How the music industry has fooled us for 50 years

Throughout history we've seen and read about celebrated musical artists who have poured their life's work into creating masterpieces, like Beethoven (seen to the left signing a contract with Sony) or Mozart, for example. While other songwriters have gotten lucky, picking that one golden apple from their own stale and limp creative tree of which the world then fawns over for a moment, like Aha, for example. But over the past 50 years or so the nature of mainstream music has become progressively more cautious, caught in its own net of covering the costs of having a record label while being tentative to take a chance on anything that isn't going to be a surefire hit. The label execs, producers and artists who want to keep their jobs are then stuck meticulously crafting products (or advertisements) rather than art. Let me qualify my post here firstly by saying that I write this as someone who has over 15 years experience in the music industry as a promoter, songwriter, hired gun and performer. I'm happy to say that I got out alive.

Because of this music as competition or music as contact sport culture the artist has been taken out of the equation at the big money level, today more than ever, and has been replaced by a workhorse. Sure you need an "artist" but the parameters in which they can creatively work are very narrow, but it was also like this in the 1950s when studios had cubicles full of songwriters crafting the next Buddy Holly-esque hit. For half a century the music industry has been making us think that advertisements, misogynistic, sexually charged, aggressive, or immature advertisements are masterpieces. And we continue to somehow believe that these people throughout modern history are talented, the most talented people that record labels could find in fact. They are the new Mozarts. We've gone from Carmen, Faust, Salome, (none of them by Mozart of Beethoven, but by other true master artists) and from music that questioned the moral and metaphysical fiber of our human existence to Can call all you want but there's no one home and you're not gonna reach my telephone! Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh Stop telephonin' me! Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh I'm busy! A True wordsmith Lady Gaga is. Rich insight into the human situation now in the 21st century.

Just to contrast this for a moment, independent music has perhaps never been more vibrant and active, creative and exploratory, because this is truly where the art of music is being made in my opinion. The art of sound engineering is the only thing truly being challenged in Mainstream music. With lyrics that account for little more than a perverted nursary rhyme. But let's get back to our artists for a minute. Those celebrated musicians and talented singers we've all been amazed by for so long...they were just average (and often times very messed up) people who somehow made it through the cheese grater of a music industry we've come to know and trust. Few people make it through the grater, and they are no more talented than the large bulk of the ones who don't. Enter Lin Yu Chun.

Remember when you thought Whitney Houston's angelic voice was the apex of human talent, trying not to cry at your grade 9 dance as that cute boy danced awkwardly with you side to side. Well, it could have just as easily been a fat Taiwanese boy singing that song, because the wealth of human "talent" grows ever greater as our population increases. And as entertainment technology proliferates, and millions of more people living sedentary lifestyles have few things better to do than play Rock Band or go to Karaoke bars, a new Whitney is born every minute and sometimes they're a chubby Taiwanese guy. The fact that the music industry has stooped to this level to find its stars is an example of just how cash strapped it must be.

The overhead on a creative artist (or God forbid, a band) is HUGE, because they're using technology, other musicians and talented engineers, computer geeks, symphonies, world's best triangle quartet and most valuable of all TIME to craft the most amazingly exploratory sounds and songs that they can muster. The ROI or profit margin on that kind of music is disasterous! But some fat kid from Taipei or some unassuming maid from Scotland, competing in an open mic contest to see who can sound exactly like a star from 20 years ago....well your ROI just shot up huge. Because the kind of people who love these stories, these America's Got Talent, diamond in the rough, underdog stories, are the same kind of people that still buy CDs at Walmart- which sadly remains a large proportion of the population. That's how labels still make money, because they haven't figured out how to use the internet yet, and maybe never will. It's why just behind Taylor Swift (another "Artist" who won on a music as competition pageant show) Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream was the second top selling album of 2009 with just over 3 million copies. I can't remember the last time I bought a CD. 15 bucks for a Scottish Middle aged woman singing songs that were popular 20, 30, 40 years ago? This is the music industry? Beethoven and Mozart's coffins must be filling with vomit as they thrash wildly. Now some chubby karaoke idiot savant is going to be celebrated as the next musical sensation? I don't know how they'll market his debut album- listen to the most beautiful female vocal performances of the past 30 years, as performed by a fat 23 year old Taiwanese guy? But this is exactly how Boyle's album is described by CD Universe:

"a large part of Boyle's appeal is that she's a middle-aged woman recalling a bygone era when there were singers that appealed to an adult audience by offering soft, stately versions of pop hits and standards. That time was the late `60s and early `70s, and apart from a rather faithful version of Madonna's "You'll See," I Dreamed a Dream could very well have been released all those years ago, as it mixes up the show tunes, gospel, and Christmas carols with covers of Skeeter Davis' "The End of the World," the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses," and a version of "Daydream Believer" that is easily the slowest on record"

There's no denying it, it's rehashed gospel and Christmas songs and hits of the 70s sung by a homely middle aged Scottish woman. Now here's the greatest secret of the music industry. It's that the most talented people are really a dime a dozen, and it comes down to who they pick and how well they market it. "Talent" is everywhere, and the more people we have on the planet the more it suffers from diminishing returns. Creativity however is a different thing, but creativity, sadly, is unwildly and hard to manage. Creativity can get expensive, whereas a workhorse to help move merchandise, that's far more manageable.

The fact that the industry has been reduced to scouring the countryside for underdog archetypes proves this more than anything. They have stopped looking for the talent, because the real talent is largely an illusion. For every 1% of songwriters, singers or bands that "make it" another 30-50% of songwriters, singers and bands that don't have just as much talent. Creativity though, well that's another thing altogether. They could've been picking anyone these past 50 years...Buddy Holly could've been Bradly Jolly, The Monkees could've been any other 4 cute boys. But they were who they were, and Lady Ga Ga is who she is, when in fact any blonde club tramp could sing about not answering her cell phone because she's dancing like a whore. Any one.

Where Beethoven would learn the craft of music and take years to finish a piece, some producers now pay some "songwriters" to whip together a few tunes using formulaic arrangements and current sounds and then the high profit margin, high ROI, low risk "artist" who beat the odds and represents the underdog in all of us is thrown in the mix. Or in GaGa's case someone who's shocking. For Boyle's album they did even better and bypassed the songwriting aspect by rehashing several songs from the past 30 years into even shorter versions than before and somehow convinced over 3 million people into buying them? Now that's an investment. 10 thousand years of human civilization and this is where the industry of our culture, of our music, is at right now. We've replaced the craftsmen with beasts of the field. Boyle, Swift, Gaga, and other workhorses. If we are to believe that art still mimics life and life still mimics art we are in a very bad place right now.

If this shit is considered art, what do we consider life? Or more accurately what do the record labels consider life?

The next Susan Boyle they say.

I say asteroid now.