I saw this question on a forum today. A Guitar Hero forum, in fact. I can almost see all your jaws dropping. Har har har. Being the geek I am, I had a million things to say on this topic, but I didn't feel like catching up on eight pages of responses and fighting with little pre-teen kids whose entire internet experience consists of scorehero and myspace. The internet is an ugly place, might as well let them have what few sanctuaries they can find.
I read a few initial responses, with most of them saying how horrible it will be when our kids are singing "crank dat soulja boy" twenty years from now. I guess I'll start with that point.
There will always be shitty pop songs. Always. Some of them will grow to be endearing, some will die horrible, unjustified deaths only to be rediscovered decades later, and some will latch onto the very essence of pop culture itself and continue to torture us until the end of time. For example, in that order: The Turtles - Happy Together; the entire late-50s, early-60s garage rock sub-culture; Village People - Y.M.C.A.
I hope that made sense. I don't think it did.
The point is, history repeats itself. And nothing in music is more repetitive than pop music. Case in point: we're currently going through an 80s pop revival. Which isn't a bad thing, not at all. Look at a band like MGMT--straight out of the 80s, but with a wonderful modern touch all its own. At the same time, however, you have bands like Hellogoodbye. So it's not all good.
As far as the influence of pop music today, I'd say there will be none. There's nothing original on MTV these days. Rock bands are rehashing the 80s, and rappers are either ghetto-mother-fuckers or Biggie wannabes cashing in on their thirty seconds. Nothing is happening on the surface, at all.
But below the surface...that's an entirely different story.
To put it simply, the music industry as we have come to know it for 40+ years is dying a slow, painful death at the hands of the internet and an ever-growing revolution against paying $15 for a ten-track CD.
Can you remember the last time you bought a CD? Probably not. My last physical purchase was most likely Pink Floyd's seminal Dark Side of the Moon, and that was...11th grade.
That's not to say no one pays for music anymore. iTunes still makes a killing selling music
digitally, and has been completely dwarfing CD sales for nearly a decade. And at a pretty good deal to boot. 99 cents a track and $9.99 an album is nothing to turn your nose up at. Plus they have this new "complete your album" deal at an even more reduced price.
The record companies make a profit off digital sales, sure--but nothing like the dough they were bringing in with physical sales.
But there's a much, much, much bigger problem on the horizon. Hell, fuck the horizon--the shit has already hit the fan, whether they want to admit it or not, and it's only a matter of time before they give in to it.
Free music.
Do you remember when Napster exploded? I do. 1999-2000. I was too young to appreciate the moment my dad explained that we could download any music in the world we wanted, for nothing. File sharing, they called it, trading music, but for all intents and purposes it was stealing music. The industry's never been the same since.
Applications and websites come and go, but if you pay attention, there are a truly staggering amount of ways to get free music online. Peer-to-peer networks. Torrents. Rapidshares. Ripping audio. Shared folders. It's everywhere. It's a force that cannot and will not be stopped. Child pornography has already proven to the world that no matter how determined governments become, the internet will always win. People will always find a way. And until the record industry realizes this, they will continue to shrink until they ultimately die.
It's not just the listeners revolting against the industry anymore--now even the artists are circumventing the traditional method of music sales. After the mind-blowing "name-your-own-price" release of Radiohead's In Rainbows, artists have begun dropping their labels and releasing albums on their own terms, in many cases without a price tag. Already, label giant EMI has seen numerous artists jump ship for private release systems, resulting in layoffs and the overall decline of the company.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The Pirate Bay, one of the most influential torrent trackers in the world, just entered the list of the 100 most visited web sites on the internet, the second torrent site to do so. Record sales continue to decline. Lawsuits and government actions continue to stall and fail in court. And all the while, the record industry refuses to work with the digital music phenomenon, insisting instead on fighting an impossible battle.
Web sites, television, radio, movies...what do all these things have in common?
They make money in the same way: advertising.
Why in the hell haven't the record companies figured this out too?
If an advertising-fueled torrent tracker or P-2-P service appeared on the internet, the response would simply be unimaginable. Free music, without the fear of being sued by the powers that be, who are sitting back raking in astronomical advertising fees from companies foaming at the mouth at the thought of targeting the entire computer owning, music listening demographic, across age, race, income, and location.
On one hand, it's mind-blowing that such a venture hasn't been attempted.
(Actually, it has. Sort of. Q-Trax launched a few months ago, announcing a free, advertising-based P-2-P service supported by the major labels. Unfortunately, the labels denied such a deal, and the site never launched. It was rumored to be one big stock scam. Sigh.)
On the other hand, you can't expect a billion-dollar industry to roll over and accept vastly inferior profits.
With no end to free music in sight and the music industry unwilling to cooperate, it's just a matter of time before the industry collapses altogether, or they finally bow to the will of the internet, changing the face of music as we know it.
And that, my friends, will be the influence of 21st century music: the combined efforts of internet downloads and indie music coupling to either destroy or revolutionize music as we know it.
