…or, How I Quit My Job and Made a Record.
First, the plug. I have a record available for purchase on Bandcamp. You can hear it for free on YouTube.
I’ve spent the last four years of being disconnected from the world as a long-haul trucker. During that period, I had no time for anything resembling a hobby, and what time I had at home was too scarce to spend on recording. When I decided to call it quits, I gathered up some ideas from a sketchbook I’d been keeping and decided to hammer them in shape.
In just over a month, I’d recorded about 45 minutes of material. This is where things get interesting and novel for me. Anyone can access my music, and in a form that I’ve chosen. I’m not beholden to a major corporation to “advise” me on the process, manufacture the media, and (hopefully) market it correctly.
When I first became involved in the business in the early 1990’s, that would have been unthinkable.
What follows is an account of the death of the music industry and its subsequent rebirth in a form that’s much more responsive to artists and listeners. Most of it is based on my personal experiences as a performer, an engineer, and a buyer for a major record-store chain. It’s not the whole story, and it’s shot through with bias, but I hope I can tell you a more nuanced narrative and explain why it’s important.
(If you want to do some supplemental reading, I highly recommend Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction and Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free.)
It’s an odd thing, really, and shot through with irony. It’s also much deeper than the “Napster killed everything” story we always hear. The corporations who claimed the mantle of promoting music did everything they could to act as gatekeepers, and it was that situation that led to their demise. Napster was a symptom, but the disease was a glut of lackluster material, skyrocketing prices, and an industry that thought it was a better idea to sue its own customers rather than adapt to new distribution and marketing models.
Tomorrow, we take a trip back to the Reagan years, when the first cracks started showing.