There is no maturation of the music industry. That is how it works.
When I was a teenager, music meant so much to my friends and me. Our tastes in music defined us, or at least we thought.? I was really into acoustic folk rock from the 60?s and 70?s ? James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell, and the like. Then in my 20?s I studied jazz in college and although I still loved the story telling of those troubadors, I realized there was a whole other side to music?the music itself.
I grew to love the jazz tradition which went back and even melded with the folk tradition at some point traveling backwards in history. I went back even further and learned to love serious art music from the Romantic, Classical, and Baroque periods, and I thought that as I matured my tastes that the music industry must be doing the same, right? Wrong.
The music industry isn?t interested in what adults like. It is mostly interested in what teenagers like.
That?s because as you grow into adulthood, there are other things that define you and music doesn?t tug so hard on your identity. You have your accomplishments at work, your religious choices, your family, and your well-deserved leisure time to define your character. The music industry knows this, so they let you go on your way holding on to the songs you enjoyed as a kid and still know so well dancing around your head.
Every year there is a new crop of fifteen year-olds. They turn sixteen, and right behind them is another round of fifteen year-olds.? This is where the big money is. Every year there is a new customer base for the sale of hundreds of thousands of units of music ? music that is no less disposable than a box of Bic pens you buy at Office Depot. The music gets used up and needs to be replaced.
But there is one difference between music and pens. If you want to buy a really nice pen, a Mont Blanc for example, you can spend a few hundred dollars on one and it is something you keep and use for a long time.? However, music doesn?t work that way. You can?t craft a very fine style of music, lyrics, arrangement and production and then sell each CD for $200. No one will pay that much.
It?s A Lot Like Catholicism
If you want to really grow deeper in your love of Jesus, it helps to study the history of the Church, the Church Fathers, and the lives of the Saints. As your desire to appreciate your faith grows you study more about the Tradition. We all know that if more people really understood the Tradition and traditions of the Church then there would be real progress in peace, love, justice, and mercy in the world.
But the secular mass media and those who distribute it would rather we not know about the truth.
They don?t want us to know about really good music either. That would make their jobs of producing new music on a yearly basis much harder. The corporate record labels would rather regurgitate the same saccharinely soaring songs on American Idol so that the following year radio stations have cheap fodder to drop in between advertisements. Like cheap and easy forms of religion this sort of thing has generational consequences: our culture stays in a perpetual adolescence, and a society of fully-grown adults never comes to fruition.
What You Can Do
As in your faith, study the traditions. There is a great PBS series by Ken Burns called Jazz. Rent it or look for it at your local library. Learn about the lives of those musicians. Maybe some of them were unsavory characters and even desperately sinful, but God used them to bring beauty into the world.? Find a way to take the appreciation of their musical depths and improvisational skills and just be keenly aware to the best of your ability that the disposable music you hear on commercial radio is a step backwards for those of us who want beauty in the world.
It doesn?t have to be jazz. Learn about the history country music?actual country music that comes from the country, not a big city like Nashville. There is a great book about the Carter family by Mark Zwonitzer titled Will You Miss Me When I?m Gone.? It?s interesting to me that A.P. Carter traveled the countryside looking for other people?s folk songs which he then recorded and sold as his own. It appears the recording industry was unethical from the start.
Most importantly, learn about the Catholic music tradition?Gregorian chant, Mozart?s Masses, and Celtic religious music for example.? I hope that one day the divine inspiration and artistic beauty found in these traditions, our traditions, can be rediscovered and used in a contemporary way that has a broad appeal to teenagers and people of all ages.
Category: Entertainment
Source: http://www.ignitumtoday.com/2013/01/19/the-way-the-music-industry-works/
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