Many say that music is something that soothes the soul and allows us to express our emotions in a way that all can enjoy. We feel this special connection to music, and its cultural significance has remained since the days of the ancients. But in today’s music industry, specifically in America, it seems as though more and more people within the industry are worried more about profit than actually finding real musical talent that makes us appreciate music for what it is.
Today, there are several different genres of music, such as rock, pop, country, rap and hip-hop. We have a wide variety of music to listen to and enjoy. However, in all of these genres there is a growing trend of industry professionals rushing to produce an album instead of providing us with some quality music.
If you think about music years ago and music today, you can instantly see how music has changed over the years. We went from listening to icons like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and Dean Martin to listening to singers who make their way to the top by singing about sex, drugs, irresponsibility and Friday. What happened?
The music industry, it seems, has abandoned what made them in the first place: talent. What they use instead is face value, hype and business interest to give us new “talent.” When recording labels sign on a musician, they want to be given material they approve of, a media-influenced topic that will be accepted by a majority and will give them the highest profits.
It seems that the multi-corporation music business is in overdrive, with recording labels buying rights to everything. A great example is their super-tight control of anything released on YouTube without their permission that contains content that they own, even if it is just a simple fan-made video. I understand the need to prevent illegal downloading of content and protect their assets, but they take it to extremes when they take away from the most important group: the fans.
Their profit-hungry promotions and talent molding show us that they don’t care for the quality of the music. One example of this is Disney’s need to push its acting talent to sing. Disney would sign a contracting deal with a recording label to create an album and use a person with semi-acceptable singing skills, like Miley Cyrus, and turn her into a mega-star.
What happened to the days of just raw, pure musical talent? It seems that more artists that come onto the music scene have been picked out of a crowd at random, given some basic singing lessons and deemed “extraordinary.” It’s the industry professional’s way of cutting out the strenuous search for real talent and creating artificial talent to make some quick profits.
In 2009, we unfortunately lost one of the greatest artists in history: Michael Jackson. The death of Jackson was a devastating blow to the music industry, as he was the man who revolutionized pop music and influenced many of the artists today with his amazing style and music. It is a sad fact that as time goes on, we will continue to lose more of the greats still alive today (and still performing), and that truly is the reason that the industry itself is suffering by not understanding just what real musical talent is.
Music is supposed to inspire people, but these days, it seems artists give in to the demands of their labels and sell out by singing about all kinds of meaningless garbage just to be rich and famous. The sad thing is a lot of people, especially the already media-influenced youth of today, fall in line behind the industry’s stars and idolize them. There is truly something wrong when people think that someone like Wiz Khalifa is a better musician than Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or the other greats who really know how to make meaningful music.
I don’t know if it’s going to take some kind of witch to put an “understand real music” spell on those in the music industry so we don’t get any more uninspired music, but I still hold hope for the industry. I am hopeful because we keep the music of yesterday, and great musicians are immortalized by their music, so we will never forget people like Michael Jackson. The music provided to us by the greats will continue to be loved and inspirational to a lot of us, but it may be a tough pill to swallow for the industry itself to accept that quality is more important than money.