The Day the Music Became Commonplace

Author’s Note: Hello, my name is Strangeness Abounds (aka, Erin) and it is an honor to post my first article on Pamela’s The Discriminating Fangirl.  Please read my bio in the tab “The Geeks” if you have a moment. :-)

The day the music became commonplace was arguably the day that websites such as MySpace and YouTube became popular. Think about it for a minute: Why don’t we have mega-groups like The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, etc.? There are exceptions to this – Green Day, Coldplay and Nine Inch Nails, for instance – but it is rare to have any group anything as famous as anything in the “good ‘ol days,” and even rarer for today’s groups to be internationally known.

In the day that older music groups struggled to make it, there was really only one way to get to that lofty goal of national/international tours and popular records – hope you would be discovered by a record label and that you would be marketed in such a manner that you would be able to make a good living. Even better, a living such as the stereotypical rock star made.

On the other hand, the group under that record label had little freedom in regards to putting out songs that they wanted (i.e. SUPER controversial songs – this is not to say that controversial material wasn’t published, it was just severely curtailed. A group like Slash would not have had a chance in the 60’s), touring where they wanted, advertising the way they wanted, releasing the albums and songs they wanted, etc. If the big wigs at the record told you to do something one way, you had virtually no choice – you did what they wanted, or risk losing your record label. There wasn’t much wiggle room in the business – there was too much at stake (money was and is the number one reason) for a band to do whatever they pleased.

Today, while a nice record label is a good goal to have, it is no longer as necessary to a living as it once was. Who needs a record label when social networking websites, your own personal website, and the ability to create and upload mp3s for everyone to hear helps you along the track of making a splash?

This phenomenon has been happening for years. MySpace has a special layout for bands and amateur artists that allows them to upload what songs they want for listening pleasure as well as a section specifically created for business/booking inquiries. YouTube has also been a driving force in this liberation of musical artists. If a group has a good music recording device – audio is all that is needed – a quick upload to YouTube is all that is needed for a bit of attention. YouTube has also become more flexible as far as uploading and video customization capabilities: A group just starting out can create tags for their videos that can be picked up on a number of search engines. In addition, they too can create an eye-catching layout that asks a browser to pause a moment and listen to what they have to sing/scream/say/warble.

Even better, a group can easily create mp3s that can be downloaded from their website or from a music-sharing website. The group can even create ringtones to be downloaded onto fans’ phones. Now if ringtones aren’t good advertising, tell me what is.

However, the myriad tangle of musical categories can confuse even a hardcore music fan. In the day and age of Simon & Garfunkel and Heart, there was rock, pop, classical, gospel, big band and jazz (and some of those categories were dying out at the time – big band and gospel were two of them). Certainly, there were some smaller categories within those genres, but it didn’t deviate much from those main genres. Now thanks to the wide-spreading nature of MySpace and YouTube, there are hundreds upon hundreds of different genres, such as Alpine New Wave (folk music from Austria), avant-garde metal, Benga (Kenyan pop), Cantopop (Chinese pop), Celtic reggae, Christian electronic, Cocobale (who knows?!), crossover thrash, Dangdut (Indonesian dance music), deep house, deep soul, disco polo, doom metal, dubtronica, full on, girl talk, glitch, gypsy punk, happy hardcore, hands up…the list goes on for miles. The circumference of Planet Earth could be papered with lists of these musical categories.

It is in drowning in these multiplying categories that musical groups are lost. They don’t have a shot at creating a musical career that can support them. Their appearance on the MySpace and YouTube scene is exactly what sinks them as there are many other aspiring groups just like them. Perhaps if they aggressively advertised themselves they might have a shot, but many do not, and so their chances of making the impact they desire are slim.

Even someone who has a proclivity for one genre could not get all the way to the bottom of the variations that category carries. With YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook, these groups can do their best at making it, but such websites can also provide a false sense of fame and “personalization” – that the group is actually less well-known than they think and that they stand out. After all, there are often many, many other groups just like themselves in the same categories who are trying to make a go of it as well.

To be honest, there has always been something of a double-edged sword in the music industry. Either your only chance at big fame is solely through a record label and what it can do for you, or your other chance is to put your material out on highly-populated places and hope that you will be seen.