Have you listend to the radio recently? If your reading this blog i suspect not. Well let me tell you what your missing. Nothing.

I tuned into the local rock station for about two hours a couple of weeks ago (a thing that i haven’t done since i got a cd player over 10 years ago). I had never heard a song by a majority of the bands in rotation. Probably for good reason. Hinder, Hollywood Undead, Sixx A.M., and other new bands sounded like replicas of what Nickelback has been doing their entire career. Almost everything that i found myself nodding along to was released at least 5 years ago. If you take out the ‘classic’ songs the station had about an hour and a half of new material they were hawking for your listening pleasure. (Pain?)

It’s an A&R’s job to find new talent. It’s the record labels job to take the talent and give it the right atmosphere to make decent or incredible material that they then make the public aware of. Today all my music recommendations come from MP3 websites, blogs or my friends. (Who probably found out about their recommendations through the previous.) A large amount of the bands that i listen to are either indie labels or smaller satellites of larger record labels, neither of which have the advertising dollars to be brought to my attention though major media, leaving their talent to do all of the talking. With so many bands to choose from, if i don’t like one after my second time giving them a try i can move on. If I seem to find music that me and my friends love, from the unlimited amount of bands on the internet, why can’t the record labels?

Since the record labels leave it up to us to find the music that we enjoy, the artist have started leaving the record labels to bring the music directly to us. Last year Radiohead released their album ‘In Rainbows’ as pay what you want, through their own website. A move they chose even though their last two albums each went double platinum with the backing of a major label. Soon after bands such as N.I.N. and Girl Talk followed suit each releasing albums through their own websites.

Music is about the artist getting out their creative process and the fan connecting with the artist. The fans will support anything that brings them closer to the artist. The artist will give the fans what they want as long as there are fans to give it to. It’s only natural for both the artist and the fan to want to get rid of anything that impedes that connection. With the internet letting us all be our own A&R, the major label has to figure out where it fits in the jigsaw before it falls out of place, for good.

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