Albums are dead.

Can you be more specific? I see you’re in Hong Kong. I’m happy to be corrected.

 

Thanks for the info. I differentiated my statements by country noting Japan as an outlier-I just found this Global music industry market share data - Wikipedia
And see South Korea is indeed a huge physical market.
Please note though that outside of Japan and Korea China is the only other Asian country in the top twenty recorded music markets, performing obviously very poorly if considered on a per capita basis. Also note it’s incredibly low level of physical purchase: physical is just three per cent of its music market.

Actually India is also there, just, at nineteenth biggest market with just 7% of that being physical sakes.

 

I have thought that since page 2 lol

 

My personal take is that it's kind of sad and silly how much talk there is here about albums being dead or rock music being dead, when obviously both statements are far from the truth.

It's some sort of weird form of denial.

 

The saddest thing of all is that on the first page of this thread there's a post that 'music is dead', and it's got 37 likes so far.

 

I think the industry is in some disarray (personally) but that doesn't mean music is dead ... people make great music even if we don't hear it

 

It becomes clearer when you think of it in terms of these people saying "The music I hear on TV and radio does not sound like the music I heard on tv and radio when I was in high school and everything was awesome."

Their tell is when they complain that all music today is auto-tuned Swedish electro pop and hip-hop. And yet somehow I buy between one and four new LPs a week by current artists, none of which are in either of those styles. So who are these artists and where are these records coming from? They don't care. Because they're not asking for recommendations, they're asking for validation of their decision that all music sucks now.

 

I rewatched the south park episode "you're getting old" last night. I think that sums up a lot of what has been said in this thread.

 

Are there any new rock stars? Of course. Each era yields its own crop of stars and superstars.

IMO the 80s was a pure pop era. Whether it was metal or alt/indie post-punk; all the best rock was underground (at least in the US). Now we're in another pure pop era. But as I said earlier, low sales have blurred the line between the mainstream and the underground. Underground even seems like an outdated term now.

I don't care about the movement (man!); all I want is to hear some electric guitar. If I can't find transcendence, I'll settle for kick@$$.

The album isn't dead. And rock isn't dead. Boogie's 823 is just as much of an outlier as Swift's 1.2 million. For lack of a better term; the rock album is no longer king.

The pop single is now the currency of the land. We're not going to extraordinary intensity and creativity at the top of the charts anymore. How do we cut through all the chaff to find any wheat?

Fact is I get almost all my new music from the charts. I'm out here listening to those number one singles every week. That's makes me part of the problem.

Each era also has its own unique vibe. That vibe is the one thing I haven't been able to pick on in 15 years, maybe more.

Recently SHMF posters have brought St. Vincent and Screaming Females to my attention. I checked them out on youtube and spotify. Then I bought every one of their albums. Outside of box sets, I can't recall the last time when I bought anyone's entire catalog.

I could have been listening to them for the past 10 years. I feel like some newb hearing Kill 'Em All or April Skies for the first time. I missed out (d@mmit).

I look at my favorites and everyone of them is from the late 60s/early 70s (man!). I'm a dinosaur and I'm a BOF --- with one exception. All my favorites from outside that era are women. Patti Smith, Sade, Mary J. Blige, PJ Harvey, Carrie Brownstein; and now Annie Clark and Marissa Paternoster. I said this in another thread on guitar heroes, I think the next rock superstar will be a woman.​

 

If the album is dead... fortunately nobody seemed to tell any of the musicians I follow.

 

Exactly. Their minds are closed, and they aren't aware of it or won't admit it.

 

They'll also be the first ones to turn around and tell us that just because it got played on TV and radio doesn't make it good.

When 12 rock albums hit number one, it can't all be dance-pop and blue-eyed faux. Even if they did ask for a recommendation, they'd just shoot down any act you'd name anyways.

 

While we're on that theme ....
From the last twenty years I have really enjoyed
- Devin Townsend Project
- Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
- Muse
- Iron Maiden
- Decemberists -Hazards of Love
- PJ Harvey - Stories from the city
- a couple of War On Drugs Albums
Old School favourites
Floyd, Genesis, Crimson, Gentle Giant etc
Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Kinks etc
Cure, Depeche Mode kind of stuff

I have been out of touch for 2 or 3 years really. What would you recommend trying from the last couple of years please (obviously if any of that stuff resonates with you)

 

Entering? That was always the case. It just used to be the guy had some leverage because he brought home all the bacon.

 

Only 2-3 years? Every act that you've cited is old school. Nick Cave came out of the late 70s.

An album's shelf-life is usually 18 months. Hazards Of Love is 10 years old.

 

Interesting. I can honestly say in my household it's pretty much a 50/50 arrangement.

 

I think that it's a little more complicated than this. Some old school music fans look back to the halcyon days of the 70s, when popular music and prominent rock album statements like Dark Side of the Moon and Born To Run made a much bigger impact in our culture, but times have changed since then. We have a plethora of different types of media competing for out attention and music has taken something of a back seat to stuff like social media, cable tv/Netflix, video games, etc. Beyond that, there's the feeling that after sixty some odd years, rock music is a bit of a spent force. Back in the old days, the frontier was wide open and classic rock bands were breaking new ground all the time, whereas now there's a sense that it's all been done before. Of course, there are new rock albums coming out all of the time, but few seem to make the kind of seismic impact that they did in the past. So no, albums and rock music more broadly aren't dead, but they're not exactly thriving either.

 

Cave's work in the new millennium has been brilliant. I personally love 2016's Skeleton Tree, Push The Sky Away 2013, Dig Lazarus Dig 2008, Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus 2004
Townsend is mainly a new millennium artist, new album on pre-order for March
Muse are a new Millennium artist, but the Drones album left me a bit cold, and I haven't heard the new one.
For me Brave New World (2000), A Matter of Life and Death (2006) Book Of Souls (2015) are Iron Maiden's best albums ... yes even compared to the 80's albums
Decemberists - Hazards of Love 2009, King Is Dead 2011
I am still discovering PJ, but anything I get the wife will steal for her car lol

I suppose from my perspective 2017, 2018 are the only years I have no representation for ... If I like an album it has an unlimited shelf life

Having said that though, if someone has anything that may fit my tastes from the last twenty years I won't complain

 

In my opinion the rock form has been taken as far as it can go. It's been taken to full fruition, you might say. It's not a terrible thing, it's just the way things work. Music is subject to the laws and limitations of the universe.

By the same token I believe the composition of classical music was clearly taken to its full fruition too. No one was going to be the next Beethoven or Bach or Mozart.

 

To some degree the leaps and bounds in rock music had their feet knocked out from under them by the punk and new wave movements.
I certainly understand the "we want to rock" mentality that was involved ... I also understand that the prog and fusion movements had become a little stale to a degree, but instead of a development there was a regression (for rock) and it never seemed to come fully back to life.
Please don't misunderstand my statement i musically grew up in the late seventies, early eighties, and love all that stuff, but we have been going back and revising ever since ... it seems to me. So the style got tired in the general populace ... again. so it seems.
Each burst of rock that came out to save us was essentially revisiting something from the past, with not too much deviation
for example
Guns and Roses were apparently the new hero's because they weren't playing hair metal (late eighties)
Nirvana were playing stripped back rock in the nineties, and i reckon it's great, but, to me at least, it wasn't forcing open new ground, merely rephrasing old ground ....
Idk, it's a difficult subject in reality
It seems leaps and bounds were made in the Metal zone, but then it was taken over by the screamo, mud gargling thing and that isn't to everyone's taste either.

 

And Springsteen's fans will tell you the same thing about Bruce's recent albums. They both still came out of the late 70s.

He's been around since the mid 90s.

We're further removed from 2000 than Zeppelin was from Bill Haley.

 

Where is it supposed to go?

They shouldn't want to be. We don't need a clone of Bach anymore than we need a clone of Bowie. They should want to make it by being themselves.

 

- I love Springsteen, But Cave's work has been cutting edge and reaching in different directions in a big way.
- I know, I have all Townsend's stuff
- not sure what you mean, but it's cool, perhaps I am a dinosaur lol

 

We're further removed from Bill Haley than Bill Haley was from Tchaikovsky.

 

Of the four new releases I bought last week, the Steve Gunn (plangent electric guitar in folk-rock forms, more song-based than many of his previous releases) and Sharon Van Etten (mature singer-songwriter stuff, working with synths as well as guitars for the first time on this album, which is somewhat influenced by the poppier side of '80s college radio and features lyrics about becoming a mother for the first time recently) are probably most in your wheelhouse. The Deerhunter album would probably be a harder sell -- even though it's one of their more straightforward releases, there's still a knotty, resolutely experimental feel to their music, and Bradford Cox's whole death-trip vibe is very much not for everyone. And I'm pretty certain the Malibu Ken album isn't for you based on the above list--not because half of the duo is a rapper, Aesop Rock, but because I suspect the musical style of the other guy (Tobacco, the frontman of the cult band Black Moth Super Rainbow) takes some serious getting used to, and is the sort of thing people tend to love or hate: the songs are sculpted out of noise filters, half-broken synths, detuned guitars, and drum machines set on Stun, and are based on melodies somewhere between the Residents and the Archies, plus he sings all his lyrics through a Vocoder that's buried so far in the mix that it's best to think of it as just another instrument.