Musical Confession

You know something... I have not been excited by a new record in a long time. Perhaps by a track here and there, but usually it is just a little bit: a particular passage, a particular way of phrasing, etc. Generally, when I hear a new release I am just not all that moved to dig any deeper into it.

Perhaps it is me, but I don't think so. I think that we are seeing the record industry tightening its belts at the expense of its product, resulting in every shrinking sales, causing them to tighten their belts...

I heard that the Recording Industry Association of America is bullying college students who are sharing music online. Now, they are standing on the objective moral high ground: if these college students like the music enough to listen to it, to go to the trouble of downloading it, they ought to pay the copyright owners. And, subjectively, I object to almost nothing when it comes to harsh punishments for college students, particularly the long-haired (or the fellows with those silly collegiate flip-de-do haircuts, where it is stringy and kind of flips out at the bottom, often under a baseball cap).

I realized when I was in college that I did not much like college students, and once proposed, as the Chairman of the Student Senate, that the University adopt mandatory haircuts and pre-dawn excercise in the quad. No one agreed, although I was able to get the Senate to adopt a resolution in favor of the administration against some rabble rousers who were arrested at a protest (they were protesting the building of a new music building, so they came strongly in my crosshairs).

But I digress.

Even with Justice on their side, and my own particular loathing of college students, I have to say to the RIAA, "are you people serious?!?" Mark down a whopping big negative on the PR ledger here. This looks exactly like what it is: a desperate move to stop the bleeding of a nine-year record business slump (or six or seven or eleven year slump, depending on who you talk to).

Now, part of my own boredom with current releases is undoubtedly due to the fact that I don't spend as much on music and I don't do as many record reviews, so I am less likely to hear the great new thing as I was when I worked in the record business, reviewed records, and took advantage of insider's prices to get lots of new stuff (and I do have a new Cajun release to review that looks promising). Also, there is the fact that many of my favorite recordings did not grip me immediately (I should do a post on that: why critics are worth reading and listening to. I can think of many records that I bought on the recommendation of a favorite jazz critic, and how I at first thought, "oh, this is just hype the critic has succumbed to," only to go back to the disc later and find that there really was something there), so perhaps some of the new jazz releases will sound better when I go back to them (I do hear most of the new jazz releases because of KCSM, our fantastic jazz station).

Since we are seeing a prolonged slump in the industry, and it isn't really all tied to the internet, my guess is that I am not alone in being completely unmoved by most musical offerings these days. Only the movie business can rival the stupidity of the general recording industry (remember when they decided that the best way to deal with falling ticket sales was...to raise the price?).