on 11/30/02 12:20 PM, Franz Fuchs at f.fuchs@gmx.net wrote:
If the new business models (William mentions one of them) are successful, there will be a lot more folks out of work than just upper-region record company executives [and they're probably the last ones that will have to go ;-)] To call these changes epochal isn't hyperbole, that's for sure.
As the ways and means of an industry change, so must be the laws surrounding it. Example -- look at a 1961 episode of TWILIGHT ZONE or OUTER LIMITS where there's a computer in the story. Look at that gi-normous, monolithic thing that takes up a whole floor of an office building. Did anyone back then ever think that a Bill Gates could emerge from that? Or a Sean Fanning? As recently as 1992, the laws regarding computers and prgrams were more in the 1961 headspace than you'd ever think, but largely because the pre-Clinton administrations were made up of guys who were contemporaries of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Their frame of reference for computers was still laregly in that 1961 headspace. We're only in the last few years starting to see the record business be taken over by a new generation of corpo-greedheads, a bunch of MBA pipsqueaks who don't even remember the Sex Pistols first hand, let alone the Beatles. They know from digital transport. Theor emergence is truly epochal. The record industry in LA -- the center of entertainment for the masses -- looks a lot like the auto industry in Flint MI during the filming of ROGER & ME. Now, there's not a whole lot of car production that can happen on an independent level. But CD's can be made so cheaply that there's more music out in recorded form than ever before. And the numbers aren't going down, even tho record companies are downsizing like a pre-SUV GM every month. The amount of music is inversely proportionate to the execs in a place of power. One of the jobs of a good exec is to get rid of his competitors. Coca Cola doesn't want RC Cola out there. So Coca Cola buys the space in every major convenience store chain so there's no place for RC. Literally. In Tower, Border's, the end caps and listening stations are pretty well monopolized by majors or majors masquerading as indies (Matador). Sure, a Tzadik record can be found in Tower. But have you ever seen one displayed? You have the freedom to make any record you want (unless you're black, in which case you have the right to make any record you want and have it boycotted systematically). But do you have the financial freedom to make it known to the public that your record exists, that it could be a perfect product for an audience that exists? If you're Zorn, you have little more money and profile. But what about all these brilliant guys with no financial resources from which to draw once they've depleted their spare funds (saved from their 6.00/hr job at a used bookstore) just to record and press their music? You may get a review in DOWNBEAT or THE WIRE, which is the difference between life and death when the stakes are low but still dire, but is ROLLING STONE spending all that much time reviewing records on labels that aren't taking out ad space? It's been like this for a long time. Remember Keith Jarrett or Sun Ra on Saturday Night Live? Now, it's corpo rock. Even the venues that purport counter-cultural cred are lost to the artists who live outside the cultural mainstream. Thank you all for making Gwen Stefani the spokeswoman for "alternative music". You think mergo-monopolies like Time-Warner/AOL and Clear Channel are happening in a vaccum? No. The way the business works is changing. It's just about the monopoly Jello Biafra predicted in the late eighties. What passes for "alternative" is largely a joke. You can count the majors on one hand (just about), and if you look at what they're putting their weight behind, you can see what's happening to the record industry. skip h NP: Bill Evans, THE PIANO PLAYER