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Oh music, how much time I waste listening to it. Hours of listening, and hours of analyzing. I have come to several items that is killing music.
First is piracy, people downloading songs is totally destroying sales. People no longer buy CDs and instead just download songs. People hear a song on the radio and instead of supporting the artist and buying the CD they fucking download the song. A common argument against this is “I don’t want to pay for a whole CD when I just want one song.” Well there is your fucking problem, listen to the full album, you will probably enjoy it if you like the band. That logic is fucked beyond belief. I can say I can’t afford a Ferrari, but that doesn’t give me the right to go ahead and steal one. Because of piracy, the record labels increase the cost of the CD, which actually makes less people buy it. It’s a stupid strategy but the label has to pay the band somehow.
Even legal downloading is killing music a bit. Artwork is no longer needed, people wouldn’t just sit around and look at a picture in their fucking iTunes but they would look at the CD when they put it in their CD player or whatever. Concept albums wouldn’t work online, it’s like listening to one Pink Floyd song from The Wall and not listen to the entire thing, it’s fucking pointless. Song running orders also don’t work, forget the songs that flow into each other. You are just going to listen to what you like, instead of being exposed to new music.
Next problem is the radio. Yes, the source of the problem is the place music comes from. The main problem with the radio is that it plays stuff that people WANT to hear, otherwise it would have no profit. But playing stuff that people WANT to hear limits the variety of stuff that people DO hear. Sometimes when I actually do listen to the radio, I hear the same song twice, about 20 minutes apart. Large variety of music my ass. All that plays is the same shit over and over again. I used to listen to The Edge 102.1 live at clubs. Then I noticed they play the exact same songs on those nights, except in different order. That is essentially what the radio is, a random playlist of songs that you already heard. If you are like me, you don’t even like pop, and you wish that you heard some metal on the radio.
The next point is singles, in order to make money bands have to release a song that people will be exposed to and be played on the radio. This is known as a single and most of the time it is the most generic song on the album. Now singles are good to introduce someone to a band but chances are that the single sounds totally different than the rest of the album (unless it is Dragonforce.) Bands, also sometimes concentrate too much time and energy into making a single instead of making the rest of the album good. Once again this is because of piracy, if a band can make you love one of their songs, then maybe you will actually BUY their album.
Next is people being worried about their popularity, these people are known as hipsters. They are worried about their musical taste being made fun of so they listen to whatever is popular. Therefore the bands that are already on the top 40 become even more popular while bands that are unpopular become ignored. Some of the bands I like actually skip Toronto, and the general area due to a lack of popularity. While they sell out shows in Europe. The problem is not the band sucking, it’s Europe’s open mind about music.
The last thing is people being genre fags. As soon as something is a different genre than what people are used to, they dismiss it. I love metal, but I have to admit that there are good rap, techno, or even pop songs. I find that metalheads complain about genres a lot. “Oh, I don’t like Metallica’s new album because it is not brutal enough.” Fuck, just because Metallica doesn’t sing about Satan and use excessive distortion doesn’t mean it’s not a good album. I guess if you want the same shit over and over again you should listen to Dragonforce.
And that, is my 70th blog post. Enjoy.
