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Have you lately listened to any of those bands that lightened your way in your very early age, made you adopt a specific dress code & attitude and opened the path to now call yourself “musically conscious”? Didn’t you feel proud and totally satisfied about all those passing years from this young period to your today self? Don’t you feel like you owe a few things to this music?
We are those lucky people who lived our half years grown up with bands such as Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Megadeth and in general all these years which are often characterized as the golden age of metal music. But the progress in various fields and especially the technological progress helped our ears become more vulnerable and Iron Maiden were replaced by Sepultura or Slayer and eventually by As I Lay Dying and Norma Jean. We became those people with dignity I’d say, by respecting the old ones and always giving the glad hand to the – new and thirsty for fame – blood. But we are also those people who face the gradual but almost total twilight of the respectful way of life we’ve learned.
Our corner’s diskery is now displaced by our web browser and the pocket money we were saving to buy our favorite cd’s without never regretting it, is replaced by the seeds and peers of our torrent engines. The little book of our cds or vinyls is now torned by our ease of having our line connected and simply click to our favorite band’s blogs. And I’m sure there are some reasons that made us turned into that kind of humans we once sang we would never become. Unenterprising.
Is it our fault? Is it the music business’s fault?
Mentioning the music business, I always and still believe that setting this “lady” as an aliby and putting the blame on her was always the easy excuse to not move our asses from the couch and try something more in the name of the thing we keep on saying we dedicated our lives in. It’s like America sometimes where everyone blames George Bush for the economy but all of them voted him. So let’s just imagine the fact that labels did not exist today.
The musical promotion has been far more free and accessible to every artist nowadays via myspace, youtube or other similar websites, which is a fact that leads into a total chaos where the simple fans that count much fewer than band members are so confused, don’t know from where to start their search-try and keep on bombing their heads with crappy staff until…?
Until they get sick and tired of this situation and pay their attention again to a signed artist as this statistically showed all those years that it is the most safe thing to do, (and I am sorry If I make you cry here), as music label’s signed artists per cent is full of bands that have worked hard to succeed from a cool hairstyle to a great production and composition numbers.
And isn’t that what makes you as a latecomer on stage immediately send your debut promo to hundreds of them, checking your mails like a maniac to read if someone found your music interesting and offer you a “whatever” contract? No fellows, you love the music business although you can’t admit it. You love it because deep in you, you recognize that it is almost the biggest chance for you to be heard worldwide, because you know that a good contract is going to be followed by a full promotion and booking require attention.
But let’s return to our main theme by re-examine a new possible answer. What about the price of the cds? Did they hit a so non-approachable phase that precludes any further waste of money than a few years ago?
The answer is definitely NO! We are the beginning of the so called “internet-freaks” generation and we know better than everyone that if we spend some time to look for some external websites we may find our favorite cds in half price or even less sometimes especially if this cd is a review-trusted second hand.
And there is no need I think to mention that in our local diskeries, if we are a little patient, in less than three months from the release date everyone with no exception resume the price of the albums for biggest sales.
And that is finally the honest and my beloved part of this editorial which I always wanted to express, cause it has to do with us, I mean the fans who also have our own bands (or some of us we don’t thank God). What I am about to write at the moment reminds me my daily activities where I meet many friends or people I know and happens to realize that the 80% of them have their own bands and worse than that, most of them are just simple copies of what they are currently listening.
There is one common truth and it seems than not everyone can admit that. I mean not everyone can be rock stars in that life and follow the other bands in the Warped Tour just by wearing a VANS t-shirt or having their high school girlfriends scream in their local shows! And that is what I think I’ll use as a conclusion to the topic theme.
My point is that if everyone have a daily and easy access to promote their bands almost the same way as the bigger ones, a worthy one should stay very lucky in order to escape the obscurity, because us -the fans – are daily bombed of a thousand invitations to check someone’s music and I am really disappointed telling you that I barely find a few bands who play in a fresh and original way, have a well-advised production, do not try to mix 100 genres in order to be a novel, and do not lack of basic imagination. A result to this is that people learn to like the unremarkable because they miss the good.
We truly grab the medium band’s updates in order not to lose them too, buy their cds, listen it a couple of times and then get bored again and start from the beginning to find a needle in the barn.
Does this really worth the cost?
No! It is obviously more preferable to download this band’s cds than spending our money just to gain a few hours of sound pleasure. And there stay some good bands in obscurity, bands who no matter how much is their effort to spread their music worldwide, we are so bored of checking them too in their first appearances and debut works and just convict them to anonymity. Anonymously lost in the friend requests…
So is it the music business’s fault? No. It is our fault cause trying to persuade ourselves that we belong to the group of the “stars” we grow this situation bigger and bigger until we totally lose our personal spot and finally pass the torch on TV and mainstream radio broadcasts. And then we’ll cry over the ashes of Iron Maiden clicking the repeat button on “Wasted Years”.
“Let us be poised and wise and our own today” as some good friends use to say…
Rena Koutsou.
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1:21 am on February 25th, 2009
I can go along with a bigger part of your blog.
But the biggest problem is that technology (read: the internet) has given the world so much more possibilities (including downloading) that people fall back in an old habit, called taking what is not theirs.
I remember the introduction of Napster, and i remember how many people were on there exchanging cd’s and also illegal live recordings.
Why?
Because there is a market and because it is convenient.
Did those people download in order to steal? No.
Because opportunities were there.
Also (and the bigger part of discussions forget that fact) it is and was a good way to find out about bands.
Unfortunately, music business was too late to put samples online and to protect promo copies in such a way that downloading a new album was no fun at all.
The solution came too late. People know where to find normal copies, people in the music industry leak music themselves because otherwise, how would you explain that i found a copy of the Nightwish album “Once” more than a month before its release?
Because someone leaked.
Every dog eats the meat that is held in front of his nose, so blaming downloaders is, in my opinion, a bit too easy.
And, as you stated correctly, alot of bands are far from original, they get known with a small audience but will never break through.
Why? Because they are not good enough, and record labels would have never given them a contract to begin with.
My conclusion, dear collegue, can be no other than they are partly guilty themselves, record companies and bands. NOT only downloaders.
And yes, cd’s are WAY overpriced. Double the price of a vinyl album. Ridiculous. Some cd’s still are 40 to 45 minutes. Ridiculous. I think that the music industry as a whole artificially keep the price of cd’s high to earn a lot of money and because of THEIR greed the bands get punished for not touring or no record deal (or even a deal but little money).
We all are not able to change the current situation, and i for one have given up on the fact that it will change anytime soon.
Nevertheless, i admire your crusade
1:34 am on February 25th, 2009
Hello Hans and thanx for sharing your opinion!
I think that if we dig it a bit more we could put a blame to everyone, starting from the music industries and ending to our own selves. So I guess that what happens, finally must be “nones fault”. It is something unavoidable because of the process in every single field of our lives. I understand that nowadays people don’t even have time to “think” by being too busy, how could they have time to search stuffs about music! The easy solution is always the preferable when things are getting pushy..
Process is good though and we just have to watch it as spectators in order to enjoy our lives, don’t you think?
4:51 pm on February 25th, 2009
I think that Rena’s editorial is the answer of why the metal music is dying day by day.
I can’t forget myself when I bought my first ever original cd in the age of 13. It was “Master Of Puppets” of Metallica and I was so proud of it. I can’t furthermore forget that I was listening to it every day again and again and I was carefully reading the lyrics of the booklet. That’s the indescribable feeling that keeps the metal “flame” alive. Isn’t it? I still feel the same every time that I buy a new cd. How will the metal really be without this feeling?
I can not even imagine the possibility of the suppression of the cds and their replacement of a digital mp3 format that’s something that many labels are thinking about. Mp3s are really so inanimate.
I understand Rena who says that if someone wants to buy a cd then he can easily find really good prices on internet. But I’m afraid that that’s not about money. That’s because of the social wave that drifts all the new generation. Because during the years, the vinyls were replaced by cds and now the cds by mp3s and ipods. Metal is becoming falser and falser as it’s not concrete any more and anything that’s not concrete is inanimate. So the “flame” and the “feelings” are dying.
And in my opinion isn’t the society the source of that problem but; the fashion, the marketing and the companies. The downloading, actually, serves interests of other like torrent sites. Downloading is just a habit that somebody sprayed us by using a real good marketing plan. What’s the result; All the people are in front of a pc and download tons of music gigabytes every day (that the most of them they don’t even listen to) and they call themselves “metalheads”. In reality, they are collectors and nothing more. They can’t appreciate the real value of having an original album and the music furthermore.
In the past it was the tape-trading but it wasn’t like downloading. Tape-trading helped people to become famous and it was a real helpful tactical of the fans to expand their music knowledge. In the end, they were finally buying cds.
I think that a real fan is this one who buys cds and is at the first line of every gig of his favourite band. Of course he use internet that’s a great tool and downloads mp3s to be informed and to take a first taste of a new album, but then he will definitely buy what he likes.
We have to use downloading just for testing if we like something or not and then to buy what we like. That at first to support the music that all we love and secondly to respect the bands!