NY Times They Really Don’t Make Music Like They Used To

[Bob Olhsson]

I went for a decade thinking I was just getting old. Then I tried to find live music for my daughter to experience like what had inspired me to go into recording. We were living in San Francisco at the time (the '90s) and I was shocked by what I found. The only goose-bumps available were amateur classical performances. Even the symphony was in a terrible sounding hall that required a sound system. When I was growing up in the late '50s, early '60s, most professional musicians were in the union and earning a decent middle-class living from playing mostly on weekends. There were pages of live shows listed in the Sunday newspapers. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC and San Francisco all dwarfed what we had in Detroit.

[Muddy-T]

I know correlation does not equal causality but I have always thought the ascent of the post WWII baby-boom generation, coming of age starting in the mid sixties, and what we think of as the 'Golden Years' of Popular Music (or Rock & Roll if you will) are too closely related to be entirely coincidental.

"Everything changed. Then changed again." - Tom Petty

T

[Bob Olhsson]

We had many, if not most of Europe's top musicians living here thanks to the war plus the military had trained and bought instruments for massive numbers of musicians. The 1940s, '50s and '60s were our golden years of popular music for that reason. The Beatles made being a musician fashionable for the first time. That led to massive numbers of young people willing to play for free by the 1970s and it was all downhill from there.

Our parents had survived the depression and the war. It had been a time of conform or die. Our generation revolted against that attitude.

[DonaldM]

Its an interesting paradox that in an age where the global demand for original music has never been greater, it would be so difficult to create a musician middle class. With ever expanding media platforms all creating multiple sorts of content and ALL of them needing music, the opportunities for musicians and composers are out there. Connecting the two isn't so easy. And even when the connection is made, you can't always get what your time is really worth.



Despite all that, though, creating music is still good for soul!

[Bob Olhsson]

I think the connection is developing new music using the feedback from live performance. Throwing new music recordings up against the wall to see what sticks hasn't really worked out.

[moshuajusic]

Thanks for posting. The graphs are really interesting. What annoys me most are the flagrant compressions. Compression that's so obvious--like a modern metal song with a solo bass and then the beat drops with the whole band--I imagine the engineer going "awww yeah! take THAT!"

[Bob Olhsson]

Nobody's buying most of these hyper-compressed recordings!

[elicious]

Another blow for the musician middle class was the late 70s to early 80s.
Local Musicians Union 7 printed up buttons saying
M.A.D. – Musicians Against Disco.

Back then, Film composer to be, Mark Mancina was in a local cover band that played up the irony
by programming a drum solo on an early drum machine
and then shining the spotlights on it during the solo…!

[John_Toolbox]

I agree that a good live performance is often a parallel to a good recording. Best concerts I have been to lately have been the guitarist Jesse Cook. My 9 year old son loves listening to his recordings in the car. I took him to one of Jesse’s show’s earlier this year and he was completely immersed in it.

[DonaldM]

In a recent lecture I gave to a college class on the history of audio recording, one comment I made was that with today's technology its never been easier for so many to create high quality bad music!.