The record labels are cooked
On the social media app Instagram Threads I saw a millennial “evil record label executive' (his words) saying “Show me your music and i'll tell you why you don't have what it takes.” I think he mainly wanted to have fun trolling hard working artists who are stuck in the 100 monthly listeners club. He could have been looking for the one golden nugget to sign.
The top comment criticized him obliquely. It was a Frank Zappa quote about the decline of the music business, that I heard before and agreed with, from this video.
“Remember the 60s?” says Frank Zappa in the interview above, “that era that a lot of people have these glorious memories of?... they really weren't that great, those years.” Ever the grumpy uncle. But Zappa does get nostalgic for one thing, and it's an unexpected one: the music business. “One thing that did happen in the 60s,” he says, “was some music of an unusual and experimental nature did get recorded, did get released.” The executives of the day were “cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, 'I don't know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!””
“We were better off with those guys,” says Zappa, “than we are with the hip, young executives,” making decisions about what people should hear. The hippies are more conservative than the conservative “old guys” ever were. This Zappa of 1987 recommends getting back to the “who knows?” approach, “that entrepreneurial spirit” of the grand old industry barons of the 60s.”
Makes me think of the obsessive quest I've been on to surface the underknown music of the 2020s. There's still boundary pushing talent with Gen Z taking the reins of music.
All those breakcore YouTube mixes with a million views filled with small bedroom projects.
https://youtu.be/2i9vG5ZtK3c
A few of the bands in the latest screamo revival. Though others sound like a watered down version of Indian Summer or Saetia. The pluggnb and trap remixes teenagers are cooking up that they release as FL Studio screen recordings first.
https://youtu.be/ytUK2Bi2bVo
The haunting music of The Caretaker has been a viral TikTok sound a few times. Many zoomers have listened to his disorienting, depressing 6 hour album about the feeling of slowy losing your mind and dying of Alzheimers based dementia, in full.
https://youtu.be/wJWksPWDKOc
I even discovered the next young prolific outsider musician John Idalis. The spirit of The Space Lady and Xenia Rubinos has found a zoomer to carry that weird torch.
https://youtu.be/-jV3Y7LEXj0
I have an Instagram mutual who's a teenager. He's a fan of my old screamo band All My Wishes Were Thrown Down a Well and Should Die There. As we blew up 10 years later, I only answered new fanmail from the boys. I was interacting with adults as a 15 year old at metalcore and hardcore punk shows in 2009. I think it's appropriate. This kid has been plugged into ambient trap music since 2017. He showed me this unknown producer ijji from the microgenre to come. I couldn't locate the Soundcloud originally, so I downloaded all the tracks from this fan on Soulseek.
https://on.soundcloud.com/yvyVhBjaHgtTWBfp7
He also recommended 990x, which I haven't had a chance to listen to yet.
https://on.soundcloud.com/U4UkLi8YfAiCDakk6
The people want weirder music. We're tired of the latest cut and paste squeaky clean alt rock and popstars every season. TikTok audiences have even wisened up to the cliche music promotion tricks. “Did I just write the song of the summer??” videos of musicians playing the lead single in their cars are met with an outraged comment section.
The fact that the artists I linked aren't on record labels' radars shows that the hipster-turned-yuppie A&Rs simply aren't doing their jobs. They need to scour TikTok, Reels, YouTube, and Soundcloud like I have. Find the projects with rough recordings who are adept at making memes.
Fund a debut album, hire the best songwriters to fill out the sound, just like you would for Chappell Roan, and take the risk. The same backing that created all the classic rock that continues to drive our nostalgia. You won't find these artists playing to 50 people at a bar show in Hollywood. They're not 21 yet, and they're digital natives, so they publish from their iPhones first.
But really, many of these kids will do better staying independent. You can distribute your music to Spotify on your own for very cheap. The labels expect the big musicians themselves to do the dirty work of creating viral TikTok trends for the singles anyhow
The major labels don't have a plan for beating AI generated music either. Which is already proliferating on Spotify due to Udio and Suno. But that's another blog post.