- Karma Factory
- Jan 14
- 8 min read
Recently, because I've been under the weather for a bit, I've been thinking about a conundrum, being the music industry. I'm not part of the industry but I'm certainly a marginal musician who writes, records and releases music. Scanning through youtube I have my "go to" youtube channels I watch regularly and one of them, a rapper who does first listen reactions to rock songs, Black Pegasus. Recently he reacted to Tesla "Love Song" and had a question:
"Are they doing it like this anymore, with music? Hear me out. Is this happening in music anymore? There's something about these rock ballads where they're edgy, right it's rock music but at the same time, we're talking about one of the truest emotions. Love. So it's like this duality there... But it's just interesting am I like tripping? In the last 5 years, what is the big band that just emerged that has a crazy dope love song?"
See the video here:
This video clip is almost making me nostalgic for the record company's! First I want to address: Record companies were very bad for a whole lot of artists but were a product of their times. And to answer the question "Are they doing it like this anymore?" The answer is no. They're not. Sure there may be obscure bands and artists who are writing love songs - but love songs are passe. Most popular songs aren't written by band members anymore. Songs are written by groups of producers who use formulaic templates, sampled sounds, instrumentation and a proven track record of engineering techniques to crank out yet another forgettable song from a well known artist. It's more akin to grinding meat into sausage and following a spice recipe, rather than creating music.
In the 1970's, how did the population consume music? Where did they hear new music?
Generally there were two specific ways: Word of mouth and the radio. Radio was ubiquitous. Every house still had a radio. Every car had a radio. Every small business had a radio in it - someone brought one from home to listen to the ballgame or music while they worked.
How did radio's get the music to put in their collection to play over the air? Well record company's sent records to larger markets who reached a dense population of people. Back in the day, DJ's ruled the airwaves. Some of the bigger stations played just what the record companies sent them and the record companies followed the play charts from these big markets to see how their artists were doing with the public.
The second way was, your friend's brother or sister just heard this great song from their cousin who had the album. You're brother just mowed 20 lawns to make enough money to go buy it at the record store, then spent the next 4 hours reading the liner notes and listening to it on their parents record player. And it was amazing! That meant that you somehow had to get ahold of $7.99 plus tax, and go get yourself a copy. In my case, it was 5th grade when Danny brought in Pink Floyd, The Wall, and played part of it for the class.
In smaller markets, like Long Island, they couldn't compete with the Manhattan radio stations so the DJ's would play experimental new music absent from the Manhattan stations. Bands used to send their new music into smaller stations because the smaller stations weren't shackled by big corporate money and the DJ's were free to play whatever they liked. If a DJ in Ada Oklahoma like a song they were sent, it's a good chance they'd put it on rotation. If the public liked it, they'd call the station up and request the song. If the song got big in Ada, it might just catch on with their sister stations in other cities - creating a buzz - catching the ear of a record company who might just pick that band up. Then the public would go out and buy the record, tape or CD at the music store, take it home, listen and tell all their friends.
The band Kansas, who's songs "Dust in the Wind", and "Carry on my Wayward son" are classic 70's rock were discovered not by a radio station but by the band sending in a demo tape to a new pop label Kirshner records. Kirschner sent out Wally Gold to hear the band before they would sign them, so the execs decided to come to one of their gigs but the band didn't have much of a following, nor any big gigs to wow the record executives flying out to see them. So the band decided to advertise a "free beer" concert to get a huge crowd. It worked.
In the 60's through the 90's, record companies controlled what people listened to. If the A&R guys like the music but the public wasn't picking up on it, a lot of times the bands were dropped, or were just sent out to play shows with minimal marketing and management and then they were dropped. Some bands switched record companies and did well, some were left to die. It was a hard business and in virtually all of the cases, the record companies OWNED those bands through contracts that benefitted the record company, not the artists. I remember the story about Thin Lizzy. They were recording their third record and things were not working out. The public weren't catching onto their songs, no singles were really catching the public's ear and their label was thinking of dropping them. They were out supporting their third record, depressed, thinking the band was going to split up when some DJ somewhere really liked what the band though was a throw away song that wasn't even supposed to be on the record, "The Boys are back in town". That song saved them.
Yet, the artists usually saw minimal compensation, worked to the bone where the record company owned much of the music the artists created, and sometimes just outright screwed the artists over. Yet the pipeline of popularity and "rock stardom" was possible. Without these dirty corporate tactics, the best music ever made may never have been heard.
Getting back to the radio stations - I remember as a kid, watching my sisters washing their car, soaping them up in the driveway in the summer, music blasting on the radio. Foghat, BTO, Boston, Zeppelin, The Chain from Fleetwood Mac, then maybe Little Feet, Alabama,, Sabbath and on and on. If you heard a new release on the radio like I did in the early 80's when Journey "Escape" was released, songs from that album were in heavy rotation and you heard it every 30 minutes. You'd go to the mall or the local record shop (to me it was Tower Records or Music Stop at the mall) and stand in front of rows of albums or CD's, casually flipping through them every weekend, looking for something new to try or an older album from a hot band.
Every band's dream was the same. Get signed. Get famous. Even if it was a shitty contract, the dream was to get signed, go on the road and play in front of huge crowds. When you started a song, the crowd would sing it back to you. Ahhh. The girls, the booze, the fans. Some bands got to stardom differently - REM for example made their way through College radio - a small network of college stations around America, that shared artists and music to rebellious teens their first time away from home. That led to lots of genre's of music being discovered by mullet heads like punk, indie, alt rock, shoegaze, etc.
So how does it work now? We know the introduction of the internet, Napster and technology changed forever the way music was made, distributed and consumed. Napster while legally forced to shut down in 1999 by who else, the RIAA for copyright infringement, yet Napster paved the way for artists to distribute music without the aid of the record companies. Technology also created ways for artists and bands to record their own music, create their own publishing, and release their music and hold on to the proceeds themselves without handing over their publishing rights and profits to the record execs. But is it better now?
Going back to the Black Pegasus video - there are very few huge bands left. Many of them are still touring but are getting quite old. Bands like Foreigner, big in the 70's and 80's don't even have an original member left in the band, yet they still tour under the name. Aerosmith recently cancelled their touring due to ill health. The Rolling Stones are still around but they're in their 80's. Being in a band is considered "old school".
Did a cadre of 15 producers get together with Debby Harry to create the song "Call Me?" Nope. Bands are no longer popular partly because the rock and roll lifestyle is no longer socially acceptable. Sex, drugs and rock and roll are gone. Well, the rock and roll part anyway. There's still plenty of sex and drugs. Rock and roll is gone forever and many will say that was a necessary thing. Yet that means, there will never be another Jimmy Hendrix Experience, or Zeppelin, or Cream, or Fleetwood Mac, or Duran Duran.
The method of creativity to make those songs is unacceptable, the way to create it (in a studio) is fallen out of favor (most of the classic large studio's have closed), the companies that hired the producers to work with bands are now buying 70's and 80's artists catalogs because they've realized they'll make more money off of 40 year old songs than looking for and signing new artists. The pipeline to test songs and play songs has all but died - radio. The consumption of music is now through, ironically, the internet (which shut down Napster) where pay services like Spotify and Amazon Music who pay 0.002 cent per play to the artists. That sounds even WORSE than what the music companies did to artists back in the day. At least then, you got a signing bonus, marketing, management and were put on a tour.
In the 70's and 80's you heard new music either by word of mouth or on the radio and you went and bought it. Now, new music is lost in a sea of billions of other songs by millions of other artists. The next big song? The next "Back in Black"? It's floating around with millions of other songs that will rarely be listened to and rarely appreciated.
Where are the bands from the past 5 years? There are some there. Perhaps underground, in word of mouth areas of the internet.
So who's selling out Madison Square Garden these days?
Let's look:
DJ's, Comedians like Tom Segura, Cassius Jane, a few bands like Deftones, Disturbed, Goose, Role Model, then the Dua Lipa's, Tate McRae, Kylie Minogue (she's gotta be 65 by now) but that's about it. The most interesting on the 2025 list is Los Tigres del Norte . That's a far throw from Billy Joel, Elton John or Phish.
So how do we find great new music?
There's still word of mouth - with social media and podcasts, this may be the best way to scour the internet for new tunes in your most liked genres.
Playlists - rotate your playlists while exercising, working, or cleaning the house and you may stumble on a new song or artist that you can explore further.
Spotify, discover section is a possibility. Bandcamp can net some gems of more obscure bands and artists. Online concerts like NPR Tiny Desk or KEXP are possibilities. KEXP archives of artists have yielded a few for me personally like Dear Tick, Waxahatchee and Nada Surf.
The bottom line is, it's much harder as an artist to be "discovered". It's much harder to get people to even hear your songs simply because there's so much other music competing for the same listeners. You don't make money off of recordings anymore, you have to make money doing shows. Lots of them. Even if you do have 2 million listens on Spotify, you'll make about $4,000, that's 0.002 cents per play. Bands and artists have to not only write and create the song, but arrange it, record it, engineer it, master it, market it and distribute it themselves. Then design the artwork, the t-shirts, and book your own shows or hire a manager to do it - then sell your own stuff at the shows to make a few more bucks. Don't forget your website, patreon, X, Instagram and TikToc accounts to market your music and show dates. Sure you get to keep all that money now, but how much effort, time and sweat goes into making $100 more bucks per show?
Is it really better than with the record company's back in the day?
