Death of an Industry

John Mellencamp recently gave his perception of how the recording industry has slowly dissasembled itself over the years in an essay published on Huffington Post. He argues that the downfall started with the introduction of SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS). These two new Neilsen monitoring systems, in a nutshell, allowed the labels to see exactly how many plays a song was getting on the radio, how many units it has sold and where it all happened. This essentially caused the labels to focus on certain cities and ignore the rest of the country. According to Mellencamp, this caused #1 hits that most of the country had never heard and was the catalyst for the self-destruction of the industry. He goes on to say this business transformation from music-centric to the Wall Street mentality stripped the artist of the creative process of recording music and has forced commercialized marketing tools out of the artists instead of songs. He uses the example of Mariah Carey..."Nothing against Mariah, she's a brilliantly gifted vocalist, but the point here is the way that the songs were built -- mine from the ground up, hers from the top down. "




I agree that the shift to a Wall Street mentality by the record labels in the late 80s and early 90s did cause music to be 'commercial,' but it didn't completely rob the artist of the creative process. Although the majority of music recorded and released by the major labels falls within the 'commercial' category because it was created simply to make money and keep stockholders happy, artists can still have creativity and time to develop their music. Granted, it may never see radio play or mass distribution, but people can still take the time to create what they want and feel they should without some suit force feeding them concepts of what people will like.