Aging rocker complains that it’s “destroyed the music business” and that it’s “going to destroy the movie business” someday. Also contends that rock ‘n’ roll will be gone in a “few generations” time much like what happened to big-band music of the 1930s and ’40s.
Rock ‘n’ roll musicians seem to be lining up these days to blame the Internet for having destroyed music in one way or the other. Rather than see it as a chance to reach people around the world and bypass greedy record labels in the process, they appear to prefer things the way they used to be before the world went online.
Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks declared in an interview the other day that the “Internet has destroyed rock” as well as children’s “social graces.”
“There are a lot of people out there as talented as we were, but they can’t sustain being in a rock ‘n’ roll band for long without success,” she says. “We were able to, but we’re going to die out.”
Aging rocker John Mellencamp is apparently on the “Internet has destroyed rock ‘n’ roll” bandwagon as well, saying recently that in a “few generations” time it will go the way of big-band music from the 1930s and ’40s.
“After a few generations, it’s gone,” he said. “Rock ‘n’ roll — as important as we think it is, and as big as it was, and as much money as people made on it, and as proud as I am to say that I was part of it — at the end of the day, they’re gonna say: ‘Yeah, there was this band called the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and this guy named Bob Dylan…’
He thinks everybody else will be reduced to “footnotes,” and he’s “OK” with that.
Where it gets really interesting is where says the ” Internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb,” and that “it’s destroyed the music business. It’s going to destroy the movie business.”
The only thing it’s destroyed is the distribution side of the record business that served as the pillar of the physical distribution-centered business model.
In the UK total music industry revenues have rose 4.7% between 2007 and 2009, and were up some 2.3% last year. How can you suggest the music business has been “destroyed” when profits keep going up?
“Since 2000, the number of recordings produced has more than doubled,” reads a a Harvard Business School study from last year, proving that artists are creating new music like never before. Record labels are no longer the gatekeepers of music, giving artists greater creative control than ever before.
I wonder if Mellencamp also considered the VCR and DVD players atomic bombs as well.
Maybe he ought to talk with Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, who from the very beginning if the Internet has seen it as an opportunity to be capitalized on.
Stay tuned.
Internet is to rock, what radio was to books. And we all know that radio will rotten our brains and bankrupt every writer.
He speaks for a lot of people in many creative fields – journalists, photographers, and others including the music industry – who have lost first our ability to be autonomous in the tech era (DUH – it’s the use of computers in the first place that allowed radio station owners to take decisions out of DJs hands and let consultants decide everything) – and have become or are becoming irrelevant altogether in web 2.0, where anyone with some talent (but few developed skills) and a circle of friends can get their egos stroked while they create content for Google and Facebook, uncompensated.
? Content creators get a share of YouTube ad revenue.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/technology/03youtube.html
The guy should quit smoking with the stuff he was shown smoking on that picture.
Yet another aged rocker that hasn’t had a hit in 20 years complaining about the net.
Hey maybe if you did not re-hash the same old tired shit your career would not be in the toilet douche bag.
If the record company sold CD’s for less money the would make money. Now days it cost 15 or 20 dollars for a music CD and more for a video. My first album was 2.95. CD’s are cheap to make and they are making a lots of money on each one. Maybe I’m wrong but most of the time the cd has only a few good songs anyway. Its better if the bands make their own CD’s and sell them.
That’s exactly what the digital exchange of media is. The artists get to sell their own shit and profit more.
Johnny Cougar stinks on ice. That might have something to do with it.
“And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly aging
Please get of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin’. ”
. . . I think some guy named Bob Dylan wrote that.
he will just have to show up on stage….an play a medley of his hit
Also, let us not forget that Big Band music never earned the artists any money from record sales, and they made very little from concerts. Is he trying to tell us that Robert Johnson would have never made music had he not earned millions from it? Oh hang on, he didn’t did he? He had to jump trains to get to his concerts as he was extremely poor, but he carried on regardless.
Thankfully, the big corporations managed to get a hold of his rights and publish his music over the years on the various formats, so many people have got very, very rich off of his work.
Rock n roll will never die. Never. IMHO punk, industrial, metal, alternative, grindcore, death metal and a hundred of other genres are all subgenres of rock. Lump all that shit together and I don’t see how anyone can possibly say that rock is in any danger of dying.
To be fair to Mellencamp, I think his “Internet destroyed the music business” comments are separate from his “rock’n'roll is fading away” comments.
If you take the long view of music history, one certainly would expect any style to fade away eventually — and Mellencamp acknowledges that this happened to prior popular genres such as big band jazz. And big band jazz faded away without any help from technology. Rock had a good 50 year run, but from my perspective it was getting tired and wheezy as far back as the early 1990s.
Rock and Roll won’t go away like Big Band Music because Big Band Music sucks ass.
ummmm go paint some little pink houses there Cougar.
I get the feeling alot of these anti-internet musicians do not use the internet. Once the old model dies out and the new one begins to sell, I bet alot of these people who are bitching now will come out with denials and excuses about what they said.
Let’s not forget that video killed the radio star, so we will also need to unplug everyone’s TV cable to ‘save Rock ‘n’ Roll.
What a luddite.
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem
Let me help you out, John. What you should’ve said was, “The Internet has destroyed the music and movie business as we know them.” Of course, saying it that way changes the impact entirely, not to mention is a whole lot more accurate and truthful. No one but companies invested in the “old way” of doing things much cares if the old model dies. No one.
Seriously, does he think that demand for movies and music will somehow fade away because the Internet causes a change in the business models for those industries? Really? That people will somehow not pay for quality music and movies in the future?
Even more insane is his comparison between 30s Big Band and today’s Rock n’ Roll. Yes, both are genres of music but that is where the balance between them stops. Rock n’ Roll, unlike Big Band, is also a way of life, an out-and-out lifestyle, for many people. Rock n’ Roll is fated to die the same way that Blues or Bluegrass might be said to be doomed–so long as people attach a sense of lifestyle to the genre of music, it’ll continue no matter how well the music industry profits from it.
Clearly, Mellencamp is either out of touch or has a secondary, money-centric motive for saying these things. My guess is that he is in cahoots with the RIAA and MPAA and this, eh, “wisdom” of his is nothing more than a way to appeal to older adults in a blatant attempt to appeal to their nostalgic bones, and thereby influence public opinion in some fashion.
In all, ridiculous but hardly surprising. Go Internet!
LOL Internet most dangerous thing since atomic bomb! What an idiot. If the Internet and file sharing signals the death of the record industry GOOD, it’s about time. It will be the end of a multi-billion dollar, trans-national industry which can only be a good thing. It won’t kill music creation it will liberate talented artists from the yoke of recording contracts, marketting men, and target demographics.
If your music is good it will sell, if your music is crap you’ll disappear without trace. Which seems to be very different from how it is now. Now if your music is great the marketing gurus will struggle to pitch it to wide audience and if your music is dull, lower common denominator, derivative, of the moment then marketing can make you millions.
Aren’t rock stars supposed to live fast and short lives? It’s about time this guy retired to his mansion and STFU.
Christ he’s more ornery than Joni Mitchell. Another “Well, their old stuff is okay” artist.
Of course many of the older generations of anything criticize the new. Here they recognize it as a direct threat to their success, which was due to being one of the handful of “fortunate ones” given the nod from the record labels. Overpriced albums with one or two hits was the norm, but people bought them because we want music so badly. Now we don’t need radio stations force feeding whatever new crap they want to distribute and we buy only what we want. We’re still in a time where both old and new are successful. The old model is dying, and along with it the attitudes shared my older rockers. I say good riddance if you can’t see the benefit to the consumer beyond your own greed.