As the saying goes, music soothes the savage beast. But apparently not when the beast resides on Wall Street, according to superstar John Mellencamp. In a recent blog post on the Huffington Post, Mellencamp details his perceptions of The Way Things Were, and the systemic problems wrought upon the industry because of short-sighted "profit before prose" mentality.
The following is a condensed version of Mellencamp's post. For the full article, just click on the title.
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Posted March 22, 2009 | 08:18 PM (EST) on The Huffington Post
Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business. We've read and heard about the "good old days" and how things used to be. People remember when music existed as an art that motivated social movements. Artists and their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide. These days, that possibility no longer seems to exist. Had the industry not been decimated by a lack of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music rather than trying to market it as well.
Reagan's much-vaunted trickle-down theory said that wealth tricked down to the masses from the elite at the top. Now we've found out that this is patently untrue -- the current economic collapse reflects this self-serving folly. The same holds for music. It doesn't trickle down; it percolates up from the artists, from word of mouth, from the streets and rises up to the general populace. Constrained by the workings of SoundScan/BDS (Broadcast Data Systems), music now came from the top and was rammed down people's throats.
By 1997, consumers, now long uninvolved, grew passive, radio stations had to change formats. Creative artistry and the artists, themselves, were now of secondary importance, taking a back seat to Wall Street as the record companies were going public. The artists were being sold out by the record companies and forced to figuratively kiss the asses of their corporate overlords at the time these record companies went public. In essence, the artists were no longer the primary concern; only keeping their stockholders fat and happy and "making the quarterly numbers" mattered; the music was an afterthought.
Long-tenured employees of these companies were sacrificed in the name of profitability and the culture of greed was burned into the brains of even the most serious music lovers. It seemed that paying attention sales, who had the #1 record from one week to next, and who fell or rose on the charts was all that validated music.
While all this was going on, technology, just as it always does, progressed. That which, by all rights, should have had a positive impact for all of us -- better sound quality, accessibility, and portability -- is now being blamed for many of the ills that beset the music business. The captains of the industry it seemed, proved themselves incapable of having a broader, more long-range view of what this new technology offered. Not understanding the possibilities, they ignorantly turned it into a nightmarish situation. The nightmare is the fact that they simply didn't know how to make it work for us.
The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased. They used to call this "planned obsolesce" in the car business. Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.
Now that the carnage in this industry is so deep you can hardly wade through it, it's open season for criticizing artists, present company included, for making a misstep or trying to create new opportunities to reach an audience, i.e., Springsteen releasing an album at Wal-Mart and, yes, we all know what Wal-Mart is about. The old rules and constraints that had governed what was once considered a legitimate artist are no longer valid. When you think about it, you must conclude that there really is no legitimate business; there is no game left.
If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love, compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed and we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand each other's problems. So let's try to put our best foot forward and remember that anyone can stand in the back of a dark hall and yell obscenities but if you want a better world it starts with you and the things you say and do.
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