FASCINATED

Well.. that’s really inspiring…

jakelodwick:

sangennaro:

With the internet footprint on society only getting bigger and bigger, where do you see the music industry in 15 years?

I think the music industry will actually be safely nestled inside of other corporations, less its own sector of the economy and more a kind of PR expense. Young, attractive recent college graduates with business degrees will get hired by Mountain Dew, or Bacardi, or Scion, or whoever, and plopped into the Music Dept., where they use a little pile of company funds put aside to pay for the recruiting, recording, and promotion of hot debut albums by hot new bands made up of young, attractive recent college dropouts (or art school grads, same diff.)  Prove yourself here, and you get promoted.  The Music Dept is regarded by the rest of the employees as a bush league, only slightly more important than the team that organizes the annual Secret Santa gift exchange.

Bands who opt in to this Faustian sitch will get/have to tour the country for 8-12 weeks in a veggie oil bus that’s skinned with the logo for the company’s newest, edgiest product, and they’ll give out samples of it for free at the merch table, and there will be huge banners on the side of the stage while they play, resembling a webpage with banner ads on each side (Virginfest is already leading the way with this innovation, btw.) The corps will license the names of popular cartoon characters, video games, & movies for their bands to use as their band names (Bogey and Chrono Trigger opening for Book of Shadows Blair Witch 2 at Whole Foods Arena on Friday!) and every other song will be a cover. Every instrument will be auto-tuned via plug-in, so every musician will be standing behind a table that has a laptop, an audio interface, and sixteen vintage guitar pedals on it. Drummers will have 2 or 3 laptops but no stool, because they all play standing, like dills.

MEANWHILE, the underground will be a glorious, ghostly blur. Flyers for good shows will be so cryptic that most people will assume they’re just some crazy-art that a crazy religious person photocopied and hung around town while waiting for their disability check. Good venues will be like speakeasies where you knock on the door and have to pass a mysterious test in order to get in (“If this is 5, then what is this? If this is 2, what is this?” etc.) Good bands will switch up their webdomain without warning on the regular, and the most common way of finding out about good new music will be when the Cexman breaks into your house a la Robert DeNiro in BRAZIL and puts a shitload of mp3s on your hard drive.