Great piece in the Guardian on the “crisis” in the British music industry.
The BBC have thus far offered only sketchy details of what the Great British Music Debate will contain, perhaps in fear of boring prospective listeners to death before transmission. The website proffers offers the usual hoary stuff: the music industry is obsessed with instant success, it doesn’t take risks, reality pop heralds the end of civilisation as we know it, and so on.
Of course, the situation, while similar to the malaise in the American recording industry, also adopts the problem of national culture - British music throughout the 1980s and 90s had a singularly British identity, with genuinely popular genres that crossed over only as cult phenomena (Britpop, Madchester, drum-and-bass). But in many ways, the situation is the same: records execs and music critics alike seem to be moaning the dearth of good product that also is popular. For some reason, there has been a breakdown in generic cohesion in music audiences. The crisis, to the extent there is one, is reminiscent to the way that the categories with which the record industry understood audience tastes in the early 1950s (R&B, Country&Western, legitimate Tin-Pan-Alley balladry) were shattered by the emergence of rock and roll. Only now, we have a proliferation of genres, and no real clear revolutionary future of popular taste. Or, maybe we’re returning to a 1970s-style audience balkanization, where subcultures adhere to one radically different music genre or another, while the charts seem to sample from these genres without a full-fledged cultural identification with the music.
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