Video didn’t kill the radio star, and neither did illegal downloads. What did it? The CD. No, I mean it. Well, it wasn’t really the CD as much as it was the skip button. Once every listener had the power to bounce around an album from the comfort of their couch with that remote, the artist was fighting an uphill battle. Sure you could fast forward a cassette, but you always went just a little to far and ended up a few seconds into the song. Then tried to rewind it back to the beginning, and you went too far. And before that, you had to get up and walk over to the turntable, lift the needle and place it at the start of your song.
Musicians, and more so record companies, were screwed once the CD player was in every house, car and backpack in America. Singles were always important, going back to when 45s came out,. The market wasn’t saturated as it was in the early 90’s, but there wasn’t someone new release that was hyped by a label coming out every other Tuesday. MTV changed things, a video could make or break someone. If you had a good song and video, you could move units. But once someone had the CD, all that mattered were the singles. The songs they know is what the average listener cares about, and with a CD they could skip from familiar song to familiar song.
And that’s what killed the album and screwed up music. Fans learned the popular songs, but didn’t spend as much time listening to the rest of the CD. It used to be, at least this is how I picture it, that someone bought an album because a single sucked them in. Then they listened to the rest of it, and that’s where they found the songs they could relate too more personally. Today, I’d say 9 out of 10 times my favorite song on a CD wasn’t released as a single. But after everyone became so used to just playing their favorite songs thanks to that handy skip button, it was only natural to download one or two songs.
But shit, I’m even boring myself with this now. It all sounded so much better in my head, but I’ve written too much to just scrap it. So you’ll suffer through reading it, sorry. Basically, it's like this: CD's have done to music what blogs have done to reading. It's real easy to move on to something else now. As you may have already done.
2 comments:
I hate to burst your intellectual and contextual bubble, but the 8-track tape provided the ability to skip with the push of a button (as, technically, did auto-reverse on the standard cassette deck). If you're unfamiliar with either or these items, check with your pops. He'll verify it.
Dad never had an 8track. But even so, you couldn't do so with a remote. You had to get up and press it. TV needed more channels when we all got remotes, not just cause we had cable. 32 channels was more than enough when changing them meant getting up and walking over to the TV.
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