Music: Pirated or Quality

[tw]

The music industry has increasingly rewarded the artist with a smaller percentage of the pie. Executive salaries and bonuses exceeding $100million annually. So executives blame piracy for the downturn in music sales.

However karaoke industry (according to the BBC this week)notes a serious problem. Japan's Karaoke sales have dropped significantly because, the industry says, so little good 'sing-a-long' music has been created in this past decade. IOW music quality may be inferior to that of the late 60's, 70's, and early 80's. Makes one wonder who is to blame. Artists - or the $multi-million industry 'top wigs' who decided what is and is not good music.

So who is getting blamed? Music pirates or the top industry management that first pretended that the Internet did not exist?

[xoxoxoBruce]

There is plenty of very talented bands out there that'll never get a recording contract because they don't fit the profile the record company has at the moment. Some band becomes a hit and then it's me too city for all the labels.The labels have clones and clones but no cajones.

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by tw
Japan's Karaoke sales have dropped significantly because, the industry says, so little good 'sing-a-long' music has been created in this past decade. IOW music quality may be inferior to that of the late 60's, 70's, and early 80's.

I for one don't judge music's quality on whether or not it is suitable for the Japanese karaoke industry. Sounds like a positive trend to me.

[Griff]

Originally posted by Tobiasly

I for one don't judge music's quality on whether or not it is suitable for the Japanese karaoke industry. Sounds like a positive trend to me.

Ditto on that! tw does have a point on the rest, however.

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by Griff
Ditto on that! tw does have a point on the rest, however.

I won't disagree with that. I eagerly await the day when the RIAA and record labels are obsolete.

Consumers paying artists directly for their work, and in turn being able to use that work any way they want to -- that'll be the shiznat.

[tw]

Originally posted by Tobiasly
I for one don't judge music's quality on whether or not it is suitable for the Japanese karaoke industry.

Japanese sale of latest karaoke music is international. Internationally, the world in not demanding karaoke music for tunes of the past decade. People seem to prefer music of 60s, 70s, and 80s. I thought it was just me - that I am getting too old to appreciate the new music. Apparently new music is not as popular internationally - at least according to sales figures from the karaoke industry.

[xoxoxoBruce]

So the man with the big cigar says "Sign right here, Son. You'll have fame and women and a gold cadillac. I'm gonna make YOU a STAR!......and me rich."

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by tw
Japanese sale of latest karaoke music is international. Internationally, the world in not demanding karaoke music for tunes of the past decade.

I fully understand what you're saying. But you're implying that, because people want it less for karaoke, the music isn't as good. That's not true.

For one thing, no one my generation or younger sings karaoke (much). It's the people who grew up to the music of the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Of course they don't want to sing along to Limp Bizkit. Every generation thinks the previous generation's music sucked, and the next generation's music sucks worse. That's nothing new.

[tw]

Originally posted by Tobiasly
I fully understand what you're saying. But you're implying that, because people want it less for karaoke, the music isn't as good. That's not true.

Every generation previous loved to sing a long with its current music and to the better music of their parents. Who among us can not sing a long to Sinatra's NewYork, NY, or some silly Bing Crosby tunes like Moon River or Irving Berlin - all well ahead of my time.

Iimplied is that the latest generation does not like to sing a long with its post 1990s music but will sing along with music of its parents? What makes this newest generation so unique that it does not like to sing a long to it latest music?

They are not saying earlier music is not popular. All generations still sing to that. They are saying music of the last ten years is not in demand for sing a long by any generation. Now if you said the music of last ten years is not appropriate to sing a long, then karaoke sales makes sense. However I don't hear anyone saying post 1990 music is not appropriate to karaoke. All I hear is that few want to sing along with post 1990 tunes.

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by tw
Who among us can not sing a long to Sinatra's NewYork, NY, or some silly Bing Crosby tunes like Moon River or Irving Berlin

Pretty much everyone in my generation.

Now if you said the music of last ten years is not appropriate to sing a long, then karaoke sales makes sense. However I don't hear anyone saying post 1990 music is not appropriate to karaoke. All I hear is that few want to sing along with post 1990 tunes.

I'm saying that it isn't possible to draw the conclusion you're making without further study.

Karaoke pretty much only became popular in the past ten years. The people my generation or younger -- the ones who like 90's music -- are not yet old enough to enjoy karaoke. I don't know anyone my age who would be caught dead in a karaoke bar.

So maybe it's that <I>any</I> music takes 20 or 30 years before it's popular on karaoke, but we never noticed because by the time karaoke was popular, the music you refer to was already that old.

At any rate, you simply can't point to declining karaoke sales and say that shows people don't like the music as much.

I will agree with you that the RIAA is choking creativity and is making many enemies of late, all of which will come back to bite them. The recording industry still doesn't "get" how to use the internet to their advantage, and it hopefully will be their undoing.

[elSicomoro]

Let me say it then, tw--As a musical scholar of sorts, I would say that a good chunk of music in the 90s was not meant to be sing-a-long. Look at what was popular--most of the decade was dominated by grunge, alternative-gone-mainstream rock, and electronic/techno music. Singable music per se didn't really seem to come into the picture until...oh, 1997 or so. There was certainly SOME--actually quite a bit of it--around here and there, but it didn't really achieve serious prominence until the time mentioned, IMO.

As an example, I'll use Chris Cornell--lead singer of Audioslave, but formerly the lead singer of Soundgarden, one of the godfather grunge bands of the late 80s into the 90s. He is one of my vocal idols...he inspired me to start a band in the early 90s. But trying to sing...and I mean really SING...a Soundgarden song like "Jesus Christ Pose" or "Slaves and Bulldozers" is very difficult if you don't have his vocal range. Vocal ranges and styles went all over the place in the 90s...screeching, wailing, distortion, etc. It actually started in the 70s, IMO, with punk...laid low in the post punk 80s...became popularized by bands like Sonic Youth and the Pixies, then went all over the place with bands like Nirvana and Ministry. But hell, even trying to sing a Mariah Carey song can be a real challenge.

And with electronic/techno, many of the songs were either sans vocals, or contained a very limited amount of vocals. Moby's Play album is a perfect example of that--on some of his songs, he sings. On others, he uses other vocalists or samples. Then there are the instrumentals. The first two singles from the album ("Honey" and "Run On") contained only samples from pre-WW2 music of the American south. I can sing those sampled portions...kinda...but I wouldn't really call them true vocals. And yet the songs are still great...IMO, of course.

I hope we're getting to the point now where a major label is no longer necessarily the key to making money off your music. If I wanted to, I could record some spoken-word shit, put it on CDs, then sell the CDs on my site for about $6 a pop...maybe more, maybe less. I can promote it on the internet, which gives me a nice worldwide audience...and maybe I can get some indie radio stations to play the shit. And I'm making...oh, $3-4 off every damned CD. The only people that are making money like that on the majors right now are bands like U2, REM, the Stones, etc. And while those folks are established artists, why the fuck should I have to wait 20 years to make paper like that?

My $0.05 (because I like giving more than my share)

[Torrere]

Originally posted by tw
Who among us can not sing a long to Sinatra's NewYork, NY, or some silly Bing Crosby tunes like Moon River or Irving Berlin - all well ahead of my time.

Me me me! I have hardly ever sung along to _ANY_ music. I've occasionally wished to, but I fear that I never really have. I did have the opportunity a year ago to done Karaoke, and quite likely would have, but I didn't realize until we were leaving that they had the lyrics scrolling along on a screen, and hell, I can't remember all the words to that song by Genesis I had thought of singing! I've met people my age (18-22) doing karaoke a few times.

Most of the music that I listen to now, however, is music or music with spoken word. If the song has lyrics, they usually are sparse. Often, the vocals are treated almost as an instrument, rather than as the focus of the song which the music accompagnies. Other times, the lyrics are simply difficult to 'get', such as Delerium's Aria, which I mention because it's currently playing and sung in Old English (or so I believe).

As an aside, when I clicked on this thread I thought you were asking from a RIAA-supporter point of view: Do you listen to the RIAA's quality music that you buy, or do you listen to pirated music? I was all ready to write that quality music and pirated music tend to be one and the same in my experiences. Darn, I missed that speel.

[warch]

Singing and dancing is essential stuff and can make you happy. Here's my analysis- those booming stereos coming out of moving cars...thats a mode of singing and dancing, albeit a passive one. So if you say you dont sing or dance, I betcha do.

[russotto]

I neither sing nor dance (no coordination) nor even listen to music.

However, I still dislike the RIAA. They say piracy is killing them -- so you music lovers, pirate away!

[Uryoces]

2 beers and I was up singing "Don't you forget about me". I really want to sing Nine Inch Nails' "Sin". NIN Karaoke. Bwa ha ha ha!