Does America Have a Malnourished Listening Audience?
By Tone Taster
July 4, 2006 in Guitar Forum
Tone Taster
Dang, G55; We could all go home on the above 2 posts, man
Justus A. Picker
Originally posted by Guitar55:
Anyone who listened to commercial FM radio in the late 60's and early 70's and then listens to today's commercial FM would know for a fact that the two experiences are VASTLY different.
"Back in the day", DJs were not limited in what they could play. They could pick ANY artist in their library (or bring in their own records) and play ANY track (as long as it didn't contain blatant profanity. You could listen to a station all day and not hear the same song twice and you'd hear a much larger selection of artists across multiple styles. They could also play MANY songs in a row or even entire albums! You actually LEARNED about new music from listening to the radio.
This is a good point, BUT, it should also be noted that free-programming FM wasn't the "mainstream" back then. Hit-oriented AM radio was, and to tell the truth it was as tightly controlled and full of crap as mainstream radio is today.
I think the reasons FM took off had to do as much with the social structure of the times as it did with the "quality" of what was being played. Music, it seems to me, was a much bigger part of our social fabric than it is among todays youth that has myriad other distractions to occupy their time and minds. Music seems, to me, to be more of a background to their lives than it was to ours.
Of course, because we're musicians, we may be projecting the part that music played on our lives onto our contemporaries....
The internet has the same, probably greater, potential for changing the market as FM did. I don't think we can even concieve of the impact it will have had 30 years down the road. I'll bet the folks in the late 60's had little idea what FM would become either.
http://www.smokedsalmonband.com/exile/exile1.jpg
Dr. Ellwood
""Back in the day", DJs were not limited in what they could play. They could pick ANY artist in their library (or bring in their own records) and play ANY track (as long as it didn't contain blatant profanity. You could listen to a station all day and not hear the same song twice and you'd hear a much larger selection of artists across multiple styles. They could also play MANY songs in a row or even entire albums! You actually LEARNED about new music from listening to the radio."
Yes! this is so very true. These are for the most part THE kind of people I play for every week. This is the classic rock crowd, who do know music, who play attention and appreciate what they hear because they grew up on this kind of radio format. And it's not always older people into classic rock either, there are allot of young people that are very into classic rock or classic sounding type rock.
http://www.thestringnetwork.com
Guitar55
Agreed, free-programming was not mainstream, BUT it was THERE if you choose to seek it out. Not today, my friend.
The Internet is the obvious successor to freeform radio, but until mobile devices are more ubiquitous, it does take more effort to find music than by just spinning the dial.
Originally posted by yZeCounsel:
Are you driving?
And trust me, I dig skynyrd, hank, Rap, the rolling stones, some stuff in the TOp 40 and hamburgers just like any one else
RAP!
Originally posted by ellwood:
That's just "forum diplomacy"...I don't think he really means it!
miroslav - miroslavmusic.com
"Just because it happened to you, it doesn't mean it's important."
Guys...don't forget to pick me up...
Originally posted by miroslav:
Yes, I like some forms of hip-hop & Rap. Sorry
Ricardo.
yZeCounsel wins the internet.
If you stick Zappa into the RAP pigeonhole, I like RAP too!
webe123
Originally posted by Starcaster:
Eric VB
Sounds like the burden of responsibility should eventually be on the musical acts that have the power to change things but don't.
This position is flawed only because acts just don't have that kind of power.
If Nickelback didn't release the same CD six times, then six other groups would have released the Nickelback CD instead. And there would be hundreds of other Nickelback-wannabies lined up and ready to do the exact same thing.
The supply vastly outnumbers the demand. If the current acts aren't giving the biz what they want, they can so easily get new acts that will.
D_dup3
The title of this thread is a rhetorical question, right?
The modern world of entertainment has come to resemble that of fast food: instant access to a startlingly narrow range of non-nutritious pulp.
There are better things & there are ways to find them but it takes a great deal of investigation if one doesn't have either some good historical grounding or guidance to get past the constant blitz of what's promoted.
At the root, this is the same as why "bad" bands get gigs at local venues (and "good" bands lose out).
What is the number one factor that determines whether a gig was a success or failure, in the eyes of the venue manager? How much profit was made that night.
It doesn't matter how good of a musician you are, it's all about how well you market yourself. A bit cynical? Yes. But it does seem like the music biz is a lot more about biz than music.