Eliminate the Ones You Hate

There will always be critics, and these critics will always hate what doesn't sell and what doesn't go with the system. These critics are usually not writers themselves, but they believe themselves to have a higher understanding of the language or of music than the actual poets, songwriters and musicians who tear themselves apart making everything perfect. Truth is, they don't, and they never will. Until they can write an entire album and give a story to us that will brighten up our day, even if only for half an hour, they will never understand quite the minute differences between an amazing album that won't sell, and a horrible album that will.

Aside from the critics, there are the people who will be listening to the music; these people generally will not want to sit down for half an hour to an hour to listen to a full album, that is, unless they're caught off guard and swept off their feet by the songs. Entranced in the romance and dueling instrumentals and the power behind each chord, struck in anger or struck in love. These are the type of people you should aim to change with your writing. Short attention spans will bring the fall of anyone making money off of music, because it starts with only listening to one three minute song, then it goes to only listening to that on the radio when it's on, which crawls slowly to only listening to the radio, into only listening to a top 40 station, into not noticing when that station plays silence. Granted there are still people who will go to shows, who are die hard fans of a band and will pay upwards of 100$ to see them, there will always be those type of people- but they are by and far the minority here. When it gets to the point where radio stations can play static and still make the large amounts of money they are used to making, when it gets to the point where no one in the mainstream audience will want to pay to see a band live when they can just look up that performance later, when it gets to the point where no one cares about the music anymore and it's just about the background noise, when no one will be able to tell the difference between Paramore and Neutral Milk Hotel and The Paper Chase; we will look back and ask how it all went wrong. And I am here to answer how it all went wrong.

With the upheaval of the music industry, when we push ourselves to the limits and raise the price astronomically to only suit the industry and not the bands, when the bands can't have intimate shows and play whatever they feel like, when bands make no money off of the records and barely any money off of touring- this is where we went wrong. The line only further darkens when bands the like of Coldplay and Dragonforce, and artists such as Jason Mraz and James Blunt, become popular and further ruin the public's opinion of what "music" is. When someone can listen to Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" and Joe Satriani's "If I Could Fly" and not see the resemblence, and brush it off as a coincidence, or say that Satriani isn't "popular" for a reason, this is where we went wrong. When someone can call Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails revolutionary for releasing albums for free, this is where we have gone wrong. People are so desentized and jaded towards the idea of music, where we can't even say our favourite independant band without being called a pretentious hipster who only likes it cause it's not cool. When someone can look at me and ask me who I think I am when buying a Nas and Bright Eyes album. This is where we went wrong.