ChanciusDrzewucki

Hey guys, Long time fan writing for the first time. As an Indie musician I found your segment about music in this podcast very interesting. I'm constantly keeping tabs on the industry and reading books about the history of rock & pop music and I think I have some answers for you about why top 40 has no edge or darkness: 1 - Alternative/Indie Rock Stations Make No Money It's a fact that station owners believe that Alternative/Indie Rock fans are extremely opposed to commercials and are anti-corporate, so they don't find it a good investment which leads to there being much less gritty or innovative music on the radio. 2 - Pop Still Sells Little girls and tweens still buy music and they like lite, fluffy pop music. Anything about love or songs performed by their favorite Disney/Nickalodeon/reality music competition stars. They have no tastes of their own yet and mommy and daddy will buy them anything. 3 - All The Majors Sell Soup Around the end of the 90's when the industry was still a couple of billion dollar operation a bunch of conglomerates swooped in and bought up the majors expecting it to be great investments. They believed they could run these companies like all the soup, sneaker, and etc companies they owned and applied those tactics to music. They let go of most of the creative types who had lots of experience in scouting, production, and artist development which has led to teams of the same 5-10 people writing a lot of the songs for most of the artists. It was like taking a machine that spray paints 300 cars a day and expecting it to paint the Mona Lisa. It just doesn't work the same... and sometimes it just doesn't work at all. 4 - The Economy and Consolidation of Power In the 80's and before, the majors were known for not taking chances on new styles of music, but they had the budgets to promote big acts and buy smaller. The indie labels had smaller budgets, but took more chances on new artists and genres, so that helped them in the long run. Fast forward to now and just about all the indies are owned by the majors or deal with and through them greatly. No one has the budgets they once had, so taking risks is a thing the past. It's really hard to discover anything of real quality or innovation because there is so much working against it. There is a great disparity because either you have very experimental, rough around the edges music being made, but lacks that finishing touch or time to actually get to a state of real quality through practice and honing of skills and on the other end you have cookie cutter music that is written by 5 people trying so desperately to create songs that are as bland as possible to reach the largest target audience that has no taste of their own anyway. I'd compare it to the Disco/mid 70's era. You've got a lot of pop music that is light and fluffy that doesn't really mean very much that's there to make people dance and don't have an album's worth of songs, but only a stray single here and there. The same can be said for indie stuff as well. A lot of rock in the 70's was soft and "corporate". Rock and indie rock of today tries to be too dancy and electronic which just comes off desperate and a little amatuerish. In the end, there's no edge because there are very few who are making a statement or trying to go beyond their skills to reach new heights and if they are they aren't getting the backing and helping hand that they need for guidance.