Woodstock 1969

I received this email yesterday from David Sherbow in response to a comment I left on a post he had written. I felt like his perspective was worth sharing, so I’ve included his message in its entirety:

Subj: An Old Man’s Perspective

Refe -

Thank you for your comment. I believe that you are one of the more insightful bloggers of your generation.  Let me say this.

Since Napster, the music business I grew up with has basically imploded and through its own stupidity and greed has charted a course for almost certain self destruction.  In case you haven’t read it, take a look at Steve Knopper’s brilliant tome, “The Appetite for Self Destruction” which gives a chapter and verse description of the breakdown of the music business since the advent of the CD in 1979. Technology and change has brought us enormous amounts of user generated music, its easy distribution and a music world that is wrought with extreme fragmentation. I agree with you that these changes have brought a certain amount of opportunity to a group of people that prior to 1999 would never have even been on the music map. For those who enjoy this increased popularity, it is a new day and the new music business is working for them.

I grew up in the three most significant periods of cultural change in American life over the past 50 years. First was the period from 1955-68 when post WWII America first started coming apart at the seems and baby boomers started to rebel against the All American image acceptable to my parents generation. Things changed soon after McCarthy fell in the mid 50′s and, in essence, parts of Texas and the deep south and its country, blues, and R&B music converged and rock and roll began to evolve. I got my first radio in 1957 for my 7th birthday and soon after became addicted to Top 40 radio then R&B radio.  Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Hank Williams, Sr.,, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison changed my world along with R&B groups like the Platters, 5 Satins, Smokey Robinson and Little Anthony and the Imperials and bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf  and John Lee Hooker. No disrespect meant at all, but you are much too young to have been moved by such amazing forces of music that changed my life forever and moved millions of others like me in ways that today are unimaginable.

Then came the Vietnam War, free speech movement, civil rights movement, the drug culture and sexual freedom all heaped upon my generation.  Groups like the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the Who, Cream, Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin from England, The Beachboys, Bruce Springsteen, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Doors, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan along with Otis Reading, James Brown, Temptations, Supremes, Four Tops and Aretha Franklin and many others changed the American music scene forever. Then there was Woodstock to bring it all together. It’s is impossible to understand how powerful this period was without living through the majesty of its immense political and cultural change.  Then the 70′s brought unbelievable heavy metal music and Disco. The 80′s brought Michael, Jackson, U2, Madonna and the 90′s brought grunge with Nirvana and Pearl Jam.  Every decade brought another group of artists that clearly articulated the feelings and moods of that generation.  People were toally swept up in the music.

Then came 1999 and Napster and over the next 10 years music became diluted, homogenous, and less than inspiring.  Today it is plentiful and ubiquitous. In my opinion, part of what truly makes music great from the days of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart to the present day, is the connection certain artists have been able to develop with the masses who then have a shared common experience they all can relate too.  It is this shared experience which takes music to another level. Its is something that your generations feels and sees in bits and pieces in between video games, surfing the Internet and Texting.  Music is ever present but it is no longer the focused force for change in our society. Music is still a part of everyone’s day to day life but it is no longer the focused cultural and political force it once was. A platinum artist is nothing more than a monetary designation that became the standard by which great bands were judged since Creedence Clearwater Revival was the first group to ship 1,000,000 albums in 1971.

Music has always evolved and changed without the help of the record business which has only been good at co-opting great talent and rarely developing it. I totally agree with you that it’s all cyclical and look forward to the next game changing music scenario.  We are a world of many niche artists and very few genuine original popular artists.  What American Idol continually tells me every year it maintains its immense popularity, is that is that the masses want artists to believe in and to connect with. So do I but I want them to be of substance, not manufactured by the remnants of the record hit making machine but instead I want my new music to emerge from the grass routes of the new American psyche motivated by meaningful cultural change.

I am by no means trying to say that my insight or love of music is deeper than yours or your generation. My perspective over 58 years is different than those in your generation.  I truly miss discovering and sharing music the way I used to.  I believe that eventually the Internet will develop a better mechanism for the discovery of popular music and I look forward to that day. I hope this wasn’t too much bullshit. You ought to call me sometime and personally share some of your thoughts.

David Sherbow

David is a music industry professional with over 40 years in the business. He has managed and booked major regional and national rock, r&b, and hip-hop artists, owned and operated a rock-n-roll booking agency, put out over 25 independent releases, made record deals and was head of promotion for WMG’s Asylum Records. Find out more about David at his blog or on Twitter.

Also check out yesterday’s post The Defining Sound of this Decade is… Undefined.

A pair of Wired stories recently reported evidence of a significant uptick in the sale of vinyl records, showing that while CD sales have declined 11.7 percent this past year, vinyl sales have increased 36.6 percent.  This recent resurgence of vinyl is beautifully ironic. This is the digital age! Music is cheap, convenient and portable. Innovations in technology have propelled us to places no one could have dreamed of a couple of decades ago. 8-Track cartridges came and went. Cassette tapes came and went. We’ll soon be able to say the same thing about CDs. Yet here we are, watching the sale of vinyl records climb like it’s 1976.

 There are those who may see this as a step backwards for physical media, but in reality that couldn’t be further from the truth. For the past few years the recording industry has been increasingly commoditized, and listeners have consistently chosen quantity and convenience over quality. The MP3 is the poster child for this idea. You can download, copy and share it almost instantly and carry it anywhere, but it sounds terrible. The result is a glut of recorded music on the Internet and a largely devalued product. Listeners were ok with this for a while, but it seems the masses (or at least an increasingly large subset of the masses) have had enough.

Vinyl could be the perfect answer to listeners’ digital fatigue, and could provide the flailing music industry with something it desperately needs – value. Digital files are nearly worthless as a product. You can’t see them or touch them. They are infinitely reproduce-able and instantly available. If over abundance commoditized a physical product, inite-ness devalues a virtual product completely. Vinyl on the other hand can’t be easily reproduced, and is a much more sensory medium. The sound quality is better, there is more room for artwork. You can see it, hold it, smell it, taste it. It has the ability to foster a much deeper connection between the listener and the music. How many times have you flipped through dozens of songs on your iPod without really listening? You have to work for vinyl – finding the right album, placing it on the turntable, finding the groove, flipping it over when the first side finishes. You can’t just let it play forever in the background. Vinyl has the potential to return some of the appreciation for music as art that this industry has lost.

CDs are not the answer. Digital files have made CDs redundant and obsolete. Why do we need a physical version of a digital file? That makes no sense. We have iPods for that, which better represent the advantages of digital anyway – convenience and portability. MP3 players don’t scratch or skip and you can carry your entire library in your pocket. CDs were always flawed, and now they are finally on their way out.

Of course, we’re talking about vinyl replacing CDs not digital music in general. We have only just begun to realize the potential of digital technology, but digital is still more effective when a physical medium is also available. Labels like Matador Records have recognized this and have begun including coupons in record packaging that can be used to download digital versions of the album’s songs. According to Matador the coupons have been a big hit. Programs like this are a great way of providing fans with the best of both worlds.

I’m not old enough to have any real nostalgia about vinyl records, but the benefits a true resurgence could bring to our struggling industry is exciting. Vinyl provides the artists and labels with a real product to sell again, yes - and that’s great. What excites me, though, is that vinyl has the potential to get listeners to connect to recorded music as an art form again, and that is something we can all get behind.

Google officially launched its ad supported MP3 search engine in China yesterday. Similar services have existed in China for some time, including the most popular and widely used, Baidu. Google is the first to offer the service legally, after cutting a deal with all four major record labels that entitles them to a cut of ad revenue. The deal is something of an about-face for the record labels whose previous strategy was, unsurprisingly, to sue Baidu for copyright infringment – which they have done twice without success.

What is interesting about all of this is that these search engines is that they crawl the web looking for free MP3 downloads, and according to estimates by the IFPI about 99 percent of these downloads in China are illegal. However, instead of trying to shut down these Web sites and stop the illegal downloading Google and the major record labels that set up a system that actually profits from the huge demand for free music. The more demand there is for downloading – illegal downloading – the more people will utilize these search engines and the more revenue is generated for both Google and the labels.

This is significant because it represents a huge concession by the labels to file sharing. By giving their blessing to a service that makes it easier to illegally download music, they are actually going a long way toward legitimizing the practice. It looks like the major labels have realized that the demand for free music is overwhelming and that they need to find alternative ways of capitalizing on it. This is encouraging, even if it is at this point limited to the Chinese market.