One usually hears that there’s no money to be made in music anyextra. However then, there was no money to be made in music when Bob Dylan begined his profession both—a minimum of according to Bob Dylan. “In case you might simply support yourself, you had been doin’ good,” he says in an interview clip included in the short compilation above. “There wasn’t this huge billion-dollar indusstrive that it’s in the present day, and people do go into it simply to make money.” He seems to have made that comment within the late 9teen-eighties (to guage by his Hearts of Fire look), by which period each the industry to nature of popular music had advanced into very different beasts than they had been within the early sixties, when he made his documenting debut.
“Machines are making a lot of the music now,” Dylan provides. “Have you ever seen that every one songs sound the identical?” It’s a complaint people had 4 a long time in the past, assumeing of synthesizers and sequencers, and it’s one they’ve in the present day, with streaming algorithms and artificial-intelligence engines in thoughts.
Not that Dylan might be accused of failing to vary up his sound, and even of refusing to acknowledge what advantages they provided to the individual musician: “You possibly can have your individual little band, like a one-man band, with these machines,” he admitted, however obvious the limitations of these machines on the time. However he underneathstood that this new convenience, like that introduced by so many other technological developments, got here at a cultural value.
Even within the seventies, documenting was becoming perilously straightforward. Within the sixties, no matter when you had been the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or certainly Bob Dylan, “you performed round, you paid sufficient dues to make a document.” However bands of the following generation “count on to make a document immediately, without anyphysique even hearing them.” As for the solo acts, “when you’re a good-looking child, otherwise you’ve bought a very good voice, they count on you to have the ability to do all of it,” however “when you don’t have experience to go along with it, you’re simply going to be disposin a position,” a mere instrument of professionalducers who took authorial cost over the information they overnoticed. All these a long time later, when it’s change into easier than ever to seek out any sort of music we might possibly need, no one have to be much less surprised than Bob Dylan to listen to “a lot mediocrity occurring.”
Related content:
Bob Dylan’s Famous Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965)
Brian Eno on the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music
The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse: Rick Beato Explains
How Computers Ruined Rock Music
How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.