The Music 'Industry'

Dear pop music,

I'm kicking you out. It's not me, it's you. How do I say this? You're fickle, predictable, profit driven, and when it comes right down to it, you're pretty damn shallow.  To tell you the truth, I've been meaning to say this for a while: you just don't have anything to say.   Yes, yes: all of us adults have been in love – it's nothing new, and frankly, the only thing truly remarkable about love, is when it lasts for several decades.  Funny how that never gets more than a footnote from you (i.e. "happily ever after," etc.).

Long before the record guy came along, we were making music and telling our stories.  Most of these were not about love. Most of the stories we told about ourselves were about our lives, our jobs, our families.  We didn't play to sold out arenas; our music never appeared on records, nor was it ever broadcast over the airwaves – most of us never saw a dime from our music.  If we were lucky, our people took time to stop in to see us at the local beer joint or come to a barbecue to watch us play.

Why did we play, if not for fame? Why did we sing, if not for accolades and/or money? We did it because the newspaper, the radio, and later, the television, were all tools of propaganda. We did it because we are the only people who will tell the truth about ourselves - we are the only people who can be counted on to tell the stories of the forgotten poor and working folk.

Dear pop music, you were, yourself, quite the distraction. Remember when we used to spend 10 bucks on an album with only two or three good songs on it? Yeah, your fault! I believe your industry even coined the term "throwaway" for songs meant to fill up your crappy pop albums. And now, the makers of these "throw away" pop songs are whining because they're not millionaires anymore. Funny: we used to share cassette tapes all the time and it didn't hurt the industry at all. Not that any industry has a right to exist: you can't force consumers to demand a good or service. And let's face it: you've been giving us the same crap since the 1950s.

So later days and better lays, pop music! And don't let my foot hit you in the ass on the way out.

Lyrics - "Needle's Eye"

©2014 Jack Nielsen

 

Christian Junior was three or four
When the Navy called his daddy off to war.
When it ended they made their way
To the Ghost Creek Ranch
Up in the North
He found his place in the mountains
Their glory shone all around him
He found a lady, they married,
He brought her home and they
Touched the bluest sky
Through the Needle's Eye

Little Christie was only two
When tragedy ran her parents through
Christian and his wife were broken
And Christie would never
Leave the Mountain's view
Their anguish rang through the mountains
The joy, the love and the promise lost
He struck an arc on the cold stone
Hot slag rained down on him
And the bead he ran on high
Shut the Needle's Eye

No happy ending--that's just how the story goes
Find your silver lining in some other thick, black cloud
He thought he'd leave it all behind
If the Needle's Eye was blind
Or at least that's how the story goes . . .

Christian Junior and his wife moved on and left
The Ghost Creek Ranch behind
He thought there were no landmarks watching him
Because the Needle's Eye was blind
But the Mountain stalks its children,
Knows when everything is wrong,
And so it was the younger Christian
Came home.
He touched the face of the Mountain
He swung his hammer with all his might
And broke the bead of his sorrow
The sun shone down on him
And he saw the bluest skies again . . .

No happy ending--that's just how the story goes
But there's a silver lining once the storm has passed
It was with him all the years--
The Mountain washed away his tears:
'Cause the Needle's Eye
Knows the story doesn't end.

Yes, the mountains are a story . . . .

Friends in the Industry

I managed to make contact again one of the best singer-songwriters in the business.  I remembered her from the Guitar Center Singer-Songwriter III contest. We talk in music about "leaving it all on the floor".  If you aren't sure what that means exactly, I'm sorry to say that there is no textbook for this, much less textbook examples.  Fortunately, however, I can show you what it looks and sounds like:


If your mouth is still open when you start reading this, it's because you've just witnessed an honest-to-Christ, visceral performance of passion and conviction meeting cultivated talent. It's okay, you can play it again. We'll still be here when you get back.

I got to know Lauren Adelle after the contest, mostly only through a few short exchanges that passed between us on SoundCloud. She is currently at work within the music industry, still writing songs, still singing and still performing. I am competing in this year's contest, but Lauren, despite her magnificent talent, will not be returning. While I can understand her reasons, I will miss having her in this event: there's no one else in the business like her. Last night I posted a link to the above video on twitter: "Please RT! THIS is what we mean when we say 'Leaving it all on the floor.'" Tonight, she returned the favor:

Everyone watch this 800 times http://t.co/7aAG3sxzfv

— Lauren Adelle (@Elladelle) September 12, 2014

It's great to have friends in the industry!

New Track - "Big War (Shining: Part 1)"

There's a song I've been writing over the past few weeks.  I recorded the demo last night.  If you've been following us, please take the time to give it a listen.  If you like it, please feel free to download it.

http://www.reverbnation.com/jacknielsen/song/19950296-big-war-shining-part-1--2014-jack

--Jack

Plans for 2014

Hey family and friends, I've written two new songs and have three or four more (conceptually) in the pipe. I'll try to get as many of them written and recorded as I can by year's end.

Guitar Center Contest winnings

Post by Jack Nielsen Singer-Songwriter.

The Musicopalypse

A lot of people see music as a commodity.  There's nothing wrong with that.  A lot of men and women have put some good music into the world through the machinery set in place by the record and advertising industries. 

When we could buy a product, such as a record, a CD, even an 8-track or cassette tape, we knew exactly what we were getting.  The big LPs had album art, high-quality sound and the excitement of anticipation.  Music as a commodity was distributed, by and large, through brick-and-mortar stores.  You would pick up the media in your hands, turn it over, read the names of the song and examine the artwork through a thin jacket of cellophane.  Sometimes, there was a sticker that prevented you from seeing the media's whole container.  Whether by accident or design, this opacity--including the fact that you were usually only permitted to hear a few singles from the radio to engage your interest in the collection--created a sense of mystery.  You had to not only that period of excitement from the moment you committed to the purchase, but that period of anticipation often lasted until you arrived home with the media.  The cellophane was never easy to get through, though the folds and seams were often apparent.  Like gift wrapping, the cellophane was torn away and absently discarded as the layers secreting the media were opened and removed.  Finally, the naked media was in your hands and the excitement of the purchase had reached its apex.  An LP required a gentler, more ritualistic approach than tapes: the record had to first be cleaned, the needle positioned, then eased down into the outer grooves.  Seconds ticked away and all was silent, except for sound of friction, making its way through your speakers.  Then, quite unpredictably, the music began.

Music cost more, because more went into it.  Singers and musicians were recording to analog tape, which unlike digital media, won't stop on a dime.  This means the recording of the performance you paid for usually happened, start to finish, in real time.  Engineers mixed the analog tapes by ear; volume changes were spontaneous and manual.  Record companies paid for this studio and engineering time to generate a product with physical properties (as opposed to bytes).  Musical acts that toured, did so to drive album sales.  Fans who attended the concerts often paid a comparable price for the concert ticket as they did for the record.

The CD, which most audiophiles hailed as the greatest invention since the advent of high-fidelity, stereophonic sound, was the death knell for music as a product-oriented industry.  Ultimately, the CD merely contained sound files that could be saved to a computer and reformatted into other sound files.  This was nothing new to the industry: we'd been permitted to transfer our records and other media to mass-market cassette tapes (e.g. Maxell, TDK, Certron and Memorex).  But where a cassette copy of the record or other media lacked authenticity due to generation loss, a CD could be replicated: the copy sounded exactly like the original.  Moreover, CDs could be copied at several times normal speed.  And once reformatted, a sound file was easier to distribute and harder to track, making the collection of royalties more difficult for the people who had generated the intellectual property that the files contained.  If you made a substantial living from the production of music, this event was nothing short of an apocalypse.

Even so, I don't believe Napster or any other music streaming websites, were responsible for the dramatic changes to the business of music.  Case in point: for a few hundred dollars, I built N-7 ™ Studios in my own house.  Since 2011, I've been engaged in a musical project, known on ReverbNation, SoundCloud, Myspace and TwitMusic as Pawn’s Logic™.  The only goal I had for this "band" (if it can be called that) was to take advantage of the current online music distribution structure so we could share the music we made with folks back in Idaho (and elsewhere), without having to pay for it.  We never expected to get rich or famous and we still don't.  However, the unintended consequences of our behavior, no matter how altruistic, was that we created competition for all of the folks out there who really did nurture dreams of fame and fortune.  That being the case, it really won't matter if you sell your music on vinyl or if iTunes can copy guard your music so that no one except registered buyers can ever access it, because if you won't give your music away, somebody else (like me) will.  Technology might be what let this genie out of the bottle, but it's us online musicians and music consumers who've made it unlikely that he'll go back in any time soon.

There's a joke that the pessimist thinks the glass is half empty, the optimist thinks it's half full and the opportunist drinks the contents of said glass while the other two argue semantics.  The music glass has never been completely full and it will likely never be completely empty.  The music-makers now make a larger portion of their living from live performances than from music royalties and concertgoers attend fewer events and buy more music files, but that's just basic economics.  What's really come from the "Musicopalypse" for the music-makers and the music consumers is an opportunity to build a music industry--or not--from the ashes of the old.