9 ms·

Investigating Rock Radio with Rick Beato

88 points by clwg 3y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Rick Beato is pretty cool. I remember a rant, he did about copyright takedown crap[0] (He's actually done a bunch of them). > Making videos is really hard. This has been my experience, which is why I tend to write longform, instead of producing videos (which I know would be a lot more popular). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqvuEal2P2E&t=60s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqvuEal2P2E&t=60s
technofiend 3y ago
I have a lot of respect for Rick's technical and music skills. But there's one place he and I diverge which is compression. I was really surprised to hear him compliment some really compressed audio saying it made it really crunchy, or something. Besides Clear Channel, at least IMHO over compression also drove people away from genres that used it. See the Loudness Wars Wikipedia entry for a good explanation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war I was a rock listener for a long time, but my local rock station spent the 80s and 90s adjusting their format just enough to kill off competitors and then swinging back to their tried and true format of the same tired songs. So some of this is definitely self-inflicted both in terms of format (unimaginative and rarely updated playlists) and presentation (heavily compressed audio) that drove me away.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  And quantised drums RB has a video on it (it's a bit older video), but it's one thing that is you hear you can't unhear. And it has a negative effect overall
  - technofiend 3y ago
    Yeah, excellent example: the remastered ZZ Top records which substituted drum machines for Frank Beard. Not sure when that was done exactly but the streaming versions of their songs sound much worse than the vinyl ones do because of that weirdly echoey and metronomic drum machine.
    - raverbashing 3y ago
      Nah, it's worse than playing to a drum machine Because they take the song and quantise everything post recording
nateb2022 3y ago
I think we have to differentiate between the industry itself and the artist community in general. The industry as it existed in prior years may be gone for good, however in my experience, there are a ton of really good alt/indie artists performing on the local level, in small venues such as the Java Barn at St. Lawrence University -- a student-run venue with a history of featuring awesome up-and-coming acts.[0][1] These artists also generally publish music on Spotify (e.g. Moxie)[2], and although they may never enjoy the widespread success of making it to the Billboard Hot 100, you can find them in almost any part of America producing awesome music. [0]: https://www.instagram.com/javabarnmusic/ https://www.instagram.com/javabarnmusic/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Barn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Barn [2]: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4K2IUtmY2APWh6mdxzBOZF https://open.spotify.com/artist/4K2IUtmY2APWh6mdxzBOZF
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Probably any college radio station is going to be similar. The point they make in the article though is that with the death of the industry we no longer have a collective listening experience. It's like the insane movie streaming world we live in now. Ever hear people these days around the water cooler? Ann: "Been binge-watching Undersea Cable Warriors — amazing." Bob: "Haven't seen it, me and the S.O. are hooked on The Harmonograph Mystery." Carol: "Wow, Return to Topkapi was amazing. Anyone else see it?" : :
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Wait, which is it: that we no longer have a collective listening experience to enrich rock music, or that we no longer have a competition among diverse, idiosyncratic stations exposing us to varying DJ tastes? It seems like it'd need to be one or the other, if we're describing a macro phenomenon like "the death of rock".
    - Retric 3y ago
      You need both, without a shared experience you just end up with fragmentation not a cohesive genre. However, without organic discovery of new talent you lose touch with the underlying culture. Payola is just part of the story. The finite number of large radio stations enforced a shared experience independent of what specifically was on air. The US used to regularly see new music genres become popular. From 1910’s there was Jazz, Blues, Swing, R&B, Rock, Disco, Rap, and Punk etc. Yet the last 20 years hasn’t seen the same kind of cohesive movements.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
By Rock, it seems they mean guitars. No doubt the industry was dripping with greed and corruption, but what does that have to do with the growth of the synths, drum machines, Hip Hop, etc.? Tastes change. Rock became one of many genres. Case closed. p.s. And if you still want Indie guitars I would start with Fontaines DC.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >By Rock, it seems they mean guitars Yeah, so? It's not rock if there's no guitars, just like you can't have classical music without an orchestra (with strings, etc.), you can't have big band without trumpets, etc. >Tastes change. Rock became one of many genres. Case closed. Strangely, though, rock remains highly popular in other places like Japan and Europe. It's only America where people are all listening to hip-hop all the time.
  - bossyTeacher 3y ago
    > It's not rock if there's no guitars That's just your opinion. I invite you to open your mind and listen to Billy Joel. Hope you enjoy it :)
  - tzs 3y ago
    > [...] just like you can't have classical music without an orchestra (with strings, etc.) [...] The large body of Bach's work for solo keyboard instruments would suggestion otherwise. Or Beethoven's many works for solo piano. Or Mozart's.
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      By mentioning Bach, you proved my point. That is, tastes change. Bach is no longer top of the charts either. Put another way, the author's argument is effectively "the music I like and the music I grew up on is no longer the genre of the mainstream." Wow. That's insightful. Life moved on? As if he's never read a history book. FFS...you're attacking me? Grow the fuck up. Gawd this is getting tiring. p.s. Rock as defined by the R&R Hall of Fame is *not* limited to guitars. Whose definition do we believe, the article of the HoF? Gee. Tough call when you're practicing to be another HN prickly person, eh. Apology accepted. Next time just move along. Thanks.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Wow, so much to rage about. Radio appears to deserve most of the wrath — or rather Corporate Radio™ as brought about by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. If radio is dying, it should and it deserves it. I confess that I would so embrace the widespread emergence of pirate radio stations. Honestly, there is nothing worthwhile for me on the dial anyway. And then there is the record industry itself that deserves so much blame. I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened. The post makes it clear what we all knew — the music industry was raking in the cash reselling us our albums at twice the price with little overhead.
- hondo77 3y ago
  > I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened. Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this.
- raydev 3y ago
  > We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened. Is this in the US? By the end of the 90s, before piracy truly took off, Best Buy and Walmart were regularly selling new CDs, big releases from big names, for $12-13, and they'd pretty quickly get discounted to $10 or less depending on age. Plenty of popular 80s CDs could be had brand new for $5. As a music collector, Best Buy was amazing. Racks upon racks, seemingly endless selection of indie bands, I even talked up a guy to order in some imports for me (those were definitely $20+ though). I do remember going to the mall during this time and seeing stores like Sam Goody sell the same stuff as Best Buy, but SG's CDs were all $18 and $20. It never made sense to me, and I don't know how they lasted so long.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    Best Buy used to be an AMAZING media company! To your point, they had everything! And it was all 30% to 40% cheaper than anybody else was selling it. The same was true for movies for a while. Then physical media collapsed. Don't know how Best Buy stays in business these days.
greatquux 3y ago
Rock looked pretty good at the 4 Phish shows last week at MSG!
- smrq 3y ago
  I have a theory that jam bands appear more popular than they actually are, because they seem to have a higher percentage of fans willing to follow them around on tour. (Assuming a metric of popularity where selling Bob 3 tickets means less than selling Alice, Bob, and Charlie 1 ticket apiece.) In this Phish example, I'd wager that the percentage of attendees who went to all 4 shows is unusually high, compared to what a band from other genres might get. Not to discount the achievement of selling out MSG in the first place, by the way. Phish bores me to tears (to the fans: yes, even live in person) but I can't deny that plenty of people go nuts for them.
at-fates-hands 3y ago
"It’s hard to imagine now just how much money the label industry made from reissuing its back catalog on $18.98 list price compact discs." He forgot to mention they didn't even try to improve the quality of those reissues either. The labels put disclaimers on every one of those CD's that said all the original music was recorded on analog equipment so the "reproduction" may not be perfect. I still vividly remember replacing my old U2 tapes (War, October, Boy) with their CD's and then being disgusted to find they sounded worse than my tapes did.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  While I know many albums didn't get transferred to CD with great attention to detail in the 80s... they'd had to have gone out of their way to make the CD sound worse than cassette.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  And then, a few years later they would make more money from this back catalog by selling "re-mastered" versions of the same albums again. But, at least it seems that by now they had learned how to correctly do a CD from analog sources, so it was usually not a complete rip-off.
  - hondo77 3y ago
    Then the deluxe versions. Then the 24-bit remasters. Then the flattened remixes (which are actually pretty nice). Etc.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    The problem there was that some re-masters were really good, while others were even worse, with massive compression and clipping.
tptacek 3y ago
There are some wild takes in this video. I think it's more accurate to say this describes the downfall of the rock music industry, as experienced by seasoned professionals like Rick Beato. That's not nothing! I'm a rockist and enjoy Beato's work. But it's hardly the whole art form. Take the opening claim of the video: the Telecommunications Act of 1996, by deregulating terrestrial radio, allowed consolidation that eliminated competition and killed rock radio and, thus, rock music. Couple problems here: * Linear radio was dead by 2000 no matter how the industry was regulated because linear programming sucks and people don't like it. By the time XM and Sirius launched, radio was a medium almost exclusively targeting drive time commuters. To say the Telecommunications Act killed rock, you have to establish that linear rock radio could have survived the iPod. Come on. * There wasn't meaningful competition even before consolidation. In most markets, a single AOR station and a single Alternative station was all you had before Clear Channel came around. Barber talks about what was lost here, but describes a pretty cynical process of test-marketing bands in Chattanooga and then convincing Nashville and Omaha to give the survivor bands a chance. I believe this worked, and I believe this got some bands airtime that wouldn't have (I assume this is the entire reason I ever heard Live or the Gin Blossoms), but this process couldn't possibly have defined the pre-Telecom-Act sound of the 90s, since many (maybe most?) of those bands were either defaulted in from being in the Seattle scene, or came from the UK. The death of radio didn't kill rock music. The death of radio killed radio. Beato claims that within a few years of consolidation, you could look at what was playing on rock radio and see that it was all the same producers using the same equipment and the same samples. I am a little bit obsessive about late-90s alt-rock radio and can tell you that you can find radio station playlists from that era, and check this for yourself. I may not like Blink 182, but I can report that Jerry Finn didn't produce The Red Hot Chili Pepper or Korn. (An aside: shared producers on contemporaneous popular records also isn't a smoking gun; see: Steve Albini, Flood, and Butch Vig; sometimes, producers just have a moment, and, like the front page of HN, there isn't a whole lot of space for these tracks to spread out in). Beato has a very Albini-esque take on the points and cuts taken from recording budgets and contracts. Somebody is inevitably going to post that Albini piece. I'll just point out that David Lowery from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker wrote a very long pseudo-rebuttal to that, and his math checks out: take the (say) $250k the label is nominally fronting for an album, and any sane, generous-to-the-artists set of points and cuts possible, and nobody in a 4-piece band is making an amazing living off the albums. What seems to have been common knowledge is: the bands get advanced money, nobody ever expects to recoup on royalties (even if the labels weren't rapacious, there just wasn't that much money there!), and you made your money touring and on merch, if at all. What does seem to be the case is that the contraction and ultimate demise of this system of label contracts, producers, studios, and session musicians was really disruptive for people like Rick Beato, who were making their money doing professional artistic services. Fair enough. But when I think of the health of rock music, I don't so much think about whether the label can afford Rick Beato, or a session drummer; the record is a document of the work of the artists themselves, and 70s CBGB scene did just fine producing timeless stuff without label-supported session musicians. (Another wild claim here: Napster destroyed the $18 CD because the studios were no longer paying for high-quality CDs, so there was only a single good track on an album, because the studios weren't paying to gloss up all 11 tracks. Pretty sure that's not how In Utero worked!)
dev1ycan 3y ago
I mean Japan has a thriving rock industry so like, yeah
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  In fact, the Ventures were huge there for decades, long after they'd mostly faded in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ventures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ventures
dukeofdoom 3y ago
[flagged]
- huytersd 3y ago
  Country music was never good post the Johnny Cash era. There’s no grit or twang, sounds like a bunch of elevator music.
  - scarecrowbob 3y ago
    I play a a lot of country music, mostly on bass and pedal steel. So by trade, I am around a lot of it. You're welcome to come to whatever conclusions you like. There is a lot of absolute crap out there. At the same time, there's a lot of cool stuff, too. Charlie Crockett is the real deal, Sierra Ferrel, Dale Watson, Tyler Childers. And that's just the folks currently doing stuff, ignoring Townes, Guy, Steve Earle, Jerry Jeff etc. And that's also ignoring the vast numbers of pretty good songwriters playing this stuff at local bars.
    - dcist 3y ago
      Charlie Crockett is great!
    - randomdata 3y ago
      The local "country" music station keeps a log of the tracks played over the past ~12 hours. I see none of those artists on the list, and certainly no record of any bar musicians making the cut. The list is mostly the usual suspects – many of which were played multiple times – playing the aforementioned "elevator music", and curiously a couple of Elvis Presley rock spins in the wee morning hours. While one station may not be entirely representative, I expect you will find a similar story across most country stations. I'm not sure you have made a compelling case that country has risen up to replace rock music. You can name just as many current rock musicians doing great things. But that doesn't mean rock isn't dead. The topic is in reference to what is popular. There is a strong case to be made that country did die after the Cash era.
grensley 3y ago
We live in a decentralized free-for-all era, and I think the result is better music, but they're nostalgic for that "collective experience". Like so many things it got so centralized that it eventually crumbled under its own weight. As soon as they said the words "Producer Manager" I was like "where have I heard that acronym before"?
- drukenemo 3y ago
  To me, with the exception of maybe a few genres in electronic, music has never been so bland and boring as of the 2000’s. Decentralization has something to do with it, as people’s attention is heavily fragmented and mostly very few marketable artists are promoted enough to stick their head out of the water. Risk taking is now at a minimum-ever for recording labels.
joshmarinacci 3y ago
I was a college student at Georgia Tech in the 90s, and I remember wondering why 99x was better than the other stations. Now I know why. By the mid-2000s I recall British stations still having decent rock when it was already tanking in America.

88 points by clwg 3y ago

Rick Beato is pretty cool. I remember a rant, he did about copyright takedown crap[0] (He's actually done a bunch of them). > Making videos is really hard. This has been my experience, which is why I tend to write longform, instead of producing videos (which I know would be a lot more popular). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqvuEal2P2E&t=60s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqvuEal2P2E&t=60s

technofiend 3y ago

I have a lot of respect for Rick's technical and music skills. But there's one place he and I diverge which is compression. I was really surprised to hear him compliment some really compressed audio saying it made it really crunchy, or something. Besides Clear Channel, at least IMHO over compression also drove people away from genres that used it. See the Loudness Wars Wikipedia entry for a good explanation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war I was a rock listener for a long time, but my local rock station spent the 80s and 90s adjusting their format just enough to kill off competitors and then swinging back to their tried and true format of the same tired songs. So some of this is definitely self-inflicted both in terms of format (unimaginative and rarely updated playlists) and presentation (heavily compressed audio) that drove me away.

raverbashing 3y ago
And quantised drums RB has a video on it (it's a bit older video), but it's one thing that is you hear you can't unhear. And it has a negative effect overall
- technofiend 3y ago
  Yeah, excellent example: the remastered ZZ Top records which substituted drum machines for Frank Beard. Not sure when that was done exactly but the streaming versions of their songs sound much worse than the vinyl ones do because of that weirdly echoey and metronomic drum machine.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Nah, it's worse than playing to a drum machine Because they take the song and quantise everything post recording

nateb2022 3y ago

I think we have to differentiate between the industry itself and the artist community in general. The industry as it existed in prior years may be gone for good, however in my experience, there are a ton of really good alt/indie artists performing on the local level, in small venues such as the Java Barn at St. Lawrence University -- a student-run venue with a history of featuring awesome up-and-coming acts.[0][1] These artists also generally publish music on Spotify (e.g. Moxie)[2], and although they may never enjoy the widespread success of making it to the Billboard Hot 100, you can find them in almost any part of America producing awesome music. [0]: https://www.instagram.com/javabarnmusic/ https://www.instagram.com/javabarnmusic/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Barn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Barn [2]: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4K2IUtmY2APWh6mdxzBOZF https://open.spotify.com/artist/4K2IUtmY2APWh6mdxzBOZF

JKCalhoun 3y ago
Probably any college radio station is going to be similar. The point they make in the article though is that with the death of the industry we no longer have a collective listening experience. It's like the insane movie streaming world we live in now. Ever hear people these days around the water cooler? Ann: "Been binge-watching Undersea Cable Warriors — amazing." Bob: "Haven't seen it, me and the S.O. are hooked on The Harmonograph Mystery." Carol: "Wow, Return to Topkapi was amazing. Anyone else see it?" : :
- tptacek 3y ago
  Wait, which is it: that we no longer have a collective listening experience to enrich rock music, or that we no longer have a competition among diverse, idiosyncratic stations exposing us to varying DJ tastes? It seems like it'd need to be one or the other, if we're describing a macro phenomenon like "the death of rock".
  - Retric 3y ago
    You need both, without a shared experience you just end up with fragmentation not a cohesive genre. However, without organic discovery of new talent you lose touch with the underlying culture. Payola is just part of the story. The finite number of large radio stations enforced a shared experience independent of what specifically was on air. The US used to regularly see new music genres become popular. From 1910’s there was Jazz, Blues, Swing, R&B, Rock, Disco, Rap, and Punk etc. Yet the last 20 years hasn’t seen the same kind of cohesive movements.

chiefalchemist 3y ago

By Rock, it seems they mean guitars. No doubt the industry was dripping with greed and corruption, but what does that have to do with the growth of the synths, drum machines, Hip Hop, etc.? Tastes change. Rock became one of many genres. Case closed. p.s. And if you still want Indie guitars I would start with Fontaines DC.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shiroiuma 3y ago
>By Rock, it seems they mean guitars Yeah, so? It's not rock if there's no guitars, just like you can't have classical music without an orchestra (with strings, etc.), you can't have big band without trumpets, etc. >Tastes change. Rock became one of many genres. Case closed. Strangely, though, rock remains highly popular in other places like Japan and Europe. It's only America where people are all listening to hip-hop all the time.
- bossyTeacher 3y ago
  > It's not rock if there's no guitars That's just your opinion. I invite you to open your mind and listen to Billy Joel. Hope you enjoy it :)
- tzs 3y ago
  > [...] just like you can't have classical music without an orchestra (with strings, etc.) [...] The large body of Bach's work for solo keyboard instruments would suggestion otherwise. Or Beethoven's many works for solo piano. Or Mozart's.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    By mentioning Bach, you proved my point. That is, tastes change. Bach is no longer top of the charts either. Put another way, the author's argument is effectively "the music I like and the music I grew up on is no longer the genre of the mainstream." Wow. That's insightful. Life moved on? As if he's never read a history book. FFS...you're attacking me? Grow the fuck up. Gawd this is getting tiring. p.s. Rock as defined by the R&R Hall of Fame is *not* limited to guitars. Whose definition do we believe, the article of the HoF? Gee. Tough call when you're practicing to be another HN prickly person, eh. Apology accepted. Next time just move along. Thanks.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Wow, so much to rage about. Radio appears to deserve most of the wrath — or rather Corporate Radio™ as brought about by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. If radio is dying, it should and it deserves it. I confess that I would so embrace the widespread emergence of pirate radio stations. Honestly, there is nothing worthwhile for me on the dial anyway. And then there is the record industry itself that deserves so much blame. I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened. The post makes it clear what we all knew — the music industry was raking in the cash reselling us our albums at twice the price with little overhead.

hondo77 3y ago
> I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened. Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this.
raydev 3y ago
> We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened. Is this in the US? By the end of the 90s, before piracy truly took off, Best Buy and Walmart were regularly selling new CDs, big releases from big names, for $12-13, and they'd pretty quickly get discounted to $10 or less depending on age. Plenty of popular 80s CDs could be had brand new for $5. As a music collector, Best Buy was amazing. Racks upon racks, seemingly endless selection of indie bands, I even talked up a guy to order in some imports for me (those were definitely $20+ though). I do remember going to the mall during this time and seeing stores like Sam Goody sell the same stuff as Best Buy, but SG's CDs were all $18 and $20. It never made sense to me, and I don't know how they lasted so long.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Best Buy used to be an AMAZING media company! To your point, they had everything! And it was all 30% to 40% cheaper than anybody else was selling it. The same was true for movies for a while. Then physical media collapsed. Don't know how Best Buy stays in business these days.

greatquux 3y ago

Rock looked pretty good at the 4 Phish shows last week at MSG!

smrq 3y ago
I have a theory that jam bands appear more popular than they actually are, because they seem to have a higher percentage of fans willing to follow them around on tour. (Assuming a metric of popularity where selling Bob 3 tickets means less than selling Alice, Bob, and Charlie 1 ticket apiece.) In this Phish example, I'd wager that the percentage of attendees who went to all 4 shows is unusually high, compared to what a band from other genres might get. Not to discount the achievement of selling out MSG in the first place, by the way. Phish bores me to tears (to the fans: yes, even live in person) but I can't deny that plenty of people go nuts for them.

at-fates-hands 3y ago

"It’s hard to imagine now just how much money the label industry made from reissuing its back catalog on $18.98 list price compact discs." He forgot to mention they didn't even try to improve the quality of those reissues either. The labels put disclaimers on every one of those CD's that said all the original music was recorded on analog equipment so the "reproduction" may not be perfect. I still vividly remember replacing my old U2 tapes (War, October, Boy) with their CD's and then being disgusted to find they sounded worse than my tapes did.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
While I know many albums didn't get transferred to CD with great attention to detail in the 80s... they'd had to have gone out of their way to make the CD sound worse than cassette.
elzbardico 3y ago
And then, a few years later they would make more money from this back catalog by selling "re-mastered" versions of the same albums again. But, at least it seems that by now they had learned how to correctly do a CD from analog sources, so it was usually not a complete rip-off.
- hondo77 3y ago
  Then the deluxe versions. Then the 24-bit remasters. Then the flattened remixes (which are actually pretty nice). Etc.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  The problem there was that some re-masters were really good, while others were even worse, with massive compression and clipping.

tptacek 3y ago

There are some wild takes in this video. I think it's more accurate to say this describes the downfall of the rock music industry, as experienced by seasoned professionals like Rick Beato. That's not nothing! I'm a rockist and enjoy Beato's work. But it's hardly the whole art form. Take the opening claim of the video: the Telecommunications Act of 1996, by deregulating terrestrial radio, allowed consolidation that eliminated competition and killed rock radio and, thus, rock music. Couple problems here: * Linear radio was dead by 2000 no matter how the industry was regulated because linear programming sucks and people don't like it. By the time XM and Sirius launched, radio was a medium almost exclusively targeting drive time commuters. To say the Telecommunications Act killed rock, you have to establish that linear rock radio could have survived the iPod. Come on. * There wasn't meaningful competition even before consolidation. In most markets, a single AOR station and a single Alternative station was all you had before Clear Channel came around. Barber talks about what was lost here, but describes a pretty cynical process of test-marketing bands in Chattanooga and then convincing Nashville and Omaha to give the survivor bands a chance. I believe this worked, and I believe this got some bands airtime that wouldn't have (I assume this is the entire reason I ever heard Live or the Gin Blossoms), but this process couldn't possibly have defined the pre-Telecom-Act sound of the 90s, since many (maybe most?) of those bands were either defaulted in from being in the Seattle scene, or came from the UK. The death of radio didn't kill rock music. The death of radio killed radio. Beato claims that within a few years of consolidation, you could look at what was playing on rock radio and see that it was all the same producers using the same equipment and the same samples. I am a little bit obsessive about late-90s alt-rock radio and can tell you that you can find radio station playlists from that era, and check this for yourself. I may not like Blink 182, but I can report that Jerry Finn didn't produce The Red Hot Chili Pepper or Korn. (An aside: shared producers on contemporaneous popular records also isn't a smoking gun; see: Steve Albini, Flood, and Butch Vig; sometimes, producers just have a moment, and, like the front page of HN, there isn't a whole lot of space for these tracks to spread out in). Beato has a very Albini-esque take on the points and cuts taken from recording budgets and contracts. Somebody is inevitably going to post that Albini piece. I'll just point out that David Lowery from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker wrote a very long pseudo-rebuttal to that, and his math checks out: take the (say) $250k the label is nominally fronting for an album, and any sane, generous-to-the-artists set of points and cuts possible, and nobody in a 4-piece band is making an amazing living off the albums. What seems to have been common knowledge is: the bands get advanced money, nobody ever expects to recoup on royalties (even if the labels weren't rapacious, there just wasn't that much money there!), and you made your money touring and on merch, if at all. What does seem to be the case is that the contraction and ultimate demise of this system of label contracts, producers, studios, and session musicians was really disruptive for people like Rick Beato, who were making their money doing professional artistic services. Fair enough. But when I think of the health of rock music, I don't so much think about whether the label can afford Rick Beato, or a session drummer; the record is a document of the work of the artists themselves, and 70s CBGB scene did just fine producing timeless stuff without label-supported session musicians. (Another wild claim here: Napster destroyed the $18 CD because the studios were no longer paying for high-quality CDs, so there was only a single good track on an album, because the studios weren't paying to gloss up all 11 tracks. Pretty sure that's not how In Utero worked!)

dev1ycan 3y ago

I mean Japan has a thriving rock industry so like, yeah

AlbertCory 3y ago
In fact, the Ventures were huge there for decades, long after they'd mostly faded in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ventures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ventures

dukeofdoom 3y ago

[flagged]

huytersd 3y ago
Country music was never good post the Johnny Cash era. There’s no grit or twang, sounds like a bunch of elevator music.
- scarecrowbob 3y ago
  I play a a lot of country music, mostly on bass and pedal steel. So by trade, I am around a lot of it. You're welcome to come to whatever conclusions you like. There is a lot of absolute crap out there. At the same time, there's a lot of cool stuff, too. Charlie Crockett is the real deal, Sierra Ferrel, Dale Watson, Tyler Childers. And that's just the folks currently doing stuff, ignoring Townes, Guy, Steve Earle, Jerry Jeff etc. And that's also ignoring the vast numbers of pretty good songwriters playing this stuff at local bars.
  - dcist 3y ago
    Charlie Crockett is great!
  - randomdata 3y ago
    The local "country" music station keeps a log of the tracks played over the past ~12 hours. I see none of those artists on the list, and certainly no record of any bar musicians making the cut. The list is mostly the usual suspects – many of which were played multiple times – playing the aforementioned "elevator music", and curiously a couple of Elvis Presley rock spins in the wee morning hours. While one station may not be entirely representative, I expect you will find a similar story across most country stations. I'm not sure you have made a compelling case that country has risen up to replace rock music. You can name just as many current rock musicians doing great things. But that doesn't mean rock isn't dead. The topic is in reference to what is popular. There is a strong case to be made that country did die after the Cash era.

grensley 3y ago

We live in a decentralized free-for-all era, and I think the result is better music, but they're nostalgic for that "collective experience". Like so many things it got so centralized that it eventually crumbled under its own weight. As soon as they said the words "Producer Manager" I was like "where have I heard that acronym before"?

drukenemo 3y ago
To me, with the exception of maybe a few genres in electronic, music has never been so bland and boring as of the 2000’s. Decentralization has something to do with it, as people’s attention is heavily fragmented and mostly very few marketable artists are promoted enough to stick their head out of the water. Risk taking is now at a minimum-ever for recording labels.

joshmarinacci 3y ago

I was a college student at Georgia Tech in the 90s, and I remember wondering why 99x was better than the other stations. Now I know why. By the mid-2000s I recall British stations still having decent rock when it was already tanking in America.