New Year, new stories. Or, maybe not.

 

 

Funny/Sad, the month of January has come and gone here in 2022. The big news headlines still shout COVID daily and its politicization polarizing the continent. This has been the news since I last blogged here and the US just passed 900,000 dead from this virus this past week. More COVID deaths in the USA than any other nation, which is a staggering statistic given that India and China both have more than 4 times the population numbers we have here in the land of nothing is for free. 

People here have just about had it with each other and the various hands that feed them over this pandemic with the many tragic outcomes the virus has produced from lost businesses, lost incomes  and lost family members. Neil Young threw down the gauntlet on misinformation regarding vaccines challenging the major streaming service of his songs, Spotify, to choose between himself and his catalog of songs to stream or Joe Rogan's podcast of lies, bigotry and vaccine phobias. Spotify has chosen Joe Rogan. We'll see how it all plays out. However, one thing not lost in all the publicity of Neil's laudatory actions regarding COVID vaccine information is the sad state of compensation artists actually see from the giant streaming services like Spotify, Apple, Pandora and others. This might be the bigger reason why Neil and many of his allies, who have now followed suit by pulling their songs, removed their catalogs from Spotify. 

Other recent articles from the music biz news world I read this past month covered the sales decline of new music titles while seeing the rise in popularity of older music titles. New songs < 2 years old. Catalog songs > 2 years old. This has been happening for awhile, but has accelerated during the pandemic years. What's old is new these days for a lot of us, young and old alike, and what's new isn't all that good, just retreading old waters with new computer programs and lifted beat signatures. 

In the big scheme of things maybe none of this matters. But, since you're swimming in my universe here, and we're all seeking the connections for the good stuff over the crap that fills up the landfills in the brains of too many people today, it argues for different approaches  to seek out the art and artists that allow us to connect as human beings with real human spirits again. That's what we're missing today, and that is what the headlines shout. 

 

 

Once upon a time, and not that long ago, there was no world wide web with file swaps, downloads or streaming, and business boomed. I'm a boomer born in the 1950s, and to me that just doesn't seem that long ago, but at the beginning of that decade less than 10% of the US population had a television set and there were only 107 stations throughout the nation. Within ten years 86% of the US population had a TV. The tax rate for the highest earners in the country was 90%. I guess it was a long time ago.

I bring up television because it truly transformed American consumerism and with it the music business, of which I was a microbe in the industry for many years.  It made Elvis Presley an international star in 1956. Heartbreak Hotel was Elvis's first Number 1 hit nationally. It was released during the last week of January in 1956, which was the same week Elvis first appeared on a national network show, CBS Stage Show, hosted by the Dorsey Brothers.

I still remember after all these years, the evening a little while later when Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show (Shoe). My parents, with jazz and classical backgrounds, watched and were not that impressed by the young man's musical chops but still found themselves mesmerized by the performances. I was allowed to stay up late (8 or 9 pm)  for that evening to catch the next big thing on the TV. They didn't buy Elvis records as it turned out, but did plunk down a big chunk of cash shortly thereafter for a top of the line stereo system, which my grandparents felt was a true waste of a healthy sum of money. That argument still reverberates in my skull all these years later. It was a crucible. 

I was hooked on music at an early age. My dad was a great freelance explorer on the piano who followed a melody for a few bars and then took off to the stars on it. My mom played from sheet music, but played well. As a young kid I listened to a lot of novelty tunes (Ray Stevens & Sheb Wooley come to mind) and classical music, mostly Russian and French composers (DeBussy, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff & Borodin). Elvis was more of a movie star celebrity rather than a pop star by the early 60s. Grammar school was coming to a close and an Ed Sullivan show again changed the world's scenery.

Eight years after Elvis, during February of 1964 The Beatles arrived in New York and played on the Ed Sullivan Show. The number of households watching this one show were incredible with all sorts of viewing records shattered and untold numbers of records to be sold in the near future. The greatest marketing campaign ever launched a British invasion of young rock acts that helped feed the pop music for 30 years. Saturate the markets of radio, television and print and you can sell the product. Everybody wanted in on the new beats, the new fashions, the new music, the new stories and all things youth. I had finally found something in common with girls.

 

 

We're a long way removed from those days, when a couple of start up paper rags (Creem Magazine & Rolling Stone Magazine) began covering all things rock in the pop music universe and helped create new publishing empires centered on the music business.  My friends and I, who all used to hang out and do the sports things of the day together on the various playgrounds, swapped the sports equipment for guitars, keyboards and drums. So many business sprang up and thrived selling the various accessories associated with the music we all thought it would never end. It's been a roller coaster of a ride for all these years, but the last couple of years has been the lowest I've ever seen the music industry in my lifetime. 

Ownership of music product has almost disappeared. There were roughly one billion CDs sold in year 2000 for roughly a $14 billion which was pretty much the size of the industry at that time. In year 2020 31.6 million CDs were purchased for a rough figure of $480 million out of a $12 billion industry. Subscription services  like Apple and Spotify today account for just about 70% of the dollars generated for the now $12 billion recorded music industry. Ownership, and not just for music is becoming an endangered species in this day and age, certainly here in the USA.

In the digital age of world wide webs with millions of channels and billions upon billions  of pages we seem to have everything in the way of information and entertainment at our disposal. All instantly available to peruse when we wish. And yet, we find ourselves living day-to-day on the lifeline of transmission methods we subscribe to at ever rising costs with almost no vested interest any longer in the offerings. What was once a cultural smorgasbord where pride of ownership with cars, books, art, fashion, albums, videos, silver, china, cards and whatever have all become relic equivalents of an archeological dig into the Bronze Age. Back in those 1950s days I mentioned a few paragraphs back, when television was brand new, the airwaves (the means of transmission) belonged to the public in the national best  interests. All citizens got all the same channels all the time Today we are a fractured fairy tale where way too many are priced out of both culture and vital honest information. 

We reach the end, which means we begin. 

Let's see where this takes us. Thanks for stopping by