Indie Music Adventures

Every day I check the headlines of Reuters Music and liveDaily.com’s music news.  I can’t believe how often they’re announcing tours from “classic” rock bands.  Today, for example, are announcements for Steve Miller, Earth, Wind and Fire, and of course more Rolling Stones news.  There seem to be at least as many of these tours if not more, than there are of new, “hip”, one-hit-wonder bands.  Wouldn’t you think that major record labels would see this pattern and recognize the potential?

What I see are bands that are still relevant in the music economy.  They’re still making big bucks on these tours, and often times they are the biggest drawing tours of the year.  If we dig a little deeper, I see a demographic with a large population that wants to feel young as they grow older.  These baby boomers have a wealth of money and are from an era where music ruled and video games, cell-phones and MySpace didn’t compete for their attention.  They really appreciate music!  Not to mention that they aren’t as computer savvy as college kids these days, nor do they have as much reason to illegally download music.

So what’s the point?  The point is that record labels seem to be ignoring these huge music fans.  If labels helped seek out and develop bands with rootsy rock sounds alongside of these teeny bopper, trendy, one-hit wonders, we might see a shift in the relevance of new music.  In fact, according to radio format popularity trends as reported by Arbitron, Rock as a format is significantly more popular than Alternative for ages 12+ across the US.  The Contemporary Hits format is slightly larger as a whole, but when broken down between “Pop” hits and “R&B” hits, it is significantly reduced (assuming that these rockers aren’t really competing for contemporary R&B fans).

The bottom line is that the music industry seems to be shooting itself in the foot by catering to a demographic of younger people who consider music to be just one of the many entertainment sources available to them; and it happens to be one of the easiest to copy and distribute digitally and illegally. 

What if…. what if labels found new bands that sound musically like where some of these classic rockers left off, and solicited them to the classic rock radio stations.  Listeners would finally get some fresh material on some of these stations, but with a sound similar to what they enjoy.  The best part is, the labels could put the younger bands on tour with the classic rockers!