DropSwitch Blog

Save us from a 'Global Bieber'!

Music is an interesting case study. It was amongst the prime categories to make the leap into the digital world in the early days of the net. It was not an easy or well managed transition. Record companies dillied and dallied, frozen by the fear of piracy. Probably quite correctly, but the piracy was happening anyway and whilst they sat on their hands their business withered away. It’s not easy, even now, to say with any certainty what they should have done although the consensus is that they should have grasped the nettle, taken charge and done something, before it was too late to matter any longer.

What we are left with today is all too obvious though. No record stores (or whatever they really should/would be called) for you to browse, no music shows on TV really, no interest in music these days like there once was either. Who knows what is number one now? I can’t name a number one record for the last 5 years with any degree of certainty and I think this is pretty common. In the old days I would have known the charts inside out. Record sales are at an all-time low, the paltry legitimate days flow through iTunes and are hailed as a triumph but in reality they are pathetic with what they have replaced on a global scale and cannot sustain the music business we once enjoyed and entertained the World.

Established bands have been forced onto the road and milked their aging fans again and again with massive shows and marathon stadium tours. They’ve had to, but it can’t go on forever. When the crowds don’t quite turn up that merry-go-round will also grind to a halt. There are no record companies developing major stadium-filling artists any more, they’re a dying breed. iTunes is a free-for-all with only the established acts getting any focus. Try and find anything new on iTunes recently? You’ll have had no real world ‘tells’ to help guide you. Unless you’ve liked a song on a film, TV or maybe video game that is? Now you have a huge number of unknown artists to check out and lots of 30 second clips to convince you. Is it any surprise you don’t spend any of those hours browsing the iTunes store the same way you did HMV or Our Price?

I fear for the future of music. Of course there are still maybe as many talented musicians out there and they can use technology to make great music better and faster than ever before. But will we ever hear about them any more? I’m not confident I will. Maybe I could but I can’t ever remember visiting iTunes and finding anything new, ever. Sure I go and grab music I know and want, special versions, etc. but I’ve always been driven there by an external trigger. In my opinion music is the most powerful thing man can create, a three minute song can inspire so much emotion in so many people so magically, it beats any other art form I care to compare it to, but the value of music is at an all-time low. That’s very sad.

I had this discussion with someone recently and they were a lot less concerned about how things were playing out. He thought things were just ‘changing’ and it would still yield the same results in the end, music was safe. I was not convinced in any case but when he cited Justin Bieber as an example of how ‘artists’ could be successful in this ‘new age of music’ - to me that was the epitaph of the music business and maybe the diagnosis of a terminal illness for music itself. The most convincing thing to confirm that my worst fears were well founded, in fact things are maybe already far worse than I had feared!