Who Killed Rock and Roll?

Shock rocker Marilyn Manson may have been rather tame and boring in hindsight. But in retrospect, it turns out that he did make at least one true observation.

Rock and roll is in fact dead. And it died right around the time he was singing about its demise.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll be familiar with Cultural Ground Zero theory.

In its simplest terms, Ground Zero was the point before which consumers of pop culture product could expect each new release to be better than the last. And by definition, it was the point after which declining quality no longer justified that expectation.

The downward trend affected every medium from live action movies to anime to music. And it hit right around 1997.

Veteran session musician and producer Rick Beato has provided foundational insights for the development of Ground Zero theory. Here, he diagrams a perfect storm of greed, corruption, and cowardice to answer Manson’s implied question: Who killed rock and roll?

Even if you’re as cynical as me, the sheer ubiquity and volume of grifting that Rick and Jim expose is staggering.

For those keeping score at home, the members of the cultural hit squad who killed rock and roll include:

• Bill Clinton, for signing the Telecommunications Act of 1996
• Clear Channel and Cumulus, whose nationwide cartel destroyed local rock radio
• Corporate station managers, for refusing to take risks on bands with innovative sounds
• Producer managers, for inserting themselves in the album production process as rent-seeking middlemen who leeched money out of new bands while adding no value.
• Napster and other music downloading services, for killing the $18.98 CD price point

The death of rock is like a dark comedy in which multiple culprits confess to a murder, and it turns out that each of them independently fired one of the dozen bullets that killed the victim.

To sum up the situation, the Telecommunications Act of 96 turned what had been myriad local markets into a coast-to-coast radio duopoly. The megacorps that took over fired the local station managers and replaced them with centralized drones. These regional programming directors, acting on typical corporate risk aversion, balked at playing anything new and innovative. Record companies responded to manufactured demand by hiring the same handful of album producers and mixers.

And while no one in charge was looking, Napster ate the record labels’ lunch by letting kids download each band’s one good track instead of buying all of the bloated albums the industry was churning out. With no one willing to pay 20 bucks for a CD, the labels slashed recording budgets that had ballooned since the 80s. New bands went from getting $250,000 budgets that could sustain producer manager parasitism to scraping by on $50K.

The result was what Rick calls The Y2K Curse. Right around the year 2000, name acts that hit it big in the 90s fell of the radar overnight. With no fresh blood to add variety, the listening public tired of infinite Nickelbacks and tuned out.

Jim calling Taylor Swift “the biggest cult artist who’s ever existed” rings true. I wrote a post a few years back detailing how the era of the pop star is over. My main source for that piece cited the steep decline of Taylor Swift’s album sales as a main data point. The industry has gotten too ossified and out of touch to maintain the artificial bottleneck that enabled megastars.

Not just music, but all of the arts, have left the gatekeeper age behind. Now is the dawn of Neopatronage.

Rick and Jim talked about how artists are finding new ways to make money. The return of the patronage model has proven not only viable, but crucial to success.

What we’re seeing isn’t so much a crash as artist earnings normalizing. If you’re a film maker, a musician, or a writer, you should adjust your expectations down from living in a mansion in the hills. It’s more likely you’ll inhabit a single-family home in a suburban cul-de-sac next to a plumber and a web security manager.

But you’ll have a better chance of achieving that Millennial holy grail than you would have pre-Ground Zero.

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