Articles & Advice
An
open-ended chat
about current trends in music and the music business,
covering radio, the rise of electronic music,
the return of rock and pop,
and the difficulty of breaking an artist in a
time with
an unprecedented glut of music on the market.
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JIM: It's a very strange, transitional
time for popular music and the music business. What's
going on?
BRIAN: We're between trends -- well,
no, we're between rock trends -- and we're in a happy-go-lucky
pop world. On the one hand, I think that is caused by
the gatekeepers -- specifically radio and MTV -- which
have moved away from alternative rock and are looking
for something new.
But also, the economy is booming, unemployment is down,
crime is down across the country, and people are happy.
This time will be looked at and described as the "Gay
'90s Mark II" 30 years from now. We're in an incredible
comfort zone right now, and people don't want to be reminded
of anything that's harsh and intense and angst-ridden.
Consequently, it's all about easy pop.
JIM: I think that since we are between
trends, things in general are a little more open stylistically.
There are new influences infiltrating all kinds of music
-- R&B, hip hop, rock, whatever. Everyone was talking
about "electronica" six months ago, but let's
face it: I'm sure that it will get a bit bigger, but
I think its influence will tweak the other genres of
music into something interesting again, and create whatever
the next happening trends are going to be.
| We're in an incredible comfort
zone right now, and people don't want to be reminded
of anything that's harsh and intense and angst-ridden.
Consequently, it's all about easy pop....BRIAN |
But I think it's cool that we don't have to think as
genre-specifically as we did a couple of years ago,
when it was like, "Will this be viewed as alternative?
Will it only get on rock radio?" and things like
that. I think it's an interesting time musically because
of that, and I think the next three years are going
to be the most interesting musical times -- maybe --
in our lifetimes because of these new influences infiltrating
all the "normal" styles of music.
BRIAN: Ironically, and I don't know
how much electronica has to do with it, but one of the
things that is happening in radio right now is the return
of rock: hard rock is starting to infiltrate Active
Rock as a format -- Active Rock is standards like AC/DC,
Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam -- and the newer bands are Days
Of The New and Creed and even some harder things. And
those bands are also starting to cross over to Modern
Rock. If you listen to K-Rock (WXRK in NewYork), they're
playing a lot of hard-edged stuff again.
JEM: Those bands aren't that big
yet -- has anything bigger happened?
JIM: It's just on the horizon right
now. But I think you're increasingly going to find those
two formats clashing together, because most of the Alternative/Modern
Rock stations are not doing well with their ratings,
and they're going to need to do something to get them
up -- whatever they can do to generalize their pool
of listeners a bit more, and cater to everybody instead
of such a specific group. That's what I mean about things
being more open now, because there are these different
elements popping into what's becoming popular, whether
it's old Jamaican music or breakbeats or whatever.
JEM: What is the A&R community
going after now?
BRIAN: Pop.
JIM: When you say "pop,"
you mean the Spice Girls, Blackstreet, etc.?
I agree with you, but I think I would define pop as being
generally more song-oriented in every genre. Things aren't
as artist-focused or album-focused as they've been in
the past, and when alternative rock was the big thing,
it was sort of image before substance. And now -- without
giving everybody too much credit! -- I think it's more
substance before image. You're finding that only some
quality songs are really clicking, but then again, a song-driven
environment isn't really about developing an artist's
long-term career -- it's about hits.
JOSH: What about Marilyn Manson?
| ...a song-driven environment
isn't really about developing an artist's long-term
career -- it's about hits. ...JIM |
JIM: Okay, there are exceptions to
everything. But even though there haven't been that
many long-term development artists lately, in a way
it's good, because it puts on the pressure to follow
a hit album with an unbelievably great next album, as
opposed to just rushing out a new record and falling
by the wayside like a lot of punk and alternative bands
from the past few years. I think it's always down to
songs anyway -- Nirvana wouldn't have changed everything
if "Smells Like Teen Spirit" wasn't the best
pop song of the '90s.
BRIAN: I think that a lot of what
we refer to as "career development" stems
from the AOR [album-oriented rock] days of the late
'70s and early '80s, when radio was all about band-name
recognition, because the radio stations were promoting
a lifestyle, and that grew out of the "underground"
radio format which they created in the late '60s.
JIM:
But there's also no mystique now. There's so much information
given to you immediately, and when a band hits now,
EVERYTHING is revealed before their song's been on the
radio for a week -- what they look like, what they do.
That's one of the reasons why artists aren't able to
build gradually.
JEM: Because the saturation rate
is that much faster.
JOSH: There's also too much other
stuff to keep your mind occupied! I mean, when we were
13 years old, it was just music. Now there's the Internet,
play stations, all of that, and there's also so much
music, and so many choices, that I just don't think
people care.
JIM: Especially when they're buying
albums based on one great song that they've heard on
the radio, and there's next to nothing on that album
that's anywhere near as good. How many times can a person
blow sixteen dollars on an album and get burned, when
they can buy Mortal Kombat II and be psyched for the
next six months? People's money is inevitably going
to go elsewhere.
...there's also no mystique now.
... artists aren't able to build gradually. ...JIM |
JEM: But do you think there's any
turning back from instant fulfillment? When I was a
teenager, you would buy the album and the band might
eventually come to town on tour, but anything beyond
that you really had to seek out or wait for -- there
was no video, no web site, no newsgroup. The only time
you ever saw them on TV was on some late-night show,
and if you wanted to find out more about them, you had
to join the fan club or track down the specialty magazines
that only one store in town sold --
JOSH: Or you'd just sit and stare
at the album cover! No, it'll never be the same, and
it'll only get worse. I think the only thing that will
save it are fewer record companies and fewer records!
If record companies really concentrated on the highest-quality
artists and lowered the number of artists that they're
signing.
BRIAN: But in order for the multinational
corporations which own the major record companies to
compete, they have to think about market share, and
they have to adopt the same tactics that their competitors
are adopting in order to have the ratio of success that
the other labels are having.
JIM: With all due respect, I know
that one major label is releasing 75 records in the
first quarter of 1998, whereas Atlantic isn't even releasing
75 records in the entire year! I'm not saying that Atlantic's
way is necessarily better, but what would happen if
every company put out two or three hundred records a
year?
JOSH: Weren't there something like
30,000 records released last year?
BRIAN: Yeah, supposedly less this
year.
JIM: All I know is that if you walk
into Tower Records, there are walls of albums that you've
never heard of. And we're music fanatics and generally
know what's going on -- can you imagine just the average
person with a $20 bill in their pocket?
TOP
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