The Decline of the Music Industry

audio2design943 posts"I don’t remember (and I remember it well), people giving much attention in the 80’s to nuclear war. Not at all like the 70’s and 60’s." Oh stop. You clearly don’t remember it well. I started out wanting to take your side but the others are right, you are just making crap up....The 80’s were all about the Cold War and nuclear war. My "well regarded" college forced me (and 8000 others) to watch the crap Made for TV movie , "The Day After" in 1983 and the overtly fearmongering "Nightlight" afterwards about how Reagan was going to start WW3. Forget "Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall"? How about No Nukes Concerts and Protests in US cities, how about the Doomsday Clock which, supposedly, was at, 1 second to midnight before world destruction...lol., the Reykjavík Summit when every television "expert" told us we has lost the Cold War? Forget the riots in London and Brussels as the Pershing Missiles were being deployed to Europe? How about Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, CSN, etc leading the Unilateral Disarmament Marches? Hear of Lech Wałęsa ? John Paul II being shot by a Bulgarian Security member, the 1,000 of Soviet dissidents, the near-like nuclear flashpoint of the Soviet shooting down of Korean jetliner 007 in 1983, the tales of genocide from Siberian Gulags. You really do live in a bubble. How else could one justify such blitheful amnesia, or perhaps it’s just a blindspot for being horribly wrong about positions taken, that in retrospect, were some of the worst things to be wrong and vocally opinionated about, in any lifetime.....

We learned long ago that businesses have three basic phases and 4 steps to ruin:

1.  Genius creates whatever
2.  It sells, and genius realizes he has no idea how to sell stuff, so hires a guy to market and sell it while she/he continues to invent and improve and innovate 
3..Sales and marketing team can not manage the money, so they hire a money team to deal with it.
4.  Money people take over the organization and start telling the genius what to "invent," when to release it for maximum money making, and then begin running the business and minimizing everyone else.

Happens every time!

Cheers!

There was a time when music literacy was, if not the most, one of the noblest of all human endeavors. As recently as one hundred years ago or so there was nary a family that did not include a member who was a moderately accomplished musician; or better. Families gathered to listen to a member perform and often to sing along in reasonably decent harmony.

Irony of ironies, a mechanical device, the phonograph first conceived and intended for use in business not for music storage or playback would change everything.

John Phillip Sousa, one hundred years ago:

”The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards. Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music. The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”

@mikeydred  and don't forget about Matthew Broderick and Ally
Sheedie in "Wargames"

@richopp,

A nice and clear explanation.

But how do we get out of this nightmare scenario?

Just how do we regain some space to breathe, to create and to express?

And most importantly, to enjoy?

It was bad enough that revenue from music sales went south years ago, leaving us back in the pre-Beatles era where artists made their money by touring.

Unless they were Elvis who could walk straight into Hollywood.

However, right now there's next to no opportunity for artists to tour and play live.

Now that creepy/sleepy (take your pick) Joe has been installed safely behind a wall of MSM and Big Tech (and some 7000 troops) we might just see some of the restrictions lifted shortly. 

Or we might not. 

I guess we're all getting a good taste of what it might have felt like being a teenager living in the pre Rock and Roll era.

Then out of nowhere came Bill Haley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and Elvis. Not to mention Brando, Dean, Hopper etc.

Many Brits have a similar affinity for those heady days of loosely regulated pirate radio in the early 1960s. Both Radio Luxemburg and Caroline are still especially fondly remembered by some.