The best of Bob Olhsson's writings and tour info

I disagree with trickle down being necessary and it many ways it has been the problem.
Musicians don’t get paid as much today as they did in the 1960s yet the cost of virtually everything is at least five times as much.
That’s the problem, lack of local support as opposed to label support.

Trickle down was forced on us when grass roots live venues as a means of support pretty much went away during the mid ’70s.
This was compounded by the fragmentation of radio exposure during the ’80s as radio advertisers got drunk on micro-marketing using music to sort their audiences.
Cable TV was a stop-gap source of exposure but Madison Avenue had its way there too by the mid ’90s.

This has meant that labels and artists only have radio and TV for exposure and the result is not pretty.

What we need to do is reboot the grass roots.
Albert Grossman did exactly that in the early ’60s and Bill Graham took it to the next level in the late ’60s.
My point is all it would take is somebody having the creativity and guts to do this.

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Actually the CD player is far more dependent on mass production economics than vinyl players are.
It has been a safe bet that CD and DVD players are going away sooner than vinyl from the very beginning.

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Which is precisely what the Internet industry is doing to all competing forms of conventional media.

Anybody who thinks it’s all going to remain available for free after their competition has all been bought or forced out of business is delusional.

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Making illicit material available to the general public is hardly about privacy.

When there are consequences for folks who do that, the problem will end. It’s really just that simple.

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A bottom-up, populist-driven business like entertainment scares the hell out of investors as does the financial clout that big stars inevitably develop.

Wall Street wants control from the top and performers to be employees who don’t even own the rights to their name.

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2 Responses to “On the future”