular music, be they MTV/YouTube/major record labels/something not yet imagined.

Without a sense of buying into a larger (global?) movement/marketing-attempt, I think that for many young people, fashion/pop/film loses it's raison d'etre.

Something that I regularly complain about is the conflict (as I see it) between the ability to write/record/release music that is now available to most, and the notional democratisation of music. There seems to be a growing rejection of the importance of intent in music, and it is becoming increasingly unfashionable to suggest that there is any inherent value in the stages prior to the realisation of a record.

To put it more crassly; we are now (I think) entering a time where music/music criticism appears to have embraced the previously (presumably) rhetorical idea that a baby's scrawl is of equivalent potential artistic merit to the (intentional) scrawl of a 'visual artist'. That what is in place on record is all that should be considered and then (necessarily) on a purely aesthetic basis.

Very well put......

well, believe it or not, this is a post modernist time. and i think one of the responses of the mass creation of music is the lack of "intent" in the strict sense. the sense that everything must have a certain (rather limited) view of meaning. the very fact that it is now so easy to create it could mean that it doesn't have to have so much meaning. what can be created no longer requires time or dedication -- one can simply conjure up some tracks in a couple minutes time and place them out there for the entire world to see. subsequently, one can also find meaning anywhere -- it doesn't merely have to be restricted to those who follow certain conventions. one could conceivably have the intent of no intent. and if it appeals to you, or you can find something in it, it doesn't matter who made it or why, or how long it took them to do so. there's plenty of trial and error going on, but that happens all over the world at any place at any given point in time.

you talk about merit, but in this time who assigns merit? i think there's a shifting standard in who assigns meaning and worth. now it can be more personal, or it can be amongst the few myspace friends you have. you may not even care, maybe you're just putting music out there because you can. or maybe it's just personal. what is artistic merit and/or credibility? who assigns it and what defines it?

lemur68 wrote:Where's it heading? It's been in the shitter since at least 1998.

I'd venture to say 1994, but it depends on who's keeping score.

The music I get to see week in week out by bands playing locally is killer. It is the best it has been in my recollection. The problem is now that people find it harder to tour and get out so good music is becoming 'smaller' in outlook and more localised. Not such a bad thing...