I've been struggling with the music industry lately. As a young white boy growing up in the Midwest, the best way to discover new music was through the all powerful music channel, MTV. It was great, videos 24/7, or almost 24/7. Rap, rock, indie, new wave, didn't matter the genre, MTV played it at some point during the day or night. When I wanted to find a new edgy metal band to listen to, I could always rely on Headbangers Ball for a few gems, and the electronic acts I enjoyed did their thing after hours.
Then, in the early nineties, it all started to happen…Suddenly MTV began to enjoy the revenue they received during the advertising on shows such as The Real World, and from there it spread like wild fire. Every few months from about 1992 on, a new show, which most barely qualified as being 'music based' popped up on the channel to take away from the precious music video time, and this had a fairly significant cultural impact on many people during those years leading up to 2008.
I did my first article recently for Uberfluff on Internet Piracy, and it directly ties into when the music truly died, along with MTV. When the internet started to become fairly mainstream, as in, a good portion of middle class and upper class America had access, I'd say sometime around 1996-97, things within the culture shifted even more dramatically than MTV shoving badly produced shows down our throats. Piracy, or those who were familiar with it, were now downloading free of charge all the bands they enjoyed, which, it just so happens, encompassed roughly every talented act and label that existed. What this left poor America with, or those without internet access, was a diluted stream of over-played pop-rock, pop-rap, pop-country and boy bands all across the TV and radio. The bands and songwriters with even a shred of talent were being downloaded constantly, so all of the bigger record sale statistics that began to flow into Billboard.com were all this un-talented pop crap. When TimeWarner, Interscope, and some of the other big labels looked at these numbers and seen how WELL these boy bands were selling, it sparked a revolution of commercialized garbage, from Total Request Live, all the way up to the current top ten selling albums this week on Billboard.com. The industry, instead of getting with the picture and going back to promoting real talent, instead is trying its best to milk those people who are still willing to accept the costs of a physical CD, and those who are still afraid to download on their own by promoting this cost-efficient garbage.
Sure, the mainstream perhaps once a year craps out a decent album that just about anyone could get into, but its become common knowledge among those who enjoy a wide variety of sounds that the best place to find new music is through independent sources on the internet. Sites like www.pitchforkmedia.com, www.spin.com, www.undertheradarmag.com, offer complex, thoughtful reviews, and link you to plenty of places, like iTunes, where you can preview anything you want to buy.
But, back to my gripes about the music video industry, and as surprising as this may come to many people, good bands still make videos! The problem has been that unless you order a particular bands DVD whenever it would get released, you couldn't get GREAT quality videos online, because most of the places that had these things, and still to some extent currently are, was on YouTube. Well, I'm happy to report that there is a website out there which will let you watch high quality videos online, essentially replacing MTV for the future. I have a hope that now, a new generation of kids will be able to experience good bands making great videos without watching them on pixilated YouTube. The website is www.pitchfork.tv , a site that I feel will soon replace MTV, and everything it once proudly stood for. In closing my ramble, I hope in ten years that when I enter a bar, I won't hear T-Pain, or Carrie Underwood on the jukebox, but Deerhunter or Air, or some other band that isn't being paid to promote something they didn't even write. I think Pitchfork.tv is a strong step towards bringing back the magic of seeing a great video for the first time, and I'll toast to anyone who tries to do that any day.
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