So I haven’t had a good wordvomit in a while, and since I’m up a little later than I should be, and I’m enjoying the musical stylings of one Brian Transeau, I figured now is as good a time as any to put words on page.
Today’s topic is: music. I like music. I actually like music a lot. For the few of you who likely don’t know. I am indeed a musician. I started out being forced into piano lessons in the 3rd grade, and then voluntarily started taking drum lessons — first orchestral percussion, then the drumset. In junior high, being more than a slightly nerdy child, I thought it’d be fun to learn how to mix live music and spoken word, and so I started running sound and video for my church. In high school I started teaching myself to play guitar. In college, again at my church, I was cantor at one service, drummer at another, and sang in the choir at the third. I did a wee bit of recording on the side, and did a lot of work with live groups as sort of a producer. Returning from college I taught myself to play bass, and these days recording and leading a contemporary worship service once a month is what I do musically.
All that was intended to say, I kinda know what I’m talking about when it comes to all this music stuff. It’s one of a few things I’ll actually claim to know what I’m talking about with (the others being Paladin tanking in World of Warcraft in BC and WotLK, things involving Christianity, and the BattleTech universe). Even if I’m not a particular fan of certain genres, I can almost always find something to like in any piece of music.
It’s an interesting time for the music industry. No, I don’t mean the rise of digital music, nor even the so-called “war against piracy”. I mean the rise of YouTube. But first, some background. You may have noticed that the industry tends toward certain styles in certain periods of time. For example: the 70s had disco; the 80s was hair metal and new wave; the 90s was the rise of hip hop and the increasingly inappropriately named alternative rock. Music has become more and more streamlined into certain “sounds” that fit whatever mold the record companies have decided is going to be popular. As we’ve entered the “10s”, most of the pop music I hear is interchangeable from one artist to another. We have a driving beat, lots of synths, auto-tuned vocals, and several references to a partying lifestyle. That seems to be the standard formula for Pop music and the music industry seems quite happy about it.
And yet, out there on the Tube of You, there is an ever-increasing underground of musicians and producers (often the same thing, even though they wouldn’t refer to themselves as producers) who are, essentially, showing the industry how to do their hit songs better. Kurt Schneider, Tyler Ward, and Jeff Hendrick are a few of the more prominent members of this community, but for every one of them, there are 10 more random people with a cam and a guitar or piano simple putting their covers and originals out for all the world to see.
To be honest, the vast majority of these people are simple awful. I mildly regret being so blunt, but it’s simply the truth. Of the, for the sake of argument I’ll just pull this number out of my bottom, 5% who have legitimate talent, most simply don’t have the resources or knowledge to create something for themselves resembling an album. I’ve heard some incredibly creative pieces of music floating out on the YouTube, but the recording quality is just insufficient for them to float it on iTunes and the like. By the same token, there are some masterpieces of studio engineering that just shouldn’t have been written, but those are quite a bit less common.
And so we come to the point of all this. I firmly believe that there are more talented musicians floating around YouTube than currently have contracts with record companies. I realize that this has always been the case; there will always be more talent than the music industry is willing to sign. However, the ubiquitous infiltration of websites like YouTube and *shudder* Myspace, the people who look for new talent have absolutely no excuse not to contractually pillage the innumerable talented people on the internet.
TL;DR — A&R guys need to stop signing tone-deaf idiots who can have sex with the air and sign some people with real talent.