Finally, a point

Saying that I dislike the music industry would be a lot like Liberace rising from the dead tomorrow to confess that he was really all about guys. It's just not news (aside from the whole “rising from the dead” thing, but you know what I mean). It's more in the sphere of “common knowledge”.

Yes, I hate the music industry. You can stop writing “BIAS” in bright red on your picket signs, because I fully admit it – I'm not going to be completely impartial with these guys. After all, this is an opinion blog, so I'll be stating my opinion.

And to be honest, I really don't think they need me sitting there weighing the moral consequences of the mean things I could say about them, because they've got billions of dollars and packs of wild lawyers foaming at the mouth and tugging on their chains trying to get close enough to me to slap me across the face with their big, meaty libel lawsuits. Because, of course, what they need is MORE MONEY. I'll take whatever honest advantage I can get. To me, that's fair.

I'm not going to say anything about them that I don't consider to be entirely true, but I'm not going to hesitate to hurl whatever rocks I do have in my pile through the windows of their corner offices. That aught to be a sufficient disclaimer, so I'll stop boring you and get to the part where I actually say things about stuff.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, and so that you can adequately brace yourself for the obviousness of the truth, I'll warn you that I'm going to say it right now: Record companies have been obsolete for almost 30 years.

Yes, you heard me right. Why?

Well, IBM introduced the first personal computer in 1981. That right there aught to be fairly self explanatory. (Before you say it, yes; I know that Apple had two before it, so did a slew of others, but IBM was the first to call it a PC, and it was at least one of the earliest widely used ones out there. So for the sake of argument, we're going with 1981. Just go with it.)

Basically, personal computing made a whole lot of new things possible – we haven't even scratched the surface of the tip of that iceberg yet. But for our purposes, it made home recording possible. Yes, that's right – people can create music, record it, and distribute it through the Internet, and completely circumvent the gargantuan drooling troll that personifies record labels as a whole. Like I said before: Poof! Bye, record companies!

Obviously, it hasn't been that fast or that simple. Quite frankly, I'd sooner list all the names and addresses of every registered sex offender in the country than all of the reasons that record companies are still around, because it would probably take a lot less time and would end up being more meaningful to most people. It would also make me a lot less bitter, and that's saying something. But for the sake of relevance, I'll hash out the basic gist of it.

My theory can be fairly well summed up with a melting pot and having short, bald, sweaty, pig-eyed men in fitted suits filling it with enormous amounts of cocaine, bribe money, fast talking, cologne, and Cuban cigars. But that probably doesn't make as much sense to anybody else as it does to me, so I'll put it another way.

It's interesting to compare the timelines of the music industry and personal computing side by side, because what you see is a lot like the competitive stockpiling and militaristic innovation of the Cold War. Consider this: the year that IBM's first PC was released was the very same year of MTV's wretched, demonic birth. (To dig deeper the “conspiracy hole,” the MTV project was actually launched in 1977, the year that the Apple II was released, which was actually the first widely popular home computer. Yes, it's a conspiracy, and yes, they're reading your thoughts right now. Go put on your tin foil hat before it's too late.)

Since then, both have evolved considerably. Personal computing's evolution has mostly been in scope of capability, smoothness of operation, ease of access, and quality of product and experience. In what I see as direct response, the output of the music industry has been increasingly big, loud, and flashy. Through the '90s and thus far into the 2000s, popular music has become more and more of a mediocre afterthought following the factor that has kept the public hypnotized: image.

What I see is a 30-year attempt to blind the public to the fact that they don't need the record companies anymore. In reality, the whole concept of a record company was almost completely obviated the day that affordable personal computers hit the open market. But the big, shiny, flashy image that the music industry continues to inflate in front of its market has distracted them from the truth. Look around and you'll see what I mean.

And it worked pretty well for awhile. The enormous flashiness of the music industry served its purpose for a long time by convincing aspiring artists that they couldn't measure up on their own, and that the only way they'd be able to make it anywhere in a business like that would be from within one of those massive towers of hundred dollar bills.

On the other hand, the past few years have seen a very sharp rise in the amount of home recording taking place. This is a VERY good sign. People in the know are starting to see that between the recording software that's now widely available, some of it for free, and the Internet, the record companies are little more than the weird guy on the bench yelling incoherently at you that you walk past and pretend not to notice. “You need us! We make music possible!” he yells. “Uh...huh,” you say to yourself as you hurriedly walk by, weighing dessert possibilities instead of the multitude of ways that your record label might screw you over. The way it should have been from the beginning.

The fact that music has been made into a business at all speaks volumes about just how wrong this whole situation is. Call me an idealist (no, really, do it – my evil socialist powers grow with every jab, soon I'll consume the world), but what ever happened to art for art's sake? I think, and maybe I'm crazy here, that artists aught to be supported and allowed to just do what they do best – create.

Introducing capitalism into the situation is like trying to get a very hungry lion to make friends with a puppy – sure, there'll be some scattered remains of the puppy here and there, but really all you're doing is feeding the poor thing to the big hungry lion of capitalism. Cast your Darwinian “survival of the fittest” stones all you want, but that's not really the point. Darwin didn't really take into account what might make a pleasant house pet, did he?

Sure, a lion may be able to make a puddle out of the puppy with his roar, and sure, capitalism may create competition and constant improvement of products. La tee da. But since when was art about competition? Progression, yes, but any good artist does that on their own. We keep dogs as pets because they're fun to play with and don't have teeth as long as our arms, and we like artists for the same reasons.

Figuratively, of course.

Art and capitalism really are just oil and water. The latter may work for a lot of things, but if we value art at all, we need to recognize that putting it through the meat grinder of business doesn't benefit anybody in the long run. If artists were supported and allowed to do what they do without having to take *business* into account, they'd exercise their freedom to honestly express, and in return we'd get a wide variety of honest art, and everybody wouldn't be forced to choke down the homogenous mainstream bile that's poured over our heads day and night. It'd be like hiring a team of passionate, professional cooks to make our food after countless years of indentured servants robotically serving up the soulless microwavable stuff in the back of the freezer.

Isn't that a win-win situation?