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.