Since I rebooted Power of Pop in late July, I have been moved to focus on movie and TV reviews with hardly any music reviews featured. This change in direction might be somewhat bewildering to anyone who has followed Power of Pop in the decades that it has been around.
Fact of the matter is, as I have opined before, for want of a better way to put things – music is dead, and the music industry is dead. Or at least, the music industry I grew up with has been consigned to history and I have nothing to say about what the music industry is right now.
Before 2000, the only means by which someone could listen to music on demand (so to speak) was to purchase and own a physical music product. A CD, LP, cassette and so on. But technology and poor management by the record labels changed all that and delivered the music industry into the laps of the digital tech companies.
In the past, music reviews needed to describe how a single or album sounded and felt like, because typically, the music reviews reader would not have any access to that music and relied on these descriptions to decided on whether to spend hard earned money on a physical product.
Now that anybody can stream music, music reviews are now superfluous. Why does anybody need a music writer to describe music when that person can simply click to instantaneously listen to music? It seems ridiculous to me to even think that describing music is somehow still relevant in 2020.
I used to believe then that the music writer’s purpose now was to be the tastemaker, to make recommendations in aid of music discovery. But even this function has been replaced by algorithms which basically do the same thing. More effectively than a human being, I would argue!
While the music industry is in decline due to streaming, movies and TV are conversely on the rise also due to streaming! Thus, it only makes sense for someone like me to align myself with a medium that is going up rather than going down. Thus, movie and TV reviews are the future as far as I am concerned.
Music reviews used to be one way for artists to promote new music but that has been superseded by the streaming playlist. As far as writing about music is concerned, the best I can do is write about the past – listicles and the like. Not ideal but it’s the survival of the fittest, innit?
This is not the end but a new beginning. Expect more reviews here on movies and TV. Music reviews just don’t make sense to me anymore.
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