Christmas is upon us - way earlier than it use to be; usually right after Thanksgiving. But iPods and iPhones are beckoning, and merchants must meet their quotas. Music downloads at 99 cents per tune. Sounds like a great idea, right? The record company simply licenses the music, and they collect the bulk of the money generated. No physical product involved - just the music you created. If the download trend keeps going, the CD will go the way of the dinosaur. Who will benefit? The record company, of course. No inventory needed, no returns; hell, no product, except a virtual product.

The quality of the music will suffer as well. An mp3 is not as good as a full range wave file. But most people don’t seem to care. They’re substituting convenience for quality. Hell, turn it up loud and nobody cares. So, if nobody cares, where will it all end? Wanna be in a band and make a record? Go to Walmart, buy a laptop and soundcard; get some cheap instruments, and “Autotune” the lead singer. They now call them “singers with frets” and you can hear them on a lot of popular records — pitch corrected to death, but hey, they look good.

Now, maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been down with bronchial flu the whole month of October, and I’m really feeling overly shitty (with stuffed sinus and nasel passages and hacking my guts out every few minutes) that’s contributing to my crappy state of mind, but where the hell did the “real music” go? Not the American Idol crap, or the Next Great American Band (to see who can do the best cover of a popular song), but the really raw, new music.

Club attendance is falling off, and clubs and studios are closing around the country. Where ya gonna go to hear your music? The iPod store? American Idol? Myspace.com? You may be the generation that actually gets to see the death of an art form (live music) in your lifetime.

You’ve been warned!! (Harvey Gerst)
ITR Studios
http://ITRstudio.com