Yet another reason to despise Mitt Romney! Fascinating post from entertainment attorney and music consulant Bob Lefsetz:
So Reagan lowers the tax rates in the eighties and suddenly incomes start to diverge. And the record execs don’t want to be on the wrong side of the divide. They no longer care about music, they just want money. The acts are disposable. It devolves into formula by the nineties. And by time MTV stops playing music, at the advent of the twenty first century, after the executives have wrung all the cash out of both new acts and old, via overpriced CDs, the scene was dead.
And I don’t know when it’s going to come back.
The acts have no soul, no backbone anymore. The first thing they want to do is sell out to the Fortune 500, do endorsement deals. You see they want the money. And their handlers are imploring them to do this, because they want their commission. Everybody’s chasing an ever-shrinking piece of the pie. And anybody who is smart is staying out. What did David Geffen say last week, “I’d kill myself if I got into the music industry now.”? As for the consumer, he’s screwed incessantly. Wall Street rolled up the concert business and ticket prices went through the roof. And very few acts want to go to paperless and keep prices low, because they too want the cash, they too want to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. They’re chasing the bankers, who make millions year in and year out. Very few musicians do, but that doesn’t mean they don’t try.
Sure, banking is boring, but tech is not. Which is why a huge swath of the youth make apps, are entrepreneurs, they want to be in control of their own destiny and make a fortune, the sky’s the limit in tech. But there’s a definite ceiling in music.
And the radio stations were rolled up, hell, Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners took Clear Channel private and squeezed out billions, despite the company being in extreme debt, and now stations have innumerable commercials and they all sound the same. And they’ll only play what’s on the major labels. Who won’t sign something left field without instant radio play, they don’t want to take that chance, there’s too much money involved.
The rich are getting richer and the musicians are being left out. And yes, piracy contributes to income deprivation, but it’s more complicated than that. Adele sold ten million albums in America and she doesn’t do any endorsements. Her music is perceived to be honest and from the heart. That’s a role model for you. But no one’s following in her footsteps. No one is taking a risk. Then again, you can’t manufacture Adele on an assembly line, you can just recognize genius and nurture it. But that’s no longer the job of the music industry.
The fact that so many are so wealthy is putting a huge dent in our cultural institutions. Sure, there were scalpers in the sixties and seventies, but no one paid ten or twenty times face value, because no one had that kind of cash. You could get a good ticket back then. It’s almost impossible today.
