You know what I mean about all this. Sit back and think about it for a moment: you’ve been sitting on the couch late at night, watching E! or a similar channel and wondering how bands with such a huge cult following disappeared. (You watched that documentary about the Grateful Dead – didn’t you?)
Or maybe you’re in the boat with those who still follow a band or another – but we’ll talk about you in a moment. You see, free Song mp3 download have changed the cult following of bands and how much people follow them.
Think about how expensive it is for bands to tour without a major label and all the weight of the music business machine paying the bill. Think about how that reflects on everything else: how expensive have concert tickets become for consumers? It’s kind of ridiculous, all thanks to free Song mp3 download. It’s especially funny on the concert scene when you realize that you can watch most of the highlights on YouTube for almost free. Gone are the days of arriving at a concert a few days early to park your VW bus, set up camp, plug in and tune in. Gone are the days of downloading everything fast and furious, free mp3 files that negate all other options.
Let’s talk about specifics. For bands like Phish, Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler and others, the Internet doesn’t make personal attendance at shows a requirement to be part of the scene. Blogs and RSS feeds allow people to get on the bandwagon right away without anyone standing at the top to throw out freebies. As a result, there is less of a shared atmosphere because of these artificial and virtual communities. New music fans don’t care so much about virtuosic musical performances – they don’t care if the musicians even PLAY the instruments – and in fact, parody is fine too.
Free mp3 downloads and other new technologies have caused much of this. Take, for example, the fact that anyone with a webcam and a Casio can be a rock star on the Internet – I’m thinking of this band (maybe it was called GO! . . . ?) that made a video in which all the band members sang a song on a treadmill, performing a hilarious routine (all very well done) that was choreographed by the lead singer’s sister. The lead singer’s sister! She wasn’t even a member of the band, but she was the captain of her school drill team or something. Next thing you knew, they were on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Now, granted, it was a really sweet song and the video was basically rock, but it was the visuals that literally sold the band.
So free Song mp3 download and the rest of the internet has completely changed the face of what it means to follow a band or be a music junkie, but there are still those diehards who go to concerts, buy t-shirts, crash in trailers and behind concert halls, on hills overlooking the venue and all that – they’re just not very common. Then again, it increasingly seems that those who are the most ardent followers of a particular group aren’t the ones who are old enough to engage in the whole music traveler scene. Why?
Because the bands that have these kinds of followers are groups like the Jonas Brothers or solo artists like Miley Cyrus – and their followers are all thirteen years old! So maybe it’s better to say that free mp3 files didn’t kill the music industry; they just changed it.
