Lost Great Songs

[brandondrury]

I got to thinking the other day. While the music world should continue to write songs, I wonder if we need to. I've got a feeling that there are about 100,000,000 mega amazing songs that were never realeased or ever recorded properly. The girlfriend was cooking the other day with the country station and I was completely amazed at how piss poor the songwriting was. In 20 minutes I didn't hear a single melody that was remotely catchy. Sure, they had their country stuff lyrics which I guess I could call "catchy", but I found the music to be almost melodically devoid. Of course, there were melodies, they just weren't any good.

Then I started thinking about all the rarity cds I used to save my money for. I always heard at least a couple mind blowing songs that were never even recorded well. So I wonder if the world simply stopped writing songs, how long would our great song supply last. In other words, when would we run out of hit songs (or just great songs)? I bet we have enough for a zillion years now.

Brandon

[lumpy]

Maybe I'm lamenting the loss of the influence that radio once carried, or my transformation into crotchity old shithead is complete, but I once heard tale of something called Album Oriented Rock radio. Rumor has it that years and years ago, before the dawning of the age of MTV and Sirgouney Weaver, that employees of these AOR stations called "disc jockeys" would even choose their own playlists, sometimes playing entire albums! Based entirely on their own tastes! Oh, the humanity!

This is the anti-Greatest Hits post. Most of the songs that I find myself listening to on a regular basis by bands that I would consider myself a fan of, are not the songs you hear on the radio.

Maybe there is an internet radio station out there still playing album tracks. I would love to hear some tweaked out voice in the wilderness at 3am murmer in a gravelly voice between drags on a Camel and noisy slurps from a room temperature cup of 7-11 coffee, "and that was "Out on the Tiles" by Led Zeppelin. Up next a little "Rain" from the Beatles".

Lump

[brandondrury]

And just to take this post a different direction, I believe that there is money being lost when the music delivery systems (radio, MTV, etc) put all their stock in one big song. Maybe there is an advantage to taking one song and cramming it down everyone's throat, but it just seams more like they are putting all their eggs into one basket.

I can't remember how many cds I've purchased based not on the hit song, but on other songs that, in my eyes, were clearly superior to the "hit". Maybe I'm the exception, but if there was an avenue where humanss would play their favorite songs on the record (not necessarily what the label thinks is best) I think they would see more record sales.

From what I read, label's have just as good of chance of finding the big winner as a monkey does with the stock market. It's a guess. It just seams to me that in a market where less and less music is being put out by the majors, they'd at least try to catch as many fish (sales) as they could by getting more music heard. Maybe their accountants say otherwise.

Brandon