A great video from many talented people explaining why radio and music suck so much these days. The Beatles came out over 40 years ago and are still influential, still getting radio play, still selling records and in a while will be selling a The Beatles: Rock Band video game. 40 years from now how well will Britney, the Jonas Brothers or any other pop icon be remembered? Will they sell as much music as The Beatles sell now, or heck even then? I would wager that 40 years from now The Beatles, Pink Floyd and lots of other big bands who were around before the 80’s will outsell 98% of the music that is popular today. From the mid 70’s on, music has been largely dead. Internet didn’t kill the music industry. Illegal downloads didn’t kill the music industry. The music industry killed itself by producing a product instead of letting artists create art. To heck with it. Here’s the video:

I should supplement my rant by saying that I am not saying there hasn’t been any good music since the mid 70’s. Lord knows I have liked or loved plenty of music since those days. And there are breakthrough artists that I think will be remembered, loved, respected and influential 40, 50, 100 years after they came out or were popular (if they ever got popular). But 98% of the music produced today is just to make a quick buck for the label. The music industry is no longer interested in fostering talent, they removed the talent from the executive ranks a long time ago and filled it with business people who only care about impressing the shareholders. Shareholders don’t care about fostering talent either, they don’t care if the label is here 10, 50 years from now, they want a quick return on their investment.
Okay, okay, I’ll stop my rant…
The great movie, Almost Famous, touches on how music died in the mid 70’s and became more of a product.