Decline of the the Music industry as we know it....

This is something that I have been saddened over for the last number of years. Most of my career was spent in the music industry and I saw alot come and go...artists,employees,formats and of course record stores. I saw some very good friends lose their jobs and/or businesses. For the years I worked at Warner Brothers and Elektra, many colleagues and myself warned of such self-descruction. You might think that self-descruction is commonplace in the music industry huh? Well, sure it is, but not the music itself.

When I first became enamored with music was my spending spree at eight years old buying Rush, Police, Clash, and Fleetwood Mac lps. Ten years later I was working at the same store, less than ten years after that I was working for the label. I was amazed how Elektra Records could simultaneously release the Pixies and Jackson Browne, or how Sire had a roster that included Ice-T, The Replacements, and K.D. Lang. It was a dream job! As technologies changed, the bosses did not. They did not listen to younger colleagues and employees about where the internet would take us. At this point cassettes,8-Tracks and the vinyl lp were history...the latter we still cherish. The point is simple here folks, the old suits failed to care enough for the changing of technology, and began to less about the quality.

My point here is this, vinyl is pretty much still the format of choice for any nerdy music geek, but this is the same guy who loves his computer and iPod just as much. Which brings this full circle...as Britney Spears became marketable in the late nineties, so did formats, and so did box stores such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart etc. The labels ignored the snobby record dorks, this is the record store clerk. These are the people who buy every Wilco record, and whatever they can get by Sly Stone or The Seeds, these are people who embraced new technolgy, yet supported artists by any means. They did not and do not work at Wal-Mart. So, as independent record store after independent record store close, it was the doing of weak minded lifers in the industry that could not or would not keep up. The quality format beat the quality store and the quality product...period!

I say shame on them, and for all the stores we lost, I miss ya Funhouse, Desirable Discs, Repat the Beat, Switched On, and dare I say Harmony House or Tower? We did good for a longtime. Time to go listen to an old Lyres record...