Music - Something is always killing it!

Music lovers of a certain age will remember this cute little graphic
from back in the 80s.

There were no computers then, and no internet, but nonetheless
the music industry was keen to hip quadrillions of young music
lovers to the fact that the mix tapes they were making for themselves
and their friends were "killing music"...

...and if we didn't stop, one day there would be no more music.

It was all bullshit, of course. People kept taping and music
kept getting made and the beat, as they say, went on.

Fast forward a couple of decades, during which the music
industry made sick profits selling people the same music
many of them already owned on vinyl in the form of fabulously
over-priced CDs and holy doodle- music was getting killed again!

Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!







Blah, blah, blah... and the beat goes on.

For a zone of human creativity and commerce that likes
to represent as "hip" and "cool" and "cutting edge", popular
music on an industrial scale is curiously resistant to any sort
of cultural and/or technological change.

Once upon a time, record players were going to kill music
by making it available to people in their homes. Next, radio
stations that were going to kill music by playing records
on the air... but somehow, the beat went on.

Along the way, there was another music killer waiting in
the wings - the use of "canned music" in theatres as opposed
to "Real Music" made by AF of M members. The text in these
ads is very familiar in both tone and topics to that which came
along with home taping and file sharing, don't you think?

Sadly though, they were right. Music died and now there isn't
any more and it's really, really sad. If only we'd listened to them...

Oh, the humanity...

*