cd318
Popular music (creativity) always came from the ground up, the street if you like. But nowadays the industry wants to supply it prepackaged ...This is really not accurate. If you go back to the ’50s and earlier, guys like Mitch Miller - who was the head of A&R for CBS records - controlled just about every detail of new releases . That included who recorded what and with whom. There was very little artistic freedom. That didn’t start to change until the ’60s; Clive Davis is the one who brought Columbia into the modern era, as Arif Mardin did at Atlantic. The rise of rock and roll and the singer-songwriter changed the industry, because those artists really had something to say. Most of today’s pop artists just want to be stars and make money. Hence, the "prepackaged" products that result.
Nobody who really knew what was going on ever thought taping killed music. That was a red herring. Napster, however, did inflict lasting damage because it devalued recorded music.
If they thought home taping was killing music...