classic rock, if you’re old enough, is late 60s, early 70s.
led zepplin. rolling stones. the guess who and american woman. who can miss the intro of that song? we even went through a disco phase and rock held on tight. face it – ever see a “classic disco” station? please.
even the late 70s and into the 80s rock just went, for lack of a better word, corporate. CORP ROCK SUCKS!!! but looking back it all was but that rock is considered “classic” today. van halen, night ranger, bon jovi, ac/dc, KISS and many more who while some may have roots in the 70s to be sure, their “rock” bled into the 80s and certainly still today for a few.
where has all the classic rock gone? where are all the jams? and am i really now putting bonnie tyler in my mind and writing a song vs a story?
rock today seems to be more of a niche market than anything. go out to iTunes and look for ROCK music and i promise you you’ll get SOME rock and a lot of alternative and singer songwriter stuff. this used to anger me and i would cry out LET THERE BE ROCK.
but there isn’t. it’s not that apple isn’t putting it there cause they don’t like it, there’s just not that much of it. in the 80s you could visit Sound Warehouse and see rows upon rows of music with several sections just for new music THAT WEEK. maybe it was overkill, maybe it was too much, maybe it never should have been. but it was perfect, just right, and so glad it happened. to the generation today who will proudly say I WILL NOT BUY MUSIC!!! i simply say
fuck you.
i could say you don’t know what you’re missing. i could say “back in my day” but none of that will matter and you’ll still rush off to be different and who us old timers just how things are done today.
lord knows you got the time to show off cause you damn sure ain’t listening to much new music now are ya?
you’re living on our classics and honestly, don’t care. how todays generation sees our music is up to them. they have no choice really but to look back at what used to be cause today there simply isn’t much. what there does happen to be out there competes with the ADD generation who happens to have the world in their phone. you can have it all and is it a choice to listen to older music all the time or are you just listening to what the generation before you paved the way for BY paying for it along the way?
so i suppose this is yet another rant at the millenials who now shoulder the entire blame (unfair or not) for all the faults of the young. but they and they alone can’t alter the entire course of music and things have changed.
dramatically.
is ownership of music over?
years ago, far too many now that i look back, i told someone who was telling me it was 100% important to have physical access to all your music. i told them having physical access wasn’t important as simply having access. do you need 5000 songs on your phone or do you need access to 5000 songs?
apple, rumored these days to be soon bowing out of the music download business, may seem to think streaming *is* the future and it may well be. do you need 10,398,189 songs on your hard drives? or do you just need to browse music, build a list, and access that list anywhere? for the most part people will do what they always do – take the path of least resistance. for most this means radio and whatever it is playing. for those of us who back in the 80s made our own “mix tapes” of songs we wanted to hear – we *get it*. we know the value of choosing what to listen to and when.
access will be the most important thing to us still. but whether that access is files on your drive, or “in the cloud” – you’ll still need to pay for it. somehow, some way. you’ll need to subscribe to the service that will allow you to build a list and listen in your car and remote devices or you can do what we can do today – put 50gb of music on your phone and be set for quite awhile.
i don’t ever see the physical file going away but it will fade in time as people tune into radio stations around the world or they build their own “radio station” and listen to only what they’ve heard before. that’s a downside to building your own playlist that someone will one day fix by allowing you to “insert” new songs of the same style into your own mix. that’s an advantage i look forward to, if we don’t already have it.
but the problem of content will still remain. if people do not fun music, or the industry can’t pull it’s head out of it’s ass and allow profitable companies AND artists, the painful road ahead only gets longer. but with spofitys average salary over $160k a year, and the industry on the whole losing money for artists, it’s simply not profitable, or even sustainable, to be a musican these days, thereby limiting your musical choices. with an average musican making less than $38k a year, less people will simply do it as more is needed to survive with a family.
which brings me back to the original question – what is being produced today that will be tomorrows stairway to heaven? back in black? paint it black? riding the storm out? will there ever be a “texas jamm” again?
there’s a cost associated with everything. it would seem that price is pretty damn high after all when that cost turns out to be “free”.
(photo from http://www.texxasjambook.com/)
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