[atlantaprog] Re: Radiohead once again changing the rules...


On Oct 2, 2007, at 5:37 PM, Wade S wrote:
I think it's pretty cool that Radiohead is doing this. It gets them in the news, it gets the music out to people, It's got all of us talking about their new album and before this thread, I didn't know there was one. Good job!
However, there's been a bit of talk about how it's good because it's anti major label in some ways. "Major Label = Bad" is an idea that I hear a lot about. It seems like there's been a lot of negativity towards the major labels since around 1991 / Nirvana. Why is that? What do you guys think is wrong with the major labels? Just curious. 

-Wade
It's been going on a lot longer than that--since the dawn of the punk era, maybe before. I think the equation is "Major Label = *Mercenary*" and "Mercenary = Not Good". (I think "mercenary" is a better word than "commercial", which could simply mean "commercially viable" in the sense that a record could make its investment money back, or even allow the musicians to support themselves. As the stakes rise, supposedly the desire to take risks tapers off. Glad they forgot that during the classic-rock era!) There's also "Major Label = Gatekeeper" and "Gatekeeper = Not Good", too. I think most of us here have come around to the understanding that the culture of music-making is better off when all the commercial success isn't hoarded by a few people at the top. Smaller labels potentially allow more musicians to make a living, though they're not the only necessary element in a new equation. The linchpin of the old equation seems essentially to be, if you'll forgive me, the major radio-major label complex. (But don't forget concerts and TV. TV wants big names to attract people to their shows; if there were no big names, would TV change to reflect that, or would they try to create their own big names?)
Still, the size of the record company isn't the only factor determining how the terrain of popular music culture lies; I think there'll always be some desire to hook into music being propagated on a large scale. For example, like millions of other people, I like going to an arena show occasionally, and you can't have that unless the acts playing it are selling enough copies--or, like Radiohead, already have a big audience. But there'll always be some form of Big Music, for better or worse; as critic Glenn McDonald (a reviewer unusually friendly to prog-rock, BTW) writes below (in an article from 2000), "...distribution isn't the choke-point in the system, it's still attention." And the people who can command--or direct-- attention in music will by defnition be Big Music. Question is, can there be ways in which anyone can get attention on a large scale? Might the likes of Myspace or YouTube provide an answer? (Never "THE answer", of course; why let one answer have all the fun?) 

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