General Music Chat

One other reason I'm not into any new music any more is me. Not that I'm the greatest musician on the planet, far from it, I play so much music myself that I don't listen to new music very often. I'm also guilty of not going out and listening to local bands at all. I have no interest in it really. Maybe that's a bad thing, not really knowing or caring about my competition. I've never really considered any other band competition. On Jango they play new artists about every 15-20 tunes they play of famous artists. I listen to them (I can't really help listening to them) with an open mind, but boy are most of them AWFUL. There's only been a few that are top rate. I think Jango even changed the way they post comments about new artists because of people like me. Now you can only comment on a new artist if you like the artist. I have to admit that in the last few years I'm hearing some new artists that are actually getting a little more interesting to listen to. I've been encouraged recently by the few tunes I've heard either on radio or TV. I'm hopeful that as we enter the next decade (in a few days) we'll be heading in a better direction musically. The few gigs we have performed the last few months have been in front of mainly young people (under age 30). They are genuinely digging us. We've been holding the crowd for the most part and the bar owner has been asking us back. Maybe it's becoming cool to get into more traditional music. There's hope for me yet...

While we don't get the "album experience" anymore, we also hafta remember that most bands are not OFFERING them any longer.

It's a singles market out there. There aren't the theme-based albums that there used to be, occasionally.

Most often, a band has maybe three good songs, & fifty or more so-so ones, or just plain awful ones. They spread the good songs over three albums, & the consumer is stuck with tons of less than satisfactory material if he buys the entire CD. This has become the norm in every genre. One good song, maybe two, if you're lucky, & the rest of a CD is just filler.

As it becomes ever easier to get that one good song, the ppl that actually produce entire collections of quality material are passed by. Ppl buy the one song that gets air play & ignore the rest as the entire field of music is cluttered to its impending doom with lackluster crap tossed out there by untried & untested bands who are lucky enough to be able to come up with one tune with a hook.

Our audiences all have ADHD, the attention span of a butterfly on crack, as they flit from new act to new act, always seeking the next big thing, never realizing that "big things" cannot exist in this brave new musical model. The only things that can exist are the snippets that grab the masses' ear for a single moment in time, or can be immortalized in a great movie (which will be forgotten by next year), or brought back to our attention in some tv commercial. Instant gratification has erased the patience necessary to appreciate the efforts of quality composers to produce an entire CD of good material.

Howlin' got me thinking. Albums I bought purely because of the album art:

Yes - The Yes Album
Sir Lord Baltimore
Wishbone Ash
King Crimson - In The Court of the Crimson King

The art was a BIG part of the package that's been lost.

I still buy vinyl, and prefer it over Cds. A good stylus and turntable can make the pops and crackles negligible.

Not sure what if anything it says about you other than you don't buy albums. I think the majority of the people here don't. And that's too bad, because if you don't support the industry you are helping to doom it. Yes it's a changing world and people don't buy albums anymore, yada yada yada. But I still like the album format, where an artist releases a collection of songs from a certain time period. I can look back years later and remember what was going on just by listening to an album. A single just doesn't have that impact.

Well, I read that vinyl is back in now. The new hip thing to do.
I think it started with the audiophile snob thing.

Record companies have made a lot of sales recently on good old fashioned records.

I think the album is coming back around again.