Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo

I wrote this in 2006. I still think most of it will happen. I'm especially amused by the paragraph in bolded type.



Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo

As I was sitting here at work, my mind has been abnormally unfocused. Usually while I'm sitting here cleaning up graphics in photoshop, I'm completely focused, but today my mind has been wandering all over the place. One thought I had was that, though I thought it would never happen, I'm getting sick of Coldplay. I used to love them. Now, every time they come on the radio, I just get a little more exhausted. This isn't Coldplay's fault. Their music is still as good as ever, it's just that I'm sick of hearing it on the radio. So then I started thinking about what could be done to prevent people from getting sick of hearing a band. My first thought was obviously to have radio stations that play a wider variety of artists, and more songs from each artist, thus expanding their playlist 5 or 10 times over. This, I have no hope for. So then my thoughts turned to what a band could do to prevent their loyal fanbase from becoming not-so-loyal, and I had a revelation.

I fully expect, within 10-15 years, very few bands will produce full length albums anymore.

I think, with the rise in popularity of iTunes and other, less thrilling online music stores, the classic album format could very easily be done away with. iTunes is already doing it with TV shows, which for the past 5 or so years, people have just been buying on DVD, and before that, on VHS from infomercials. Instead of waiting for an entire season of your favorite TV show to be done, and then waiting another 8 months for them to be put out on DVD, you can go on iTunes the day after it airs and get the episode for $2. I think bands will start doing the same. Releasing a song or two every couple months. Then maybe after a year to year and a half, release a compilation of "Electic Mudhens on Speed, 2009-2010 1/2" But after time, the compilation portion of that will fade off, and bands will just work to crank out one good song a month, thus keeping a fresh stream of content flowing to the ever stagnant commercial radio, so that instead of hearing the same song over and over and over again for a year, they'll only play it over and over and over again for a month or two, and then move on to the new material. This, of course, would force the bands into a tighter, more cutting edge stance because instead of having a couple good, radio-worthy singles, a couple junk songs and some in between, nearly every song has to be single worthy in order to keep up with all the other bands. Gone will be the era of bands that last 10, 15 or 20 years. Indeed, that era is already fading away, and quickly. Instead, we'll have flavor of the year bands. Bands that can crank out 8 or 9 good hits in a row, and then dissolve. I think the murder rate among musicians will increase, as will alcoholism and drug addiction.

Mark it on your calendars, folks. Today, I predict the future. October 9th, 2006 will stand in history as the day Adam stood in front of the world and boldly declared; "Sometime, in the indeterminate future, the music industry will change dramatically... eventually."

In commemoration of a bygone era, or at least an era packing up its things and getting ready to leave, I will name this blog after an album by one of the few bands that's made it more than a decade within recent memory, MxPx's Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo.