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A quick query of the tea leaves

More or less at the moment the final edition went off to the printer I quit keeping the log of incoming CDs I have maintained since December 7, 2004. My last entry was March 17, 2008, and there it will stop. With, as it happens, Fred Eaglesmith. It runs 207 pages, though it was never complete. I never bothered to enter the urban music or electronic dance music or heavy metal titles which came accidentally to my mailbox.

If I remember some numbers Chris Morris ran off a few years back, the total number of releases in distribution (which is a subset of all releases, in that a number of local bands and home-bound artists sent their music out for review in our pages, though it was not nationally available) had trebled in the last decade, from 20-odd thousand to 60-odd thousand.

My sense is that number has slowed to a trickle. But it's also likely that a number of publicists have quickly removed me from their mailing lists, and that I've neglected to count all the links to downloadable albums which I still ignore because I continue to view such things as the spawn of a particularly evil demon. (See: previous posts at this site. Too many of 'em, in fact, I'm sure.)

So I'm tossing this out to my more active colleagues: Have release schedules slowed down as much as I think they have?

It would make sense. The economy is in tatters, and no matter what election fix goes in, it's going to be a mess for a while because the whole structure is no better than the structure of the music industry. And while bands of a certain profile (or with trust funds) can continue to release albums, with $4-a-gallon gas and a bad economy and no record retail and little, if any, label structure (not to mention radio, which is mostly unmentionable), it seems like a lot of musicians from whom we once heard regularly are sitting on their hands. Staying out of the studio. Touring Europe.

Some winnowing would be good, based on all the CDs I have yet to listen to from acts I've never heard of (and I am, slowly, doing that, just for the sport of it; if I find something good, happily, I have this nice little website on which to trumpet the discovery) from musicians who ought to be able to hear that they're not ready for the national stage.

But I fear we're in for more than winnowing.

The last cash cow left (aside from TV) has been touring. And I'll be real curious to see how the summer festivals do. Local bands in big cities will probably do bang-up business. But those of our friends who can tour one or two major regions of the country and play to 60-200 fans each night...I bet they have a tough time this summer. Next fall.

Not wishing any of that. Just tossing it out to see if that's what the world looks like to the rest of y'all.

Posted by grant on May 5, 2008 3:54 PM | Permalink

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