Last week I decided to set up an ordinary stereo at my office desk so I could listen to the radio. It was pretty cool to begin with, as the local stations are playing gobs of Avenged Sevenfold, NIN, Korn, etc…
But then every day… hearing the same songs… It made me realize that I do not want Heavy Metal to make a comeback into the popular music arena like it was in the 80s. As much as I love the music, WRRV has me on the verge of hating Korn and Avenged Sevenfold, two acts which I have always been a fan of.
Every time I interact with the legacy music industry I find something else which reinforces how antiquated and dying it is. Simply put, in an age of satellite radio for $10 a month, iPods, MP3s, streaming audio… Where exactly does radio belong? Normally in any given area there are 1 or 2 stations which cover a genre appreciated by the average listener. If those stations play the exact same songs at an offset of mere minutes, it gets downright irritating.
Listening to Bat Country by Avenged Sevenfold two dozen times over the course of a week is not going to get me to purchase the latest Avenged Sevenfold album. At this point it almost has me wanting to ignore it. The music industry has completely missed the boat here folks. The days of a single selling an album have all but passed. Every on-line outlet has the ability to preview the rest of the songs on a given album. People are spending $.99 on the song they want and not $16 on a full CD.
The CD is dead, the single CD is dead, and sooner than later the avenues which feed those sales will in turn dry up.
At this point, there are only two venues for live streaming content, talk and satellite radio. Neither one depend on the aged tactics of big-music to gain listeners. What they do depend on is dynamic original talent and marketing campaigns which identify with the 21st century digital fan.
Sadly, the folks that big music markets to simply cannot afford their bullshit anymore.
