There are some wild takes in this video. I think it's more accurate to say this describes the downfall of the rock music industry, as experienced by seasoned professionals like Rick Beato. That's not nothing! I'm a rockist and enjoy Beato's work. But it's hardly the whole art form.
Take the opening claim of the video: the Telecommunications Act of 1996, by deregulating terrestrial radio, allowed consolidation that eliminated competition and killed rock radio and, thus, rock music.
Couple problems here:
* Linear radio was dead by 2000 no matter how the industry was regulated because linear programming sucks and people don't like it. By the time XM and Sirius launched, radio was a medium almost exclusively targeting drive time commuters. To say the Telecommunications Act killed rock, you have to establish that linear rock radio could have survived the iPod. Come on.
* There wasn't meaningful competition even before consolidation. In most markets, a single AOR station and a single Alternative station was all you had before Clear Channel came around. Barber talks about what was lost here, but describes a pretty cynical process of test-marketing bands in Chattanooga and then convincing Nashville and Omaha to give the survivor bands a chance. I believe this worked, and I believe this got some bands airtime that wouldn't have (I assume this is the entire reason I ever heard Live or the Gin Blossoms), but this process couldn't possibly have defined the pre-Telecom-Act sound of the 90s, since many (maybe most?) of those bands were either defaulted in from being in the Seattle scene, or came from the UK.
The death of radio didn't kill rock music. The death of radio killed radio.
Beato claims that within a few years of consolidation, you could look at what was playing on rock radio and see that it was all the same producers using the same equipment and the same samples. I am a little bit obsessive about late-90s alt-rock radio and can tell you that you can find radio station playlists from that era, and check this for yourself. I may not like Blink 182, but I can report that Jerry Finn didn't produce The Red Hot Chili Pepper or Korn.
(An aside: shared producers on contemporaneous popular records also isn't a smoking gun; see: Steve Albini, Flood, and Butch Vig; sometimes, producers just have a moment, and, like the front page of HN, there isn't a whole lot of space for these tracks to spread out in).
Beato has a very Albini-esque take on the points and cuts taken from recording budgets and contracts. Somebody is inevitably going to post that Albini piece. I'll just point out that David Lowery from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker wrote a very long pseudo-rebuttal to that, and his math checks out: take the (say) $250k the label is nominally fronting for an album, and any sane, generous-to-the-artists set of points and cuts possible, and nobody in a 4-piece band is making an amazing living off the albums. What seems to have been common knowledge is: the bands get advanced money, nobody ever expects to recoup on royalties (even if the labels weren't rapacious, there just wasn't that much money there!), and you made your money touring and on merch, if at all.
What does seem to be the case is that the contraction and ultimate demise of this system of label contracts, producers, studios, and session musicians was really disruptive for people like Rick Beato, who were making their money doing professional artistic services. Fair enough. But when I think of the health of rock music, I don't so much think about whether the label can afford Rick Beato, or a session drummer; the record is a document of the work of the artists themselves, and 70s CBGB scene did just fine producing timeless stuff without label-supported session musicians.
(Another wild claim here: Napster destroyed the $18 CD because the studios were no longer paying for high-quality CDs, so there was only a single good track on an album, because the studios weren't paying to gloss up all 11 tracks. Pretty sure that's not how In Utero worked!)
He 100% would fall into that "handful" of producers mentioned. Frankly Rick has been about as instrumental to the RHCP sound as some of the band members themselves, but it was Rick that was producing them from BSSM on and that is when RHCP blew up in the mainstream (George Clinton and a couple others did the earlier albums. )
Except the RHCP 2016 album the getaway, which was a Danger Mouse album. Rick came back with John for the latest 2 as well.
He actually has a pretty interesting podcast these days called broken record that started with him interviewing RHCP members (or at least that is when i picked it up).
Finally, I dont think rick was a producer manager and RHCP, at least, mostly had their own equipment short of mixers and sound boards etc. But they 100% used Ricks studio for a number of albums.
Bear in mind, and with no disrespect intended to the band, but there might be no modern rock act I like less than RHCP. Having said that: Rick Rubin kind of makes my point for me, right? He's literally the most famous producer in the world. Nobody engaged him for cost-cutting purposes. :)
Here's Rubin and Paul McCartney mixing Cannibal Corpse:
We are definately on the opposite ends of the spectrum then... but I will say, as a fan of their work, i completely, 100% understand why you may feel that way.
Ill just say i dont appreciate them for their lead singer in the slightest. In fact i like them in spite of that fact.
>He's literally the most famous producer in the world. Nobody engaged him for cost-cutting purposes. :)
100% agree today. But back in 1991 he was still an up and comer of sorts, at least much less established than he is now. He is definately one that made bank and benefitted off the consolidation of radio (and was smart enough to pivot that into more modern forms of production and distribution). And i feel that is point that was being made by Beato. The clear channel consolidation and Telecommunications act paved the way for producers like this to make a killing. If they had an ear for what the masses would like, they had a platform to blow up (and rick did exactly that).
He had founded and then left Def Jam in the late 1980's --- he was an up-and-comer in rock in the early 1990s, but by 1993 he was already Tom Petty's go-to producer, and by the time of the Telecom Act in 1996 he had produced AC/DC, NIN, Johnny Cash, and Joan Jett. He was a monster by the time of radio consolidation, is all I'm saying. :)
Also the bit about AFM in the 1980s and 1990s being against "hippies" and rock musicians is pretty absurd. In the 1950s and 1960s, sure, the AFM bosses were people who liked Bing Crosby and not so much Elvis or The Rolling Stones. But those people were retired or dead by the 1980s, and instead the bosses were people who grew up with rock music!
I don't buy the main thesis of the piece either (as it relates to Rock), though some points are good. But also not sure about your point:
> Linear radio was dead by 2000 no matter how the industry was regulated because linear programming sucks and people don't like it.
Sounds like you're are drawing a parallel to say Netflix vs. "appointment television". And yes on-demand is almost always better for TV.
But Radio? Not so sure... I listen to radio in the car or cleaning the house etc. Specifically when I want someone else to choose. If not, I'll cue a favorite album.
I still love Rock but it just got old and stuck, in the way Facebook got old. Long hair and shredding guitar solos is how we stuck it to the Man back in the day! What happens when it's now grandpa cranking Eruption? No longer the defiance it once epitomized.
Not to mention there's only so many ways to spin a four-piece band where every good riff is already copyrighted. The space has been completely explored over a 50+ year run. Glam to grunge, west coast soft rock to speed metal... add saxophone, synthesizers, or none of the above?
And the copyright problem has affected other genres. The top-40, electronica, or hip-hop I hear today is often devoid of melody or groove as well, leaving only atmospherics and chants. Probably also by design to avoid the cartel.
On the positive side I just saw Wolfie Van Halen last month at a downtown theater and it was packed and rockin'. Had a lot more fun than had it been at a large stadium like the old days.
I would just say that the consumption patterns for popular music underwent a tectonic shift in the late 90s and early 00's, with Napster and then the iPod, and that there was no configuration of terrestrial radio that was going to leave it as the dominant discovery and dissemination mechanism for rock music.
I'm not sure I understand the cartel point. I think rock in 2024 is more vital and interesting than it was in 1995. My hip-hop consumption patterns remain mired in the 1990s, though; I have not found a more modern replacement for De La.
Ok, but radio could still be a decent way to do that even if it lost its throne of best. "Big radio" just chose not to. For example in SoCal we have KCRW:
I still discover stuff there. Available online as well.
Re: copyright cartel
When you have melody in a song, and it resembles something from the past (as it will almost certainly do a century after the invention of pop music), you'll be charged upfront or later sued. Combine that with never-ending copyright (see recent Steamboat Willie articles).
Yeah his arguments don’t add up. Live performance has been where most of the money is in the music industry since time immemorial, and rock is a genre that lends itself well to touring. And concert revenues have been steadily increasing the entire time.
If we were all just following the money, rock would be ascendant and the genres that mostly don’t tour well (rap, pop) because the people whose name you know couldn’t find middle C to save their lives would be dead instead. The reverse has happened.
Country is such a killer business because the artists do actually play their songs (so their fans want to see it live) but it’s still basically just pop music so it sells well.
Rock is in bad shape because people just aren’t making it anymore. It used to be that rock music came from garages and pop music from the factory, but wide availability of digital editing has made anyone a potential pop star. If Post Malone were born 20 years earlier he’d have been doing a punk band because he’d have never had access to whatever software you use to make whatever you call the crap he puts out and he can actually play instruments.
Proof of Post Malone is his covid concert in his house where he and the band played all Nirvana covers. he and his band are 100% legit rock players. I wonder why thay make so much shallow pop usually.
The industry made a fortune off CDs. If memory serves, peak revenue for the music industry was in the early 2000s right when boy bands, Limp Bizkit, Britney Spears, and Eminem were the big things and Napster was about to blow things up.
I finally watched this whole video. There are a bunch of misstatements in your post:
> linear programming sucks and people don't like it
Pretty wild & unsupported statement. "Linear programming" could also be called "curation" which is something usually boasted about, not apologized for. What is a long Spotify playlist except linear programming?
> There wasn't meaningful competition even before consolidation. In most markets, a single AOR station and a single Alternative station was all you had before Clear Channel came around.
In the Bay Area, you had KFOG, which was more or less "alternative" and one or two other rock-ish stations whose callsigns escape me now. That was more than we have now. Those DJ's had personalities. In LA you had KMET.
> Beato has a very Albini-esque take on the points and cuts taken from recording budgets and contracts.
I guess this is meant as an insult?
The rental fees for equipment, drums, and tuning the drums are a smoking gun for corruption. You haven't even touched that, except to smear it as Beato-esque.
> you made your money touring and on merch, if at all.
Wrong; you made your money on songwriting royalties. You can watch any of the biopics on 60's and 70's musicians (I've written on most of them on Substack), and it's always the musicians who did NOT write the songs who are bitter that the guys who did are rich. Now the songwriters say "change a word, get a third" about the singers who've wised up on that deak,
I'm glad somebody disagrees with me; I thought I'd written all that for nothing. I appreciate the rebuttal. I think my arguments are going to hold up, though.
One of the biggest stories in the entire overarching media industry, from talk radio to television, is the shift away from linear programming and towards on-demand. To call linear Modern Rock radio "curation" and suggest that listeners moved away from it en masse and abruptly because the curation got worse is an extraordinary claim. You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it. In every medium where people have the opportunity to switch from linear to on-demand, they do so.
Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time.
I'm in Chicago and grew up here (like I said in my comment, I'm actually a little obsessive about 90s Modern Rock ["Alternative"] radio programming, since it was the soundtrack to my first startup). We had by my count 1.5 AOR stations (WCKG and WLUP, depending on the year) and 2 Modern Rock stations (WKQX and WXRT). I am aware that the largest markets in the country had a small measure of competition (bear in mind that AOR and Modern Rock in the 1990s had wildly different programming and didn't compete with each other). But it was ATT vs. Comcast levels of competition.
Albini-esque is not an insult, at least not coming from me.
According to Steve Albini, nobody was making money on royalties long before radio consolidation. David Lowery, who appears to disagree with him about almost everything, agrees with him at least on that one point (his argument would be that nobody recoups on advances, but that the advance itself funded a middle class lifestyle for recording artists, so that something was indeed lost when the record industry collapsed).
You can also just look at the numbers --- even Beato's status quo ante numbers --- and see that they don't add up for a typical rock band. They had to be making their living on day jobs, touring, and merch; it could not have been the contract.
Remember that when we're talking about the health of the rock industry, we're implicitly talking about the marginal signed rock act. Think Letters to Cleo, not U2. Yes: U2 makes a crapload on royalties.
you obviously meant a lot more by "linear programming" than the mere words' definitions.
> Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time.
Not "obviously." How many listeners are tuned into Spotify's most popular playlists at the same time, and not interacting with them at all? Versus the number of listeners of a local radio station? I would bet the first >> the second.
As for whether royalties were enough to sustain a rock act then or now: I really don't know. They said that a modern recording budget is comically small compared to what it would have been in the 90's, so clearly the money has changed.
However, I didn't get from that video any claim that royalties used to be enough. What I got was that the artists are getting screwed by a lot of BS charges. And, of course, that corporate ownership of radio is bad, which I would hope very few HN'ers would argue with.
As for "You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it": I actually spent a lot of time at YouTube in my time at Google. "The lean-back experience" was something they really lusted after, and that wa the term they used for it. In fact, if I play one music video on YT, it usually seems to segue into another. So I don't think the broad mass of music listeners is quite as on-demand in their actual behavior as you think.
The point of the video is that structural factors in the music industry destroyed ("killed", such that it was "dead" by 2012) rock music. So that's what we're resolving: is the video's argument credible? And it is not.
I'm the one who introduced the term "linear radio" to this conversation; Beato doesn't use it. So, what matters isn't the precise definition of the word, but the concept. You'd like to call a Spotify playlist "linear". Ok, fine. That doesn't change my argument! The shared, scheduled, broadcast delivery system for music died because people drastically prefer the option of listening to whatever they'd like; for instance, they'd rather avail themselves of one of the 18.7 million Apple Music and Spotify playlists they now have access to than turn an FM knob to one of 3-4 corporate radio stations that play 4 songs in a row before running 45 seconds of commercials. That latter delivery system is what Beato laments, and whose loss he credits with ending rock music.
Note that part of my argument is that I don't grant his premise that rock music ended, or that the shift in attention from rock to hip-hop had anything to do with this stuff.
I have no doubt that corporate rock screwed people over in all sorts of ways (Lowery doesn't so much, though! Go track his article down, it's interesting, he makes a case for the corporate rock structure subsidizing a lot of work that couldn't have happened otherwise, and unit sales numbers just don't work out to numbers that can support the marginal rock band). The problem is: Beato isn't making his central case, that producers renting amps and drum kits out to signed bands due to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is why we didn't get 3 more Verve albums.
OK, you can define it yourself; it's your term. Clearly listeners do have way more choice than they used to, in music and in video.
I'm not sure I'd even agree that the 1996 act "killed" rock. I don't think you would argue that the enshittification of radio (my term /s) helped anything, though.
Rock isn't dead, either. A few questions related to that, though, are:
"is swing dead?"
"is ragtime dead?"
"is bebop dead?"
For all of those, the art form developed about as far as it could, and tastes changed. If I listen to modern rock, I don't hear much that surprises me, and as Sting said in his Beato interview, if I don't hear something surprising pretty quickly, that's it for that song. Most of what I hear, I think, "yeah, I've heard stuff like that before."
Actually, I think the death of radio very plausibly improved rock music! In the mid-90s, Q101 determined a lot of what I was listening to. By 2002, it was Pitchfork† (for better or worse, not a week in my life goes by where at some point I do not hear the words "I am Ringo, elephant of Beatles worship" in my head). I probably got more good bands from Soma.fm Indie Pop Rocks, which I only followed for like 3 months, than I got in a decade of listening to the radio.
Kurt Cobain wrote "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" because of the dynamic Beato is euologizing here. Long before Clear Channel, Modern Rock radio was mostly about sanding down the edges of acts and finding ways to make success repeatable; it took the Meat Puppets that wrote "Oh, Me" and made them write "Backwater"; took Pearl Jam and ground it into the Stone Temple Pilots, and finally into Candlebox. The Candlebox discography doesn't lie: it happened to us before the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Watch the video again. Beato really does blame the decline of rock on labels no longer paying to make more of the tracks on an album good. Come on, that is a genuinely weird thing to say, isn't it?
† I am aware of the arc of quality that Pitchfork traversed since the early 2000s.
Touring is where the money has always been made, and that is now harder to do as well, in some part due to consolidation. Once you're playing real venues you enter the world of LiveNation/Ticketmaster, profit-killing merch cuts, excessive service fees pricing out your fans at no benefit to yourself, etc.
And then there are the non-music related real world implications. Decades of growth in health care costs exceeding wage growth means that if you want to be a full-time musician today you either have to have a day job and all of the limitations that places on your music career, or you have a massive annual expense for individual health insurance.
Unless you can become a star, a career as a musician is a hell of a lot more expensive than it used to be, and simply unsustainable for a great deal more people
In the '80s, the UK music scene was rich with talent and variety (punk, new wave, soul, acid house). Part of the reason was that you could rent bedsit flats in London that were very cheap, and helped give bands proximity to live music venues and record labels. That doesn't exist anymore, you'll upload your music to Spotify and hope it lands on a popular playlist.
The mega-stars of the future re likely to be already rich and well-connected. We'll see more Grimes and Billie Eilish-types than people rising from total obscurity.
I would argue that the UK scene is even richer now (multiple those 4 genres by 10). The amalgamation of styles that you see today is on a whole different level. Thanks to the internet, your average player is much more skilled than your 3 cowboy chord singer from the 80s.
The cons of being an artist today is that the barrier to put a song is extremely low nowadays and keeps getting lower and lower as technology becomes cheaper and AI gets ever close to bring people into the tsunami stream of voices of people trying to make their new single heard. The "I'm bored but making music is so cheap so let's record something", to the casual, to the good one, to the great one and the talented one. All together crying for your attention. In the 80s, the barrier was much higher and so, if you manage to get in, you were definitely not bored at home or a casual player, you were someone passionate and persistent about their craft.
Music distribution is another con. The barrier is super low now and virtually everyone and their grandma have a song on Spotify now. This makes it super hard for talented people to be heard.
To make it today, you need to be well-connected because the masses are everywhere else. So yes, you will see more Billie Eilish types. But nothing is stopping you or anyone else from going down your local venue and check the local talent there :)
Yeah, good call. Art scenes flourish when people can afford to live near each other and collaborate, when there are local scenes that support themselves.
The cost of merely existing as an artist in a place like London, NYC, etc is prohibitive.
1. A place is awful such that nobody wants to live there, thus it is dirt cheap.
2. Artists move into cheap place and make it beautiful.
3. The beauty attracts the rich and push out the artists.
4. Artists move on to the next "hellhole" – later, rinse, repeat.
But right now the artists seemingly don't want to execute on #4.
Which is likely just a function of opportunity. In recent times, other than perhaps a short blip during COVID, it has been comparatively easy to stay at #3. In fact, big shifts in the music industry have always been notably correlated with recessions, most likely because increasing unemployment pushes more and more towards #4.
Historically, new artists were born everyday. The old dirt cheap place, that turned rich, was out of their grasp. They had to find a new dirt cheap place.
But that doesn't seem to be happening right now. Even the new would-be artists are quite happy to live in places like London and NYC that have already been transformed by old artists into nice places. Again, probably because there is all kids of other opportunity[1], as visible in employment being full. One has not had to subject themselves to moving to where nobody wants to be.
[1] At least has been over the past many years. There is a strong case to be made that we're starting to see that turn.
> By the time XM and Sirius launched, radio was a medium almost exclusively targeting drive time commuters. To say the Telecommunications Act killed rock, you have to establish that linear rock radio could have survived the iPod. Come on.
Drive time radio is the most valuable segment there is - the audience is completely captive. This isn't Europe: Americans drive, most drivers do it at the same time each day.
SiriusXM was the Spotify of their day, needing to hire Howard Stern (Gen X's Joe Rogan) to boost subscriber numbers. For driving, plenty of people still listen to free over-the-air FM radio.
(Another wild claim here: Napster destroyed the $18 CD because the studios were no longer paying for high-quality CDs, so there was only a single good track on an album, because the studios weren't paying to gloss up all 11 tracks. Pretty sure that's not how In Utero worked!)
Here's another interesting take on what you said:
I used to work for a small wireless shop in MN. We managed Prince's Studio (Flyte Time) and handled all of their phones. We'd get them new lines, fix their old phones, send in insurance claims, yada yada.
Terry Lewis would come in and I always made a point of going slow with whatever he wanted me to do in order to chat him up about the music industry. It was the late 90's and Prince's war with Sony had finally finished and Prince was all over the map. I asked Terry WTF was he doing, why is he trying to be so protective about his music (I was pretty naïve at the time).
Terry tells me, "Listen man, Prince wants to protect his rights to his own music, which means he also wants to release music when he wants to. He doesn't want to have to put out an entire album if he wants to just put out one or two singles. He doesn't want his fans to have to wait for an entire album of songs, when he can just release one banging joint, you know? He wants to be on his own schedule and release music as he sees fit."
The last thing he said to me as he was walking out the door, "Listen to me man, Prince is going to revolutionize the music industry. Pretty soon, it won't be about albums any more, the music will be all about singles, I'm telling you, just wait."
I'll never forget him telling me that.
In 2001 what happens?
Apple starts iTunes. How does iTunes sells its music?
SINGLES.
I still think about that conversation that happened just a few years before music piracy began to fade, iTunes took over a huge chunk of the music industry and singles became the defacto way a new generation of kids started buying their music.
Kind of prophetic that conversation and I'll never forget it.
iTunes actually did have the option for the content owner to mark an album in such a way that single-track sales were not allowed, either for a set time after initial release, or forever.
This allowed the majors to pretend things were still business as usual for a short while, but it quickly became clear that this was a hugely unpopular and unprofitable option, and 'album-only' became a thing of the past.
Note that this wasn't hugely surprising to anyone, including the majors, because even they were well aware that in most markets the only albums still really selling were compilations (e.g. "Now that's what I call music" in the UK), so the consumer preference for singles was well-known...
Like just the idea that, like, most of the tracks on Porno For Pyros were filler except for "Pets" because the label wouldn't spring for better tracks, like that's where the good tracks come from, some vault the label pays for access to. I can't even. Albums full of filler were full of filler because the bands didn't have much to say.
Beato says rock music was completely dead by 2012. It's hard to square that with dad rock phenomena like The National, the apparent favorite band of every standup comedian over the age of 40. Further: 5 excellent post-2012 rock albums, none of which I think probably suffered for want of a session guitarist:
* Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit And Think
* Kurt Vile - Walking On A Pretty Daze
* Low - Double Negative
* Parquet Courts - Human Performance
* Sleep - The Sciences
Before you dunk on me, consider the bar here: Beato related a story of hearing a drive-time DJ play The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" 8 times, back to back --- and then lamented that consolidation meant you couldn't get that kind of distinctive taste from a DJ anymore.
I’m still not 100% sure that Beato isn’t an elaborate, deadpan parody played by one of the funniest wry comic geniuses of all time. A kind of music snob Borat so deeply undercover he’s become indistinguishable from the object of his ridicule.
Radio appears to deserve most of the wrath — or rather Corporate Radio™ as brought about by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. If radio is dying, it should and it deserves it.
I confess that I would so embrace the widespread emergence of pirate radio stations. Honestly, there is nothing worthwhile for me on the dial anyway.
And then there is the record industry itself that deserves so much blame. I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.
The post makes it clear what we all knew — the music industry was raking in the cash reselling us our albums at twice the price with little overhead.
> We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.
Is this in the US? By the end of the 90s, before piracy truly took off, Best Buy and Walmart were regularly selling new CDs, big releases from big names, for $12-13, and they'd pretty quickly get discounted to $10 or less depending on age. Plenty of popular 80s CDs could be had brand new for $5.
As a music collector, Best Buy was amazing. Racks upon racks, seemingly endless selection of indie bands, I even talked up a guy to order in some imports for me (those were definitely $20+ though).
I do remember going to the mall during this time and seeing stores like Sam Goody sell the same stuff as Best Buy, but SG's CDs were all $18 and $20. It never made sense to me, and I don't know how they lasted so long.
To your point, they had everything! And it was all 30% to 40% cheaper than anybody else was selling it. The same was true for movies for a while. Then physical media collapsed. Don't know how Best Buy stays in business these days.
The Communications Act of 1934 stipulated that one entity could own one and only one radio station. Every radio station was an independent business. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 eliminated this limit, and instead stipulated that one entity was limited to owning four radio stations in any given market. It brought about massive consolidation. Prior to 1996 every single radio station was its own independent company; since then, there are huge corporations that own a shitload of radio stations. And they will have 2-4 programs; they play their hiphop program on their 300 hiphop stations, country on their 100 country stations, rock on their 150 rock stations, and talk radio on their 200 talk stations. And that's it. You have those 4 stations.
For the most part, prior to 1996, at any given radio station there was just some idiot kid who was just playing what he wanted to play. And sometimes he put on something that was...out there. It was at least interesting. After 1996, for the most part, music on radio stations is organized by market research groups that picks what to play based on some sort of wide consensus. You'll never get an interesting radio station that just plays weird random interesting shit. Everything has to be approved by a boardroom full of old rich people.
Radio is dull as dishwater these days. I mean it's always been bad, but at least sometimes it was interesting.
College radio is the last bastion of reliably weird shit.
Find a station and listen at night. My local station WONC until some years ago had punk and metal shows after midnight which went through phases depending on who mainly ran those shows. The last gasp of the metal show was ~6 years of mostly European female-fronted orchestral metal occasionally taking forays into metal core, Gothenburg metal and screamo. Stuff these days you can explore to your heart's content on YouTube, but there is no assurance that what the algo turns up is any good.
I will never forget the one time I tuned into a college station on a whim and they were playing a jam session recording from my band; a band that had disbanded about a decade prior and biggest claim to fame was playing to like five people at a bar. What are the chances that it was played at all and I just happened to be tuned in? A pleasant surprise nevertheless.
Today the best music centered radio stations are all online. Frequencies, transmitters and repeaters cost a lot more than servers and bandwidth, so most online-only radios can still air what they want without being forced to surrender their play schedule to record labels.
If Clear Channel hadn't consolidated AOR and Modern Rock radio, would you still be listening to linear radio today, and not Spotify or Apple Music? And that because you don't have linear radio, and primarily because of that, have you switched from rock to hip-hop or to not listening to music?
> have you switched from rock to hip-hop or to not listening to music?
Less music, at least. I moved on to informational radio once the rock stations became unlistenable. The local public broadcaster produces some wonderful content about science, technology, and business.
These days, I do subscribe to a number of podcasts recorded from out-of-market radio stations that still have decent musical content. While, granted, distribution to me is no longer linear, these programs are originally produced for linear radio play. If I could readily tune in to those stations without the technical encumberments, I probably would.
I also use Spotify from time to time, but it replaced CDs, not the radio. That's an entirely different ballgame. I don't see it scratching the same itch.
Probably? Because now I listen to a few streaming "radio" stations when I am in the car or doing work around the house. They are "linear" and human-programmed. Some pay for licensing and some likely do not.
My current go-to was called Devil's Night Radio but they now stream under the name KPJK (a Twin Peaks ref) in addition to running a quirky cabin rental place in CA. Lots of garage rock, punk, classic Americana, old country/western, TV and movie soundtrack stuff...it's an odd mix but I love it.
I use Youtube Music to look something up if I am on the road and I really just want to hear something I uploaded from my personal collection, but for discovery and just letting someone else take the reins, streaming "radio" is still my fave.
Under the heading “Later criticism” there is a bit of an explanation; I guess the ownership rules changed so stations were consolidated to fewer owners.
> The legislation eliminated a cap on nationwide radio station ownership and allowed an entity to own up to four stations in a single market. Within five years of the act's signing, radio station ownership dropped from approximately 5100 owners to 3800. Today, iHeartMedia is the largest corporation with over 860 radio stations under its name across the nation.
I'm not sure if this was covered in the video, but the other conspiracy I heard a few years back now makes a lot of sense.
Mark Slaughter of the famous hair metal band Slaughter came out and said that there is a widespread misconception that grunge killed hair metal. He claims MTV hired a new president who was also a program manager at KROQ in California and he came out and said he wasn't going to play hair metal any more - and it was his decision not to play that music any more that killed that entire genre.
He readily admits there was an undercurrent brewing with people getting tired of the hair metal scene and labels essentially trying to create the next big thing, all in the image of these successful bands, but its interesting to note how one guy basically cratered the entire genre in the span of less than a year.
This is like an artificially created mass extinction event (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event ). Without it the ecosystem could maintain itself for very long time changing slowly and gradually. An extincting event wipes out most of the existing organisms, creating open niches to be populated with something new and maybe weird-looking.
Yep. Rock's dominant days were numbered when MTV decided to go all-in on rap at a time that rock was still outselling it. I thought it was a smart move because it was clear that that was the way things were heading, anyway. Grunge didn't stop rock's inevitable decline. It was more of a signpost. "Exit".
Was it Steve Dahl (Disco Demolition) that took down disco or was he merely the catalyst for the inevitable pushback of a genre that had come to be a parody of itself.
People didn't "backlash" against disco in the sense that people who used to like it started disliking it because of changes within the genre. People who culturally identified with rock never liked disco and never would, to a significant extent because it was very black and pretty gay. And as popular music it was already in significant decline. Dahl harnessed lynch mob energy to allow people to do something they had always wanted to do.
> I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.
What are you talking about? CDs today are about $16 on Amazon. If they were $16 back in the 1980s, that's pretty remarkable, because inflation should make them much, more more now. CDs really have come down in price.
They used to be $20 at Borders in the early 00s, so they got more expensive in nominal terms for a while. I remember the early days of the iTunes store, buying whole albums for $10 felt like a great deal.
> I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this.
I think we have to differentiate between the industry itself and the artist community in general. The industry as it existed in prior years may be gone for good, however in my experience, there are a ton of really good alt/indie artists performing on the local level, in small venues such as the Java Barn at St. Lawrence University -- a student-run venue with a history of featuring awesome up-and-coming acts.[0][1] These artists also generally publish music on Spotify (e.g. Moxie)[2], and although they may never enjoy the widespread success of making it to the Billboard Hot 100, you can find them in almost any part of America producing awesome music.
Wait, which is it: that we no longer have a collective listening experience to enrich rock music, or that we no longer have a competition among diverse, idiosyncratic stations exposing us to varying DJ tastes? It seems like it'd need to be one or the other, if we're describing a macro phenomenon like "the death of rock".
You need both, without a shared experience you just end up with fragmentation not a cohesive genre. However, without organic discovery of new talent you lose touch with the underlying culture.
Payola is just part of the story. The finite number of large radio stations enforced a shared experience independent of what specifically was on air. The US used to regularly see new music genres become popular. From 1910’s there was Jazz, Blues, Swing, R&B, Rock, Disco, Rap, and Punk etc. Yet the last 20 years hasn’t seen the same kind of cohesive movements.
We are seeing fragmentation, yet we still have huge pop stars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé with hundreds of millions of fans and massively popular tours.
Rock isn't entirely dead in the pop charts either.
We live in a decentralized free-for-all era, and I think the result is better music, but they're nostalgic for that "collective experience".
Like so many things it got so centralized that it eventually crumbled under its own weight. As soon as they said the words "Producer Manager" I was like "where have I heard that acronym before"?
To me, with the exception of maybe a few genres in electronic, music has never been so bland and boring as of the 2000’s. Decentralization has something to do with it, as people’s attention is heavily fragmented and mostly very few marketable artists are promoted enough to stick their head out of the water. Risk taking is now at a minimum-ever for recording labels.
I have a lot of respect for Rick's technical and music skills. But there's one place he and I diverge which is compression. I was really surprised to hear him compliment some really compressed audio saying it made it really crunchy, or something. Besides Clear Channel, at least IMHO over compression also drove people away from genres that used it. See the Loudness Wars Wikipedia entry for a good explanation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
I was a rock listener for a long time, but my local rock station spent the 80s and 90s adjusting their format just enough to kill off competitors and then swinging back to their tried and true format of the same tired songs. So some of this is definitely self-inflicted both in terms of format (unimaginative and rarely updated playlists) and presentation (heavily compressed audio) that drove me away.
Yeah, excellent example: the remastered ZZ Top records which substituted drum machines for Frank Beard. Not sure when that was done exactly but the streaming versions of their songs sound much worse than the vinyl ones do because of that weirdly echoey and metronomic drum machine.
I have a theory that jam bands appear more popular than they actually are, because they seem to have a higher percentage of fans willing to follow them around on tour. (Assuming a metric of popularity where selling Bob 3 tickets means less than selling Alice, Bob, and Charlie 1 ticket apiece.) In this Phish example, I'd wager that the percentage of attendees who went to all 4 shows is unusually high, compared to what a band from other genres might get.
Not to discount the achievement of selling out MSG in the first place, by the way. Phish bores me to tears (to the fans: yes, even live in person) but I can't deny that plenty of people go nuts for them.
I was a college student at Georgia Tech in the 90s, and I remember wondering why 99x was better than the other stations. Now I know why. By the mid-2000s I recall British stations still having decent rock when it was already tanking in America.
"It’s hard to imagine now just how much money the label industry made from reissuing its back catalog on $18.98 list price compact discs."
He forgot to mention they didn't even try to improve the quality of those reissues either. The labels put disclaimers on every one of those CD's that said all the original music was recorded on analog equipment so the "reproduction" may not be perfect.
I still vividly remember replacing my old U2 tapes (War, October, Boy) with their CD's and then being disgusted to find they sounded worse than my tapes did.
While I know many albums didn't get transferred to CD with great attention to detail in the 80s... they'd had to have gone out of their way to make the CD sound worse than cassette.
By Rock, it seems they mean guitars. No doubt the industry was dripping with greed and corruption, but what does that have to do with the growth of the synths, drum machines, Hip Hop, etc.?
Tastes change. Rock became one of many genres. Case closed.
p.s. And if you still want Indie guitars I would start with Fontaines DC.
Yeah, so? It's not rock if there's no guitars, just like you can't have classical music without an orchestra (with strings, etc.), you can't have big band without trumpets, etc.
>Tastes change. Rock became one of many genres. Case closed.
Strangely, though, rock remains highly popular in other places like Japan and Europe. It's only America where people are all listening to hip-hop all the time.
The irony of your comment should not be lost. But sure let's all join the HN Small Minded Club and comment before we read the article and think. It's all the rage here...like rock music once was. Get it?
Apology accepted. Next time just move along. Thanks.
By mentioning Bach, you proved my point. That is, tastes change. Bach is no longer top of the charts either.
Put another way, the author's argument is effectively "the music I like and the music I grew up on is no longer the genre of the mainstream." Wow. That's insightful. Life moved on? As if he's never read a history book.
FFS...you're attacking me? Grow the fuck up. Gawd this is getting tiring.
p.s. Rock as defined by the R&R Hall of Fame is *not* limited to guitars. Whose definition do we believe, the article of the HoF? Gee. Tough call when you're practicing to be another HN prickly person, eh.
Apology accepted. Next time just move along. Thanks.
I play a a lot of country music, mostly on bass and pedal steel. So by trade, I am around a lot of it.
You're welcome to come to whatever conclusions you like.
There is a lot of absolute crap out there.
At the same time, there's a lot of cool stuff, too. Charlie Crockett is the real deal, Sierra Ferrel, Dale Watson, Tyler Childers. And that's just the folks currently doing stuff, ignoring Townes, Guy, Steve Earle, Jerry Jeff etc. And that's also ignoring the vast numbers of pretty good songwriters playing this stuff at local bars.
The local "country" music station keeps a log of the tracks played over the past ~12 hours. I see none of those artists on the list, and certainly no record of any bar musicians making the cut. The list is mostly the usual suspects – many of which were played multiple times – playing the aforementioned "elevator music", and curiously a couple of Elvis Presley rock spins in the wee morning hours.
While one station may not be entirely representative, I expect you will find a similar story across most country stations. I'm not sure you have made a compelling case that country has risen up to replace rock music.
You can name just as many current rock musicians doing great things. But that doesn't mean rock isn't dead. The topic is in reference to what is popular. There is a strong case to be made that country did die after the Cash era.
Radio has never been the place to find good music, only to find the music that appeals to the masses. When talking about the rise or fall of a genre, it refers to mass appeal, not what exists in dark corners.
There are genres that are alive and well. But they are not rock or country.
I believe there is a difference between generas of music being "dead" and genears of music not having mass popularity.
I play a lot of cafe jazz in the style Django and Grappelli- there is still stuff going on with it, but I could be convinced that it's not "alive and well" because there aren't a whole lot of new compoositions that get wide distribution.
And I really enjoy a lot of the hiphop, EDM, and other stuff I hear- I am not trying to make an argument that those aren't wildly more popular.
Given that there are new artists making a living creating new compositions playing coutnry, as well as large audiences paying money to listen and dance... it's hard to convince me the genera is "dead.
But keep in mind, that's not the argument I was making, that is an argument you're placing on top of what I was saying.
The claim I was responding to is "Country music was never good post the Johnny Cash era. "
I posted some musicians who I (and guessing by their ability to make a living playing new music, other people) believe stands as a counterpoint to that point.
So for all your concern about the legitimacy of my "argument", you're focusing on a claim I am not making- even if it were a "dead" genera, people are still making new music with enough support that they can make a living performing it.
> I believe there is a difference between generas of music being "dead" and genears of music not having mass popularity.
That's fine, but there is context here. Your belief is irrelevant.
> Given that there are new artists making a living creating new compositions playing coutnry, as well as large audiences paying money to listen and dance...
Same goes for rock. Just look at the constant stream of rock music coming out of Australia in particular right now. In that vein, rock has never been more alive. But rock is still dead per the context this discussion is taking place in.
> The claim I was responding to is "Country music was never good post the Johnny Cash era. "
The claim you speak of was in response to the comment that claimed that country music rose up to replace rock – meaning, for all intents and purposes, that country music radio replaced rock music radio. The comment you responded to was asserting that country didn't replace rock, so-called "elevator music" did.
And then the best you could do was name some artists that most people have never heard of. Which only goes to confirm the idea that country music hasn't risen up to replace rock. Rather, they are both dead, as per what dead means in the context of discussion.
I gave you an upvote just because I found you highly unique mode of responding here to be quite... interesting. Thanks for the comment, it really made me think a lot of... things.
Depends on where you are. In most population centers white people perceive atleast the current crop of billboard country music as “simple jack” tier. On the other hand, bluegrass is all the rage because it’s actually good.
Take the opening claim of the video: the Telecommunications Act of 1996, by deregulating terrestrial radio, allowed consolidation that eliminated competition and killed rock radio and, thus, rock music.
Couple problems here:
* Linear radio was dead by 2000 no matter how the industry was regulated because linear programming sucks and people don't like it. By the time XM and Sirius launched, radio was a medium almost exclusively targeting drive time commuters. To say the Telecommunications Act killed rock, you have to establish that linear rock radio could have survived the iPod. Come on.
* There wasn't meaningful competition even before consolidation. In most markets, a single AOR station and a single Alternative station was all you had before Clear Channel came around. Barber talks about what was lost here, but describes a pretty cynical process of test-marketing bands in Chattanooga and then convincing Nashville and Omaha to give the survivor bands a chance. I believe this worked, and I believe this got some bands airtime that wouldn't have (I assume this is the entire reason I ever heard Live or the Gin Blossoms), but this process couldn't possibly have defined the pre-Telecom-Act sound of the 90s, since many (maybe most?) of those bands were either defaulted in from being in the Seattle scene, or came from the UK.
The death of radio didn't kill rock music. The death of radio killed radio.
Beato claims that within a few years of consolidation, you could look at what was playing on rock radio and see that it was all the same producers using the same equipment and the same samples. I am a little bit obsessive about late-90s alt-rock radio and can tell you that you can find radio station playlists from that era, and check this for yourself. I may not like Blink 182, but I can report that Jerry Finn didn't produce The Red Hot Chili Pepper or Korn.
(An aside: shared producers on contemporaneous popular records also isn't a smoking gun; see: Steve Albini, Flood, and Butch Vig; sometimes, producers just have a moment, and, like the front page of HN, there isn't a whole lot of space for these tracks to spread out in).
Beato has a very Albini-esque take on the points and cuts taken from recording budgets and contracts. Somebody is inevitably going to post that Albini piece. I'll just point out that David Lowery from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker wrote a very long pseudo-rebuttal to that, and his math checks out: take the (say) $250k the label is nominally fronting for an album, and any sane, generous-to-the-artists set of points and cuts possible, and nobody in a 4-piece band is making an amazing living off the albums. What seems to have been common knowledge is: the bands get advanced money, nobody ever expects to recoup on royalties (even if the labels weren't rapacious, there just wasn't that much money there!), and you made your money touring and on merch, if at all.
What does seem to be the case is that the contraction and ultimate demise of this system of label contracts, producers, studios, and session musicians was really disruptive for people like Rick Beato, who were making their money doing professional artistic services. Fair enough. But when I think of the health of rock music, I don't so much think about whether the label can afford Rick Beato, or a session drummer; the record is a document of the work of the artists themselves, and 70s CBGB scene did just fine producing timeless stuff without label-supported session musicians.
(Another wild claim here: Napster destroyed the $18 CD because the studios were no longer paying for high-quality CDs, so there was only a single good track on an album, because the studios weren't paying to gloss up all 11 tracks. Pretty sure that's not how In Utero worked!)