On a shoestring project part 24

  If I would tell you that this blog is about “the state of the music business”, You would probably scream. “Not again! We have heard enough about the non existent record sales, illegal downloads etc”. But bear with me for a second here. Let me talk about another side of it all. Lately I have been thinking about music a lot. Well, being a musician you would expect it anyway, but lately it has been much more. And of course big part of it has to do with this project. I have been listening music, all kinds of music. Lots of it, some great stuff, some not so great... And it got me thinking what has happened musically and sonically in the music business in the past 20 years. I remember not too long after I started to use my first Cubase, a DJ friend of mine told me it was great software, that you could make music with it, without actually knowing anything about music. His way of thinking really was a sign of where music was going. Things had come long way in popular music since Elvis recorded “That’s all right” in 1954, in the legendary sun studios, live and on to a single track. Now we were talking about virtual synths... And already in the 80's popular music became sonically polished. Drum tracks would go through gates to separate them and get rid of spill. All the natural ambiance of the instrument was taken away, for some reason it was considered a bad thing. Guitar amps got bigger, and soon rock bands would have a wall of Marshalls and bang! Ten years later we have a guitar amp modelling that fits in to your gig bag. And in 1997 Antares brings out Auto-Tune... So the record companies were armed with a tool that could fix a vocal performance. If a note was out of tune, it would pull it back in tune. This was another milestone for manufactured pop.
  But with all this technology came also the digital download. And it was just too easy to spread online. Music piracy became rampant, record companies went on a war path. In the past few months I started to think, maybe the record companies were not the only ones being taken for a fool, and maybe the industry heads had bigger part of the blame. I mean, popular music has always been a mixed bag. Artists come and go, and manufactured pop has been there since the beginning of rock music. But did they just take it that bit too far? Did they take the audience for a granted? Did they insult the Joe publics intelligence? Did they for a while think they could sale almost anything?
  Then we have bands that might be signed to a major label, but have always done their own thing. Lets take Iron Maiden here as an example, an institution in heavy rock. Not to every ones taste, but that’s not the point here ( I do quite like them). The point is: over 85million records sold with out hardly any mainstream media support. Their latest album “The Final frontier”, released 2010 reached #1 in 38 countries!
  Let’s dig bit deeper, so you say CD is dead? Not in the world of rockers. In 2010 Rock, alternative and heavy metal music sold estimated 188 million CD albums. And according to SoundScan rock music had a 27% slice of the download sales pie. And it has always been a known fact that merchandise sales in this field has been and still is extremely strong. So could it be possible that the mainstream music market and media is looking in the wrong direction with their overly polished pop stars with their perfectly auto tuned voices? What do you think? Oh yeah, and the DJ friend of mine? He got a day job and quit music.

 Anyhow, what have we been up to? As mentioned in last weeks blog, this week we moved to a new rehearsal room. And may I say, it is a great room :-) Mark in the Volt studios really takes a good care of us. The room is still bit bare, so if you have any posters to spare, send them in;-) More guitar tracks have been recorded in my home studio/office and Sebastian is taking some time off his work to record some drums :-). We are also working on a design of a logo, that Tomek’s brother drawing very hard at the moment. The first sketches look great, and we'll get the final version up soon. I also got an interesting offer from an old friend of mine that I need to look into a bit more, before I make it public, but thought to just tease you a bit ;-). Anyway, that’s all for now, and I'll talk to you more next week. Keep on rocking!