The "Record" Business....part 1

One of the crappiest feelings in the world humans can have is that of disappointment. We generally tend to be optimistic, bright-eyed organisms who expect things to go our way. When they don't, and reality sets in, it's just another chunk of our youth and innocence chiseled off our very souls. Of all the disappointments we can have, loss of trust in another person in the worse.

This isn't a story about betrayal. But it does speak to the depressingly short-sightedness some people can have, and how when those people feel the taste of power, it can ruin a common human experience for A LOT of other people. I'm talking about the sorry state of the recorded music business....

I've been EXTREMELY fortunate to be a working composer for the past 15 years. My job is writing music, music that comes out of the fabric of my very being. And people who are authorized to spend part of their advertising budgets for movies have been throwing some of that towards me for quite a while now. My actual interaction with these people is fairly minimal, which means that most of the time I'm thankfully left alone to tickle the ivories, twist some knobs and do a whole lot of pointing and clicking and fader pushing - writing and producing music. Being in this fairly isolated world has largely sheltered me from the intense machinations of the film and advertising worlds, with all that money, and many careers, constantly on the line.

But now with Globus stepping out from behind the curtain and coming out into the commercial music world, I am forced to confront some demons I always knew existed, but never thought I'd actually have to interact with! People working behing the scenes in the music business do not tend to be artist-driven. They rather come from anything but musical or artistic backgrounds. I suspect many are in it because they harbor some childhood fantasy of rock stardom, or dating the prom queen that was a foot taller and had perfect skin. Not that there's anything wrong with having fantasies and acting on them, but what happens is that these folks become purveyors of cultural moralism - they ultimately become the levers which decide what is 'popular' music, and what is 'fringe' or 'eclectic'. I can point to very similar tendencies in the world of modern art. A guy can paint a canvas black, or draw several squiggly lines, and this can easily get established as high art by the 'experts' in the field. I see much of the music industry saddled with this kind of mentality (has been for decades), where the good stuff is hard to find amid a jungle of incessant and repetitive drum loops, quirky analog synth sound effects, and those same three guitar chords we've been hearing since the day we were born. I just had the pleasure of spending a few minutes (and a few dollars) on some great, accessible music on Cdbaby.com that only a relative handful of people have heard. Why can't we elevate the common musical vernacular a bit? Because most people follow, and are fearful of stepping out on a limb and exhibiting something that perhaps does not conform to the average. I'm not saying Globus is radically non-conformist - there are certainly elements of pop in our music that taps into some existing sensibilities. But could you ever imagine a Globus song being regularly played on a commercial radio station? Or MTV for that matter?

So what is this rant about anyway? Well, we're onto a new promotional campaign for a new single from EPICON. As you can imagine, this involves conforming to a certain set of rules on how to generate interest with a few powerful people in the music industry. There are certain things a label needs to spend good amounts of money on (Globus has it's own indie label, Imperativa Records), and while it's a brave new digital world out there, traditional promotional tools still rule. So you hire a plugger, PR, press agent, make a video. Right now we're mastering the single version of Orchard of Mines, and guess what the most important attribute of the single needs to be - - - how loud it bloody well is so that when they play it on the radio it will sound the same as the tune before it and after!!!!

I actually love getting my music out to a whole lot of people, because I know it has a powerful effect on some. But the road getting there is littered with catches and caveats, which I will specifically address in the next blog on this subject.

If none of the above made any sense, you're not alone. I just reread it and made a note to myself - don't embark on grand philophical treatises in the wee hours of the morning with an 18 hour workday ahead...

Part two soon....