"We've been around for over 40 years and we've had a good life, don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. We travel all over the world, fill stadiums, and have a great time. But the record industry has just about committed suicide and the saddest part is that kids today won't have the opportunity we did. Where is the next Elvis, the next Beatles, the next Led Zeppelin? They're out there but they don't have a chance. They don't have a chance because once upon a time we had record companies, and they would support you and have point of purchase material and they would give you advances. In other words, they gave you the air to breathe to find yourself and spend the time to learn how to run. And that's what's missing. So the next big band, the next Zeppelin, what are they gonna do? Give away their music for free? They're gonna be living in their mom's basement, unfortunately, and they're never gonna get the chance that we did, which is the saddest part of all for the new bands because there should always be a new generation of bands. I mean, there's still a lot of bands out there touring, but they're all old guys like me. Thanks to file sharing and other issues, the record industry support for rock is gone."
"We've been around for over 40 years and we've had a good life, don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining...
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He's literally not wrong
He is an asshole though
His claims, while interesting, fall apart under scrutiny because he's apparently unable to explain why, if illegal downloading killed the industry, that it's seemingly had no effect on pop and hip-hop. I mean, Taylor Swift, Kanye, Rihanna, etc are not exactly eating out of a dumpster because of file sharing.
The record industry has dropped rock like a hot potato for a variety of reasons, very few of which have to do with downloading.
This
I understand his point but even indie is selling a lot of records these days, it was definitely worse for bands in the 90's. Quality control is a bigger issue these days than bands not selling.
It has a lot more to do with the fact that pop stars and rappers cost less to produce and guarantee instant immediate returns on the investment. A rock group is composed of several people, not just one, and all the equipment needed to play in a band is expensive. Also pop songs=radio play. Plus a band can break up/switch members.
that's capitalism bro
Didn't stop bands from making $$$ 30-40 years ago.
One Direction isn't one person and it generates tons of cash.
Okay technically he isn't wrong but my biggest issue with his statement is that the world doesn't NEED those things right now. Nobody wants stadium style rock music right now. Hip Hop and Pop music are on top right now for many reasons, but just like all musical trends it will go away soon and different genres will take the throne. (Who knows, maybe rock will make a comeback).
Everyone knows rock music isn't 100% dead anyways. There is plenty of good rock out there right now (although much of it falls under other sub-genres genres besides flat out 'Rock').
Also, starving artists will always be starving artists. The only reason Gene Simmons and Kiss made money is because they literally put their brand on every fucking man made object in existence and sold out from the start. Just like in the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's, artists now are 1% super wealthy 99% broke. If anything artists should be happy to be around in 2017, where the internet and social media make that climb to the top more doable than ever before.
tl;dr rocks not dead, gene is old and rich and out of touch
(((Chaim Witz)))
There were a lot of baby boomers back then to fuel record/concert sales.
Gene Simmons is the guy who, once he's living in a Beverly Hills mansion, forgets that he used to sleep on a friend's couch when he was just starting out.
to add on to this, almost every artist or band who has become wealthy and famous has done so from touring, merchandise, sponsorships, and ad deals. Music sales are and have always been largely a drop in the bucket revenue-wise.
>Nobody wants stadium style rock music right now
If you're playing stadiums, chances are you're already a sellout. See, even back in the 70s-80s, music journalists like Christgau were condemning stadium rock, they thought only some punk group in a club in NYC was "real".
>Music sales are and have always been largely a drop in the bucket revenue-wise
Didn't Thriller sell over 60 million copies?
I said largely. There are a few artists who have had records go platinum a billion times and became rich that way. But a large majority or bands from the 60's-now have made most of their money from the other things I mentioned. Also, I'd be willing to bet MJ still made more money from touring, merch, and appearances then he made from record sales alone.
Well, yeah. People forget that the "real" rock groups in the 70s didn't actually sell a huge number of albums. The bands who did sell them were pop rock trash like Journey. Compare Devo's record sales to, like, REO Speedwagon or some other buttrock from that era.
It did, but Michael Jackson had talent and if he were around today, he would have been just as successful. Maybe he wouldn't sell as many albums, but he'd still be a superstar.
Ok but even bands like Black Sabbath who didn't get radio play still had major label support behind them.
Yeh but even back in the 70s, AOR probably wasn't a big moneymaker for record labels. I guarantee you the Carpenters and Bee Gees were worth more money because they appealed to normies/women and got played on the radio. Record companies are obviously in business to make a profit, and one of the reasons for the disco boom in the late 70s was because the stuff was poppy and you could play it on the radio. You couldn't play Black Sabbath on the radio.
So even though bands got on major labels, they weren't the primary moneymaker for the industry, that was (as it always is) pop music of various flavors.
Disco is fantastic though. You just pop some on and your day lightens up completely. Classic stuff. :)
>So even though bands got on major labels, they weren't the primary moneymaker for the industry, that was (as it always is) pop music of various flavors.
Ok but what we're trying to get down to is the specific reason why it was ok to sign bands in the 70s even though they weren't big moneymakers, but it's not ok today.
One could perhaps guess that 40+ years of experience led the industry to believe that pop stars were simply more profitable relative to the amount of money invested in them, and they hadn't yet come to this conclusion in the 70s.
However, I think it had to do with demographics since the huge baby boomer population created an unnaturally large music market at that time. Record companies made so much money in the 60s-70s that they could afford to sign rock groups in spite of them not being poppy and radio friendly. They were able to keep it up for a long time thanks to the profits made in that period, but by the 2000s eventually it wasn't profitable anymore.
Pay-for-play, everyone always forgets what a huge graft it was until the the mid 90's when FM radio began to die out.
This is why record companies are largely dead. Once the scam was broken there was no going back.
In case anyone's interested.
trips and brian wilson kills gene simmons with beach boys magic
>However, I think it had to do with demographics since the huge baby boomer population created an unnaturally large music market at that time. Record companies made so much money in the 60s-70s that they could afford to sign rock groups in spite of them not being poppy and radio friendly. They were able to keep it up for a long time thanks to the profits made in that period, but by the 2000s eventually it wasn't profitable anymore.
In the 60s-70s yes, but then you had the 80s-90s after which Gen Xers had replaced boomers as the major music buying audience and there were far less of them. The decline of rock coincided with Millenials who are a big generation, there should in theory have been more young people in 2000+ to buy music.
As I said, they made so much money in the 60s-70s that the industry could live off those profits for a long time after the boomers had aged out of the primary music buying demographic. Also even when boomers got older, there was still a lot of money to be made selling bad adult contemporary/Christian revival music (and holy god, there was a lot of this in the 80s as the boomers were reaching middle age) not to mention repackages/reprints of 60s-70s music.
Yes there's a lot of Millenials but they reached adolescence at about the point where the industry just said a collective "fuck it" and went with the easiest and cheapest genres of music to produce.
>Yeh but even back in the 70s, AOR probably wasn't a big moneymaker for record labels. I guarantee you the Carpenters and Bee Gees were worth more money because they appealed to normies/women and got played on the radio. Record companies are obviously in business to make a profit, and one of the reasons for the disco boom in the late 70s was because the stuff was poppy and you could play it on the radio. You couldn't play Black Sabbath on the radio.
Arguably the decline of jazz had to do with its evolution post-WWII into extended length noodling like John Coltrane that wasn't danceable anymore. The industry jumped on rock-and-roll in the mid-1960s because it was doing what jazz had ceased to do for some time. Probably also helped that electric guitars are a very flexible instrument that can produce a wider array of sounds than a horn or a trumpet.
One direction also needs no instruments
Sure.
I was just going to get to that, but thank you for pointing it out.
>Probably also helped that electric guitars are a very flexible instrument that can produce a wider array of sounds than a horn or a trumpet
That blues rock/wah-wah pedal stuff is stale as fuck and doesn't wow anyone like it did in Jimi Hendrix's day.
That's the thing though, an electric guitar can make almost any sound you like. It doesn't have to necessarily have to have the same tone they used in 1969.
You're right, but most of the equipment you can buy now is just trying to emulate dadrock bands, it's not utilizing modern sounds.
Yeah because instruments cost millions of dollars right
He's not saying illegal downloading killed the industry at all, he's saying record labels are using illegal downloading as an excuse to play it safe and give artists less, especially rock musicians. Pop stars are pop stars on the grounds that most pop stars basically do what they're told and often don't write their own songs anyways, and hip-hop is a completely different market with its own "underground" and "mainstream" acts that have a similar kind of push and pull between them
You can buy guitars and amps which sound modern and not like the 70s, you know.
>and hip-hop is a completely different market with its own "underground" and "mainstream" acts that have a similar kind of push and pull between them
We already covered that. Hip-hop is cheaper to produce than rock, doesn't require an instrument, and isn't 4-5 guys together all of whom could split up/change members at the drop of a hat.
The crew of engineers needed to maintain them and mic them up and plug them in and the transportation cost for them and the amplification equipment certainly costs more than an audio player and a few dummy microphones.
Why did radio die out in the mid 90s?
As I said, it was probably cheaper adjusted for inflation to do this stuff in the 70s than today.
dammmmm
gene simmons is redpilled
Gene Simmons sounds like a silent movie star complaining that talkie films ruined everything.
They didn't have the technology to do otherwise.
Rock isn't dead, it just doesn't look like Aerosmith anymore. Like it or not, Twenty One Pilots and Tame Impala are today's rock as made by and representing Millenial tastes and values.
Ice Cube said that rock-and-roll isn't a guitar, it's an ideal and it can in theory be any form of 4/4 music with a strong beat. In fact Christgau said sort of the same thing, he bandwagoned disco back in the day because he though it was the rock-and-roll of that time period.
gene simmons is your typical "blood for israel" neocon jew stereotype down to a T, that's not redpilled
You're kind of right. Gene Simmons's problem is that he's looking at it from a 1970s-80s POV. Of course a current band made of 20-something guys in 2017 won't look or sound like 1977 and wearing leather and having a cigarette dangling from your mouth as you play blues rock solos looks ridiculous today, it doesn't represent what young guys think is cool now.
And thank god for that- aerosmith was shit
>If there’s a claim for rock’s continuing relevance, that would be it. A disobedient spirit is direly needed to balance out the economic pressures that push both music and media toward a narrow, survival-of-the-fittest emphasis on mega-pop. The results are both more demographically inclusive and conformist, and leave many gifted midlevel artists marginalized by press and industry. In the “rock era,” there was more space for eccentrics to skew the game.
>That standard is perhaps best borne now among young female artists, who appropriate rock’s flexibility to express out-of-bounds thoughts while ignoring clichéd postures. The likes of St. Vincent, Alabama Shakes, Courtney Barnett, Angel Olsen and even, an ocean away, Pussy Riot, embody the thought that Kurt Cobain scribbled in his late-’80s notebooks: “I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock’n’roll.” The rock feints that Beyoncé and Lady Gaga made this year on their respective albums attest that its seemingly worn-out maneuvers can yield otherwise unavailable strengths.
yeah hes right no artist will be as famous now as they were in the past because of the accessibility to new music and the constant division of groups of people along with the fact pirating is easy as fuck currently
The piracy problem is a meme anyway, Gene Simmons and Lars Ulrich at this point in their lives are so far removed from their early days of gigging in clubs that they completely forget how bootleg recordings were used to spread the word around about a band.
I mean, what makes Nicki Minaj less of a "rock star" than AC/DC? And back before the 50s-60s, jazz was the rock-and-roll of its time until it lost touch with its dance music origins and turned into self-indulgent noodling for people who wear a lot of wool.
As I said, the whole rock star thing is an ideal more than a specific way of playing music, but one thing it does require is being edgy and being able to scare parents. Someone like Taylor Swift isn't a rock star at all, she's bland, safe vanilla pop that scares nobody.
>St. Vincent, Alabama Shakes, Courtney Barnett, Angel Olsen
acceptable choices
>and even, an ocean away, Pussy Riot
Besides bitching and moaning has this band ever made anything musically on the same level as the above artists? Hell, have they ever made anything worth even listening to?
>St. Vincent, Alabama Shakes, Courtney Barnett, Angel Olsen
>acceptable choices
Liking an artist solely because waifu doesn't count.
Even today people like Adele and Taylor Swift are able to sell much more records than nearly all of the most successfull rock bands of the '60s-'90s era.
I like his wig.
>Liking an artist solely because waifu doesn't count.
Yeah she's really waifu material, let me tell you.
i would not fuck alabama shakes
>Just like in the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's, artists now are 1% super wealthy 99% broke
The percentage in the past couple of decades has been much lower (around 0,1 against 99,9%), but only because many more people are producing music compared to the past, since it has become way easier and less expensive.
When this piece of garbage received widespread critical acclaim, I realized that modern rock is awful and the genre deserves to die
yeah, my response to boo hoo rock is dead is always look at the garbage that was actually popular the last time rock was on the charts
DELET THIS
you ain't wrong nigga
he was comparing it to pre-war jazz. Learn to read maybe?
Fucking Gene telling it like it is. Can't wait to see the record industry fold into itself like a giant dying star and then all the rich jews are gonna say "w- what happened??"
>There are tons of good rock bands out there
Name 3 you dipshit
I can think of is Cage the Elephant and Foxygen and one of them are in their 30's already and the other is more of a songwriting duo
he is wrong. any schmuck can pick up a mpc and start making music and post it online. you can literally do whatever you want now, you don't have to play that stupid record label game it used to be like
Only schmucks say "schmuck".
And wouldn't you know it. The Carpenters sold vastly more records than all of the most successful rock bands of the 60s-70s-80s as well.
ok
That's why grunge was almost a fluke occurrence, because even if you look at 70s AOR, plenty of it was danceable party music, like, of course, KISS. So even at that time, it was still generally expected that rock groups would produce singles that could at least be played on FM, if not AM radio. What happened with grunge was the industry making the very odd decision to deliberately sign bands who were depressing nihilists and absolutely not fun or danceable. After several years of that, everyone had had their fill which is why good-time fun bands like Blink 182 took over.
So then what was with all the claims that disco had to take over from rock because it stopped being fun?
Disco could be played on AM radio, at least after the industry cleaned it up from its more raw underground roots. I mean, yeah, merely having a dance rhythm doesn't guarantee radio play, there's loads of EDM/techno that isn't radio friendly, for example dubstep briefly got mainstream in 2011-12 when it achieved proper song form with hooks.
The industry was definitely a lot more willing to experiment in the past, hence their eagerness to pick up bands during the British invasion or New Wave or grunge, anything that sounded fresh and kids might catch onto. Today there's almost a stultifying unwillingness to try anything new.
The pedal market is literally overflowing with unique pedals for electric guitar that can be used to make all kinds of "new" sounds. Literally any Earthquaker divices pedal can be pushed to extremes to make all kinds of new and interesting sounds. There are more ways then ever to make guitar more interesting and sound different.
That's true, still, there is a disturbingly high amount of gear out there designed to emulate Jimmy Page's guitar tone. Though I'm not sure how much of it isn't actually just marketed to nostalgic old guys. Probably a little of both them and certain kinds of lebornintheronggeneration hipsters.
I mean, I agree with the guy earlier who said that the blues/wah-wah shit is played out and boring. And why wouldn't it be? That sound was first developed by Clapton and Hendrix a literal half century ago.
Twenty One Pilots is probably the closest thing to a mainstream rock act of today, although as someone else in here pointed out, they don't look or sound anything like the Rolling Stones, and it would be silly if they did. Gene Simmons's idea of what a rock group should look like is rooted in 40 years ago and even if a modern band of today comes along, he wouldn't recognize them when he sees them.
>Nobody wants stadium style rock music right now
I wouldn't care if stadium rock never comes back. Today's kids don't deserve to experience the horror of AC/DC, U2, and Bon Jovi all over again. Let's bury that cancer in the elephant's graveyard where it belongs.
>I can think of is Cage the Elephant and Foxygen
lmfao
>Twenty One Pilots is probably the closest thing to a mainstream rock act of today, although as someone else in here pointed out, they don't look or sound anything like the Rolling Stones, and it would be silly if they did. Gene Simmons's idea of what a rock group should look like is rooted in 40 years ago and even if a modern band of today comes along, he wouldn't recognize them when he sees them
Oh, but he does. Thing is, the shit out today (or really since the 90s) isn't his idea of rawk. He thinks Nirvana were the beginning of the end.
>He thinks Nirvana were the beginning of the end
Well, they were for him and his career anyway. Literally all pre-80s rockers other than Aerosmith and Neil Young were relegated to the dustbin in the 90s.
Oh yeah, totally. Record labels were cutting everyone left and right who didn't fit in with the alternative bandwagon. This meant virtually everyone who predated the 80s and everyone from the 80s who were associated with hair metal. Neil Young and Aerosmith were able to keep their relevancy an absurdly long time compared to most all of their peers.
> implying I want to listen to Bands
discogs.com
I bought this for a buck at half-price books and still regretted it desu; only the first few tracks were notably good
haha what a story paul
No idea why you think that will happen.
*enter hip hop*
>You're right, but most of the equipment you can buy now is just trying to emulate dadrock bands, it's not utilizing modern sounds.
You don't have to play 12 bar blues for the rest of your life just because your instrument of choice is a guitar.
kike
>the world doesn't NEED those things right now. Nobody wants stadium style rock music right now.
Is that why there is 50 Nirvana threads daily?
I'm in a touring band so he's wrong about that but he's not wrong about how there is no more label support system like there was in the 90s / early 2000s. It's much harder to tour these days.
>Maybe he wouldn't sell as many albums, but he'd still be a superstar
If Jackson was alive today he would still sell more albums after his conviction and the new artists would still feel average because of MJ second huge success.
Bro, tyler the creator scared the fuck out of my parents when goblin came out, whats your point?
>I'm in a touring band so he's wrong about that but he's not wrong about how there is no more label support system like there was in the 90s / early 2000s.
Covered within the first 10 posts of the thread.
Story of the week: Washed-up old man doesn't understand how the modern world works