Jun292011
The Golden Age Of Music
I’ve been wanting to write about the current state of music for a while now. It’s not really a discussion about how music is getting worse because there are still plenty of quality producers out there pushing the scene forwards but I just wanted to take a look at how the industry is shifting in its current state today compared to when I first started out and how kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
Nostalgia
I’m 30 years old so when I started DJing, the common way to hear new music was to head on down to the local record store, have a chat and a catch up with the guy behind the counter (hat tip to Vinyl Frontier in Woking), get given 20 or so vinyls and settle down at one of the listening posts to go through each record in detail.
After a fair amount of time I’d make my selection and typically pay between £7 - £9 per vinyl. Imports and special orders would cost more as would ‘DJ only’ promos and test presses.
I’d take my music home with me and practise a DJ set with my new vinyl. That static you got as you pulled it out the crisp new paper sleeve and that indescribable ‘new vinyl’ smell would send shivers down my spine. It was exciting times.
Now we look at the state of the music scene today and I think my biggest gripe lies with the select few that illegally download music. In the age of MP3s and instant online musical gratification I understand that you simply must have a specific tune right now and that making a trip to a store to buy music seems almost absurd now, but there is absolutely no excuse to illegally download music.
Illegal Downloads
Illegal downloads have been covered by the news more and more frequently over the past few years and I really don’t understand why people feel the need to share/steal music online. Music today can cost as little as 29p on Amazon, a far cry from the £7 I used to shell out back in the day. Who doesn’t have 29p to spend on a track? What’s 29p today - the cost of a single cigarette. Even the specialist online dance music vendors rarely charge more than £1.50 for a 320Kbps MP3 single and I think this is more than a fair price when you consider CD singles used to cost around £3.99.
What’s Changed?
So what has happened to music to make people think that free music is their right, that they shouldn’t have to pay for music at all? When did it become obscene to pay more than £1.50 for a track? Even in iTunes most music cost less than £1. A POUND!
When you get people illegally downloading music rather than paying a few pence its no wonder that the top quality artists are struggling to earn a living any more.
I think that one of the problems is that music simply has no value any more. Its become too disposable. Let me try and use an analogy here. If you are going to paint a room in your house, what clothes do you put on? Is it your £2 shirt from Primark, or your £200 Armani shirt? OK, bad analogy but you see the point, because you spent so little on something it means little to you. You have little money and no time or emotion invested in an instant download as opposed to taking a trip to a record store and meticulously going through each and every tune. Today you can preview a song and skip through it in a matter of seconds.
I know this to be true because this is what I do when I listen to promos. There is literally so much music that gets delivered to my inbox on a daily basis that the only way to get through it all is to skip through each track and devote just a few seconds of my time to each one. A few seconds of verse and chorus and I make my decision there and then (to be fair I do put those ones to one side to listen back to them properly later on).
An Over Saturated Market
Music turns over at such a phenomenal rate today and there is so much software and online tools out there to enable anyone to make music that the market has become over saturated. Its only in the last year or so that mid-week chart positions became something to fight over. There are more people making music today than there ever has been - not to say that there aren’t some talented people out there but usually it’s only 5% of tunes that I listen to now which I even consider adding to my ‘listen to later’ pile. It’s now so easy to make a tune and put it out there that there’s simply just too much of it.
In the same way that XFactor started the ball rolling with talent contest-style stars in 2004. XFactor does what is says on the tin, it finds unsung (pun intended) talented people and gives them a platform to progress their career. Fine. I get that. But the effect its had is to push valuable airtime away from people with bags of talent and give it to those that have none. Now all these other talent search TV programmes have copied the format and instead of TV time being given to people that deserve it and worked hard it is now being dished out to people that have stood in a queue. As much as I hate N-Dubz, they feel the same way and they do have a point with respect to effort-to-success ratio.
No Value Placed On Music
The generation of music buyers today will never be able to fathom the idea of treasuring music because there is an overwhelming abundance of it. Vinyl is a physical entity and as such it is prone to wear and tear. No matter how careful you are, music pressed on vinyl can only be played a finite number of times before the vinyl wears out and either starts skipping or sounds dull rendering the record ultimately useless. With MP3s there is no degradation of music and no limits placed on it, it will never wear away or sound dull and in 100 years time it will still sound the same. When you have an abundance of anything you treat it with less respect and value than you would something that is rare or something that you treasure.
The rarest of music I encountered when I started DJing was the limited edition test presses, acetates and dub plates. These were either one-off vinyl presses or super-small batches of records and because at the time you could not copy vinyl easily this made the music rare. So when you dropped that exclusive mix which blew the dance floor apart you’d get people coming up to the DJ booth asking where you got it from and what the name was. There was a certain bit of DJ snobbery I enjoyed where I took a guilty pleasure in holding up a white label and saying “Test press import, mate” to the punter.
It’s A Crowded Industry
But that’s the thing, test-press imports don’t exist any more. Producers around the world can upload their latest tracks to Soundcloud for example and share their latest creations literally minutes after it’s finished. Why? It’s because nowadays the competition out there is so much stronger than it was before and to get noticed and heard above the noise you have to put your music out there in this way to get people excited and interested in your music and to get it circulated among DJs.
Producers even give away free downloads to some of their tracks just to get people listening to their productions. It’s mad, but they have to do this in order to penetrate the market. It’s like one huge viscous circle because the more music that is given away free, the more the public demands, if not expects, from artists in general thereby feeding the fuel that diminishes the value of the music being produced.
Moving With the Times
In no way am I attacking the industry as it is at the moment because let’s face it the industry is always changing and we all have to move with the times, I just believe that the golden age of listening to music, buying music and music production has now sadly passed. Music production used to cost thousands of pounds just for the equipment alone and when something costs this amount of money you have to be really serious about doing it and have a real passion before you make that kind of investment. Now you can get programs like Reason and Ableton for a fraction of the cost.
It will be interesting to see how producers get noticed in future and how they expect to generate revenue required to carry on making music as a living. Looking to the commercial side, Professor Green for one believes that the future is in brand tie-ins, and you’d be hard pressed to miss Tinie Tempah jumping around in a Lucozade ad. Even Jennifer Lopez is selling out to Gillette. I guess you can’t blame them for when their revenue dries up from music sales, where else are they going to turn to in order to make their money? What was once a relatively stable industry has been taken over by an uncertain future.
Dance music has been a huge part of my life and it still is however the golden age of music has been and gone and now its time for the next generation to take what we have given them and to hopefully push it forwards in the right direction. Whatever happens to the state of music in the future I’m glad to have been a part of what it was in its glory days.
Очень хорошая, верная статья! Полностью согласен с тобой dj всех вопросах! Я из России!
Comment by Михаил — September 8, 2011 @ 11:57 am