It seems that people today want everything for free.
People are demanding free college, free news media access, free transportation, free school lunch, free health care, free Wi-Fi and free music; however, there are serious pitfalls in the socialist ideal that everything should be free.
When we first started The Augusta Press, people complained that they shouldn’t be charged to read their daily newspaper, even though people have been charged to read the news since the first American newspaper rolled off the presses in 1690.
When daily newspapers began the switch to digital, at first most of them offered limited content for free to get the public used to the new format; then people lost their minds when the papers started charging for content, and then they found workarounds to bypass the paper’s paywall.
We all know what happened next.
Even digital newspapers have extremely high overhead; there are server maintenance costs, utility costs, open records requests costs and costs for human beings to write and edit the news copy.
Call it corporate greed if you want, but I call it consumer greed, as the massive loss of revenue caused the once roaring newsrooms across the nation to ebb down to the mere twinkling sound of a few people typing away at their keyboard. Journalists do not work for free, but the power company will shut off service for nonpayment, so the journalists were the first to go.
This is precisely why we made sure that our server was hacker-proof. I may not be the most transcendent writer on the planet, but if I do the work, then, by Moses, I expect to be paid for it; and it darn sure won’t be the government paying me. I don’t participate in propaganda.
Maybe an even more proper example is the current state of the music industry. Have you listened to what is considered “hit” music today?
Now, I am not being an old fuddy-duddy moaning about “these kids today and their wild hair and that noise they call music.” I worked in the music industry, and I saw the whole thing come crashing down in slow motion.
No too long ago, I was walking through a local hardware store and was sonically bombarded by this monotonous, drone-like vociferation repeating to the beat the same lyric, “rumor has it,” over and over and over.
It started to make me feel dizzy.
When modern music and recording techniques came along, the onslaught of the Beatles and The Rolling Stones took the record companies by surprise, and it taught them several lessons. One of those lessons led to the “development deal.”
Record companies allowed burgeoning acts to sign but not record anything other than demos for sometimes up to a year. This gave the band the opportunity to meld their individual talents into a cohesive unit.
The record companies would sometimes release the band’s demos under a clever or even hilarious alias just to gauge a local test market’s reaction.
Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, was famous for generous development deals and he gave the world tons of sizzling artists including the Jackson 5.
The result was the emergence of many more classic acts; bands such as Janice Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, Queen, AC/DC, Kiss, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin…yes, that Led Zeppelin.
According to British pop star Andrew Ridgeley, the 1980s sensation Wham! was nothing more than a development deal to give George Michael a chance to hone his writing skills and get over his terrible stage fright. The record company was pleasantly surprised when Michael’s talents matured early, and when they released the classic “Careless Whisper,” their modest human investment became an international superstar and raked them in piles of cash.
The record company reinvested the profits into more development deals while Michael launched hit after hit, and Ridgeley took up the sport of auto racing.
Ridgeley is not bitter that Wham! ended suddenly. That was the deal along; Ridgeley also raked in piles of dough and still receives a royalty check that regularly shows up in the post box near his English manor house.
In those days, people mostly bought an artist’s full album, not one song at a time, because if they bought only the hit releases played on the radio, then they only got a fraction of the full experience. The epic track “Prophet Song” on Queen’s A Night at the Opera is as, or maybe even more, compelling a musical masterpiece as “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
The same can be said for the ‘Stones “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” which was never released as a single, but Rolling Stone magazine listed it at number 25 in “The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time.”
Then consumers got greedy, and they found ways to pirate new music, first with the “mix-tape” and later on the internet with file sharing, causing album sales to plummet.
The first casualty was the development deal, and that ultimately led to a train wreck.
The next casualty was the drummer, as record companies persuaded their bands to go without a human drummer. Listen to Collective Soul’s “Shine,” and you will see what I mean.
The drum machine came into vogue because it did not need to be paid. It could simply be programmed to play anything from a 4/4 to a 9/8 beat with the push of a button. However, while a computer cannot make a timing mistake, humans, on the other hand, cannot perform with 100% precision, and that gives humans the edge.
Every drummer from masters-of the-kit Ringo Starr to Neil Peart would fall short on the backbeat by a few milliseconds at a time, creating what is termed the “swing effect” on the human brain. The ear doesn’t hear the rhythmic irregularity, but when it reaches the brain, it triggers an emotional reaction.
After the drummer became a ‘non-essential’ employee, the dominoes really began falling.
The computer was next used to actually write songs based on a mathematical formulae, and a small group of people took over writing all the lyrics for songs to be released, eliminating the need for a guitarist, a bassist and even a singer with any modicum of talent.
I don’t blame that Avant Garde musician fellow who shows up to gigs with a KFC bucket on his head at all. The music business is now largely comprised of lingerie models armed with a microphone that is not even plugged into an amp.
The vast majority of the pop and hip-hop songs you hear are nothing but a cacophony of digital samples along with a vocal that is processed so heavily that all of the human warmth is lost.
So, yeah, that country singer who bellowed that screechy, off-key version of the Star Spangled Banner was singing in her natural voice without the aid of autotune. I don’t buy her claim that she was drunk. Freddie Mercury was known to pop down several vodkas before going on stage where bottles of champagne were stacked on his piano.
People wanted something free, and I reckon that they got it.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
