www.songtrain.net

I’m sure all of you are feeling some anxiety about the future, no doubt due to the cataclysmic changes going on around us and the sense of acceleration we’re also feeling. Society, the economy, the political situation– it’s all in flux and all of our crystal balls are cloudier than we would like.
I see a repeating pattern in a number of areas where it seems that at least some answers to what the future holds may lie in the past. With food, for example, it’s pretty clear that the solution to a healthy, green, sustainable food supply involves more family farms, local produce, farmer’s markets, backyard chickens, root cellars, gardens, fewer chemicals and other ancient ideas. In medicine and pharmaceutical fields there is a noticeable push toward more holistic approaches, especially for chronic problems that modern medicine has a poor track record with, like depression, pain, insomnia and even allergies. Breast-feeding, walking, yoga, extended-family day care, reading books to kids, midwives– it’s a growing list of old-fashioned ideas that are steadily gaining adherents in the areas of birthing and raising children and keeping us more fit and healthy. People are now running barefoot instead of wearing highly-engineered running shoes. The news media are also changing dramatically, and grass-roots news reporting is growing fast and challenging the old institutions as citizen journalists post pictures, videos and stories of what they are seeing happen. So many things people did a century ago are turning out to be sensible and affordable, and I am sure you can add to this list easily by looking around you also.
This leads me to wonder if perhaps the music business, which is also in a dramatic state of change, may also be headed backwards in some ways. Could it possibly come to more closely resemble the music world that pre-dated the “music industry” as such? Just as the 75-year commercial strangleholds of the food and medical industries are loosening, it is tantalizing to me to imagine the future of music looking more like 1920 than 1990. I have been reading a number of history books lately, and am pondering how the music industry evolved, and what people did before radio and television and before there was a recording industry.
People entertained themselves and each other, though there were local concerts and some musicians did concert tours. The first centralized music business involved selling sheet music to people to play on their pianos at home, and as the recording and broadcast industries took over, the focus of entertainment moved from amusing yourself to watching or listening to others do it. Elijah Wald points out in his fabulous book about the history of popular music that dancing has remained the only old-fashioned entertainment that young people generally still would rather do themselves than watch professionals.
The popularity of YouTube shows also that there is much less central control of what we enjoy or know about music. People are discovering more music than they ever were able to before, and the decades-old model of the Hit Parade, where most people basically heard the same Top 40 popular songs is dwindling fast. People have their own very diverse music collections, and they are no longer limited to listening to what is on the radio or in the record stores.

It’s exciting that so much of what people are watching on YouTube is musical performances and not just Sneezing Baby Panda and Charlie Bit My Finger videos. YouTube is also causing a big change in how we appreciate music, and the old-fashioned idea of watching someone play well is at the center of it. You can’t watch Steely Dan painstakingly piece together their perfect studio recordings. The corporate hand that stocked the record store shelves and made the radio playlists all through my lifetime is losing its grip on us. Things are chaotic now, but I can’t help but feel that they are headed in a culturally healthy direction, even though my own income and sales of recordings are down.
We are entertaining ourselves with our iPods and smartphones and by surfing the web, going on Facebook, YouTube & Pandora. It’s not the same as playing piano in the parlor, but I see it as a big step in a healthy direction for people to be more involved, less passive, and to not just be swallowing what they are force-fed by multi-national entertainment corporations. For decades the TV networks, record labels and even big book publishers controlled a massive percentage of the whole landscape. I am pretty sure this kind of central control is diminishing quickly, and it seems to be a good thing in a number of ways.

I heard that several prominent guitar & banjo companies have just had their best sales year ever. No big ad campaigns are telling people to play music. There is no secret PAC fund run by shadowy billionaires to shape public opinion and encourage people to play home-made music, but apparently people are doing it. Attendance at summer music camps is up, and seems to be the only part of the music business that I have contact with that is not shrinking. When I look at the people playing the instruments I am interested in, I see a lot of good news. Young players are doing wonderful things with the fiddle, guitar, banjo, dobro, and mandolin. They are playing pop as well as bluegrass and gypsy jazz, and writing songs. Undoubtedly due to the age of information and the ease of finding lyrics, TAB, recordings and videos of good players, the skill level and interest of young players has really jumped in recent years. This is really a genuine grass-roots phenomenon, and it can’t be attributed to propaganda campaigns.
So if you feel like you might get a deeper pleasure out of strumming on your guitar on the back porch than by playing Angry Birds on your smartphone, you are one of many. It should comfort you to know that the urge to play home-made music is a doorway to an ancient and reliable pleasure, and more people than you think are going there, for good reason. It is a green, sustainable thing, and it does not enrich the 1% in any way either. The music industry may be in rapid decline, but the power of music to move people is not weakening. (BTW-It has not helped music at all that pop music has had essentially all of its dynamic volume range squashed flat in the insane loudness wars of the last 15 years. A CD has 96 decibels of dynamic range, and a modern pop song uses about 6 db of that between the loudest and quietest parts. If modern pop music bothers you or fails to move you, this is a big contributor.)

Think about what a song meant to people a century ago, and how that same kind of meaning is still there waiting for us. The price of admission to the home-made music world is low, and they never ask you to leave.