Recognizing the problem

The ubiquitousness of the internet and advances in recording technology over the past 20 years has allowed just about anyone to call themselves a “singer” or “musician” and enter into the music business; irrespective of whether the singer/musician in question has any actual musical talent.

It’s as simple as recording a track in your home studio and uploading it onto your social media and music streaming accounts. So simple in fact, that as of April 2019, 40,000 tracks were being uploaded daily to Spotify alone. The masses now have access to the music industry.

However, from the standpoint of a fan of good music, the inherent problem with this development is that it’s too time consuming to sort through the junk and find the gems.

In the pre-internet era, the gatekeepers who prevented hacks from entering into the music industry were the A&R representatives (“Artist & Repertoire”) of record labels. Regrettably, with the downsizing of the recording industry since the early aughts, the A&R rep no longer seems to be a viable profession.

In other words, what’s lacking in today’s music industry is a curator who can decide who has talent and who doesn’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if an A&R type professional could assess a prospective musician’s inherent talent before allowing him or her to upload a track or video on Spotify or YouTube? It would save your average music lover a lot of time in trying to find something worth listening to.

Today, it seems that whether an artist enters into the public consciousness or not will depend more on her skill with social media, photo-shopping and recording technology than the possession of any inherent musical or artistic talent.

In essence, popularity today depends more on creating good marketing rather than creating good music.

I’m a music lover first, musician second

Although I’m a musician, I am first and foremost a lover of good music.

And because I’m a fairly accomplished musician myself and have pretty good taste in music, I believe that I’m well qualified to assess whether an artist actually has any talent (that probably sounds arrogant, doesn’t it 😂 )?

So I’m taking it upon myself to conduct a series of interviews with relatively unknown artists in order to bring to your attention these up and coming talents who should be getting as much public exposure as possible.

They’re all talented, have great songs and have bright futures ahead of them. I hope you’ll enjoy reading these interviews as much as I’ll enjoy conducting them.