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Record Labels Struggle With the Album's Demise
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Mar 26, 2007 11:01 PM
from the hey-gang-let's-record-a-ring-tone dept.
from the hey-gang-let's-record-a-ring-tone dept.
Supplying yet more evidence, if more were needed, of the dire straits the music business increasingly finds itself in — reader cphilo sends us a NYTimes article about the death of the album as the mainstay of profit, and the record labels' struggle to adopt to the new realities. The article notes the trend of the labels signing artists for a single song, maybe two, and a ring tone.
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CD Music Sales Down 20% In Q1 2007 544 comments
prostoalex writes "Music sales are not just falling, they're plummeting — by as much as 20% when you compare January-March 2007 with the 2006 numbers. The revenue numbers are actually worse, since CD prices are under pressure. The Wall Street Journal lists many factors contributing to the rapid decline: 800 fewer retail outlets (Tower Records' demise alone closed 89); increasingly negative attitude towards CD sales from big-box retailers (Best Buy now dedicates less floor space to CDs in favor of better-selling items); and file sharing, among others. Songs are being traded at a rate about 17 times the iTunes Store's recent rate of sales. Diminishing CD sales means that you don't have to sell as many to get on the charts. The 'Dreamgirls' movie soundtrack recently hit #1 by selling 60,000 CDs in a week, a number that wouldn't have made the top 30 in 2005."
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Just like the death of the LP! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just like the death of the LP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Just like the death of the LP! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Just like the death of the LP! (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find interesting here is that this seems to be largely a self inflicted wound.
As I see it, the problem started with CDs. The record companies want to push CD singles, but no one wanted to play three times the price for two tracks, so the format largely died.
This left DJs as the only people buying singles, so we had charted suddenly dominated by techno dance anthems that probably sound fantastic if you're off your head on a dance floor in Ibiza, but are kind of insane when played on breakfast radio as you're getting ready for work.
So, because the single market is dead, new bands have a harder job breaking into the market. In particular if a band has two good tracks and a couple of bad ones, where once they might have produced a single or maybe two, now they have to make it all into an Album and pad it out with a couple of over-length "dance remix" tracks and hope nobody notices. t.A.T.u spring to mind here.
Making matters worse, the demise of the singles chart as an accurate reflection of public tastes has led to a market increasingly controlled by the labels through channels like MTV. So it isn't like there's a lot of confidence in the quality of these albums, either. The only reason anyone is still buying that, rigged or not there's only one game in town.
Enter the internet. Forget Napster and Kazaar, jsut consider ITunes. People can go and by a track if they like it. Not the whole album. Suddenly hte singles market is back, we have an emerging download chart that looks to again be a reasonable indicator of public interest. We even have good new groups releasing songs under Creative Commons licences, free-to-download and legal.
And the record companies are wondering why no one is interested in albums any more...
[ All the above IMHO based on faulty memory and personal prejudice. Disagreement is welcome; demands for references will be met with mild derision. Thank you for your time ]
Parent
Long live natural talent (Score:5, Insightful)
This is precisely why places like Youtube are full of talentless, amateurish rubbish. The recording industry has, over the years, obliterated any incentive for talent by its corrupt methods. Only half-arsed tunesmiths with "connections" and mediocre musicians are getting work in the music industry, by and large - their work is tweaked, retouched, and canned. If you could taste it, it would taste like imitation Spam. People with real musical talent are frequently not in the business at all. Those that have had some nurturing are not using their abilities in public (no money in it). Instead they are holding day jobs and playing musical instruments/having their jam sessions at home in the evenings to relax.
As a result, the recording industry can't find talent (because it killed it off) and is stuck with ring tones and other crap.
If we kill off their business model (fingers crossed), then maybe people will once again appreciate the value of live performances and music will become an event, an experience, not merely the auditory equivalent of fast food.
Parent
Re:The death of entertainment (Score:5, Funny)
That sounds pretty cool, I would! But.. I'm afraid of viruses. CD-s are scary...
Parent
Re:The death of entertainment (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Singles (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Singles (Score:5, Interesting)
If a singles album has ten songs on it and costs ten dollars, but only two of those songs are any good, then we are being charged ten dollars for two dollars worth of goods and being told we got our money's worth. This is somewhat like having a vacuum cleaner demonstrated at your house in order to receive "two hundred dollars worth of home furnishings", only to discover that they are giving you a cheap photocopy of a Norman Rockwell.
There's more. Even if every song on the album were solid gold, the fact is that it never cost any ten dollars to get it to the customer. Ninety cents on every dollar (say) goes to developing, promoting, and marketing no-talent "hormone bands" in the hope that they're the next New Kids on the Block. Or what-have-you.
Why should I have to pay twenty God-Damned dollars to listen to thirty year old music? I particularly like Procol Harum, but I would bet that their marginal profit hasn't gone up a cent. The record companies' certainly has, however. If I thought that the band members got a healthy cut, I wouldn't mind paying for such genius. But knowing that record companies use(d) die-hard fans like me to pay for such offensively vapid fare as fills the top 40 charts goes a long way toward easing my conscience about downloading files.
When the technology was firmly on the side of the RIAA, we felt the lash. Now, who's holding the leather? Suck it up, RIAA. It's your backlash--you've earned it.
Good luck selling songs one at a time. The rest of the world beat you to it.
Parent
Re:Singles (Score:5, Insightful)
It's obvious to anyone with a brain that this story a symptom of people still thinking of the basic unit of music as being "the song". But I'd expect that for a lot of people who like music -- especially people who are not RIAA executives, and who are not 14-year-olds -- this is probably not actually the case.
This is why there has been a trend in the last 10 years towards music tracks getting longer. In 1990 a track that lasted 5 minutes was daring, and one that lasted 10 minutes would be unheard-of -- except on the revered EP, of course. Nowadays 10 minute tracks are nothing out of the ordinary, and 20 minute tracks are often seen. And people like them, and buy them. Obviously that's going to change the shape of albums too.
I don't see this as the demise of the album, I see it as the demise of the 1980s-style album that the parent describes. There's still plenty of room for albums that are coherent works of art (even if it does feel like a return to the days of Pink Floyd, as others here have noticed). People still write hour-long symphonies for classical orchestras -- and that's an area of the music industry that is booming at the moment. I'm quite sure the album will hang around too. Just not in the shape that the RIAA wants it to be; and once the medium of the CD goes the way of the cylinder, I'm sure the length of the "album" will change drastically too.
Parent
Their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The Album Is Dead... For Talentless Acts! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Album Is Dead... For Talentless Acts! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Dire Straights? (Score:5, Funny)
Blame the iTunes pricing model (Score:3, Interesting)
If the "hit" costs $8 and you like 3 other songs for $1 each, you'll gladly pay $10 for the album.
If record stores want to make money, put the album out for purchase before releasing singles, and price the album and individual tracks at whatever the market will bear.
Re:Blame the iTunes pricing model (Score:4, Insightful)
In other news, morse code telegraph service operators are having a hard time coping with the advent of the telephone. Let's make a bunch of government regulations to help them continue their out-moded services that nobody wants anymore!
Anyway, I'm not paying $1/song - much less $8 for a song. There is not a song on the planet I would pay $8 for. What you're talking about is subsidizing shit by charging an enormous amount for the gold.
Another way of thinking about it is this:
How much do you pay to see a movie in the theater? Do you pay more to see 300 or Zodiac than you pay for Wild Hogs? Nope.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm No. Raising the single to $8 would kill any chance of me buying the single. Actualy for me raising the price makes no change.
There are four things that limit my purchases of the singles.
1 DRM -- It's incompatible with all my players except a Windows PC. In CD format, it may break your computer. Even my flash player will not play any WMA DRM format or iTunes files. Anti-rip copy protection simply means i
Options (Score:5, Insightful)
Not every artist has the ability to release 50-70 minutes of truly compelling art, and most of the buying public is more than happy to listen to singles. Conversely, some artists seem to be constricted by the 78 minute limit of CDs.
It would be a good thing if the music industry was flexible enough to let artists release what they wanted (or wanted to sell) in whatever format (in terms of single/EP/album) as opposed to this 2-years = new full-length album mentality, some artists might like to release a single every few months, while some release an EP every year and others an album every few years.
Dire Straits... (Score:5, Funny)
Man, you guys must be young (Score:5, Insightful)
It was the CD that did it. The "coolness" of CDs made everyone kind-of forget about singles, and how handy they were. And they were more expensive, which the record companies obviously loved. Yeah, they did/do sell CD singles, but it's obvious that they don't want anyone to buy them. They're overpriced, and there aren't many of them available.
But at this point, CDs are NOT cool. They're old and busted, and dull. And they're STILL expensive. More expensive.
The record companies just can't give it up, though. They had this 20-year-run of making WAY more money than they had any right to (thanks to the CD revolution), but now it's over, and they're trying to freeze the clock.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I checked the article, 85% of music sales is still on CD. It's declining but it's nowhere near dead. I still buy music on CD because that gets me an uncompressed archive. I just don't listen to them in that form. The same article also says that it was when the Beatles came around when full albums became popular, I don't think it had anything to do with CD. When I've flipped through vinyl collections, I don't remember ever seeing singles. The same
Where's the music? (Score:3, Interesting)
Record some music and I'll at least give it a listen. Too much of the stuff nowadays is fake plastic over-hyped crap. Who needs talent anyway?
Is it any wonder nobody is buying it?
My latest musical purchase was a genuine old-fashioned CD, and the entire album (Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno) holds up just fine. My Spanish-English dictionary says "clavame" means "nail me", but after seeing the video I assume it has a metaphorical meaning not unlike what it means in English...
...laura
More like shooting themselves and whining. (Score:5, Insightful)
So people are limited to choose either:
- an inflated new album price ($17+)
- a reasonable priced album if bought used ($10 or less, but no added profit to music biz)
- buying only the (good) songs people want on-line ($2 to $4 depending on artist, sometimes only $1)
- Of course this is very limited people have to have the right computer, OS, listening devices, etc.
- tape off the air ($0, low quality) digitize etc.
- piracy ($0 low karma)
The obvious would be to actually make the albums more affordable, but that seems way beyond the concept of the music industry.
Hit them with the clue stick! (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone else caught wind of the NIN viral marketing that they are doing right now for a new album? They "GET IT" with how to use the new media and Internet. If the **AA actually got it we would not be having news stories like this. The **AA is losing, they are luddites of the new age, they are consciously killing themselves. If they would simply get on with it, create content that people would want to pay for, we could all rest easier.
art vs marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
Most bands that are interested in the art of music, rather than the business of music, make albums that are greater than the sum of their parts. The album has a theme and this changes from album to album - this can't be appreciated if one listens only to the singles.
So yeah, the mas-produced teeny-pop bands and their labels move towards the single de jour, but real bands will continue to make albums.
This leads to an idea I had recently. The only distinguishing value of "big" bands is the fame that fans give them - there are plenty of unsigned/indie bands that are just as good/accessible, but are unknown. The value that RIAA attributes to their songs is merely the demand that fans give it - the songs themselves are (generally) not unique or valuable. That's why their lawsuits are so bogus - they're suing fans for the value that fans give songs - not for any value that the songs have.
This is why sites like eMusic (or youtube, etc) are great - they're cheap, and their product is just as good (if not better), but just isn't as well known and hence doesn't have the same "value".
Double Edged Sword (Score:3, Insightful)
But what I HATE more than anything are all these "indie" bands making epic prog-rock or quiet folk albums of boring, repetitive music as a reaction to the death of the album. Dear sweet lord, I know that the idea of singles isn't that great, but an entire album without any single songs on it is even worse.
I'm looking at you, Mars Volta. And you two, Bright Eyes. Putting people to sleep is not entertainment or art.
Suicide (Score:5, Insightful)
Along comes the internet and a new way of getting the word out and distributing music. Does the RIAA take advantage of lower (read: "nil") media costs? Do they dance with joy at all the chance of ridiculously low advertisement costs? Do they use P2P as a kind-of word of mouth mechanism? No, they sue us. Really f---ing bright idea, that, and then they wonder why I vote with my money and buy absofriggenlutely *nothing* anymore from any artist associated with the RIAA? Sheesh!
Not sure what the IAA stands for but I know the 'R' stands for 'Retarded'.
The great R&B conspiracy? (Score:5, Funny)
It's the only explanation I can think of for R&B
Hidden news: the new model of music (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a great idea, but they should go one step further.
The main problem for record companies is that the record company, for the most part, is not the brand - the artist is. The artist is what's promoted, etc. What would be better, from the record company point of view, is if they had a whole bunch of sub-labels, all of which have their own genre/style/sound/whatever.
Then, you'd know that you like the stuff coming out of a label, because all their stuff was the style you like.
It used to be like this in the old days, where a label like Blue Note would have a whole lot of good jazz, or Elektra Nonesuch had good classical. I knew people that would buy everything that EN put out.
Combine that with a subscription service (or music club, cd-by-mail thing I guess) and suddenly you not only have a business model, you have a core group of consumers that are committed to your label - not your artitst. That subscriber base is a guaranteed revenue stream that you can use to hunt down more stuff that your subscribers want.
Will it lead to the homogenization of the music industry? Who cares? It's already freaking homogenized!
It might make smaller players more viable because as a botique subscription music company you have a guaranteed revenue stream with no distribution overhead (except for the overhead you want). You can budget, plan, and not worry as much about the next payroll.
Ideally you'd have a third-party doing the fulfillment, so all you have to do is find acts that your subscribers might like.
It's interesting to think about, but finding that much talent would be difficult. No matter what people say, there isn't that much talent out there.
Short/Long term goals (Score:4, Interesting)
The record companies are suffering because their business plans and practices are increasingly short sighted. It used to be that artists were treated as long term investments, being signed for multi album deals, whereas now artists get deals for a song or two. It's another turn in the downward spiral of disposable culture that Hollywood has sold us, and the cycles keep getting shorter.
It's horribly inefficient to operate this way. Instead of going to the grocery store once a week to buy everything you need for the coming week, you make a separate trip for every single item you need. To be even more extreme, go from buying a sack of rice every week, to a cup of rice every day, to a grain of rice every minute. Spend all your time buying rice, and you'll have no time to eat it, and starve.
(Never mind that you can starve anyway by eating nothing but rice, but I digress.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Analog = DRM because it's not digital!
Re:not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
For the one night wonders, maybe - but not for *real* musicians.
Take banks like Jethro Tull or Pink Floyd for example. Listening to one song doesn't really mean anything, you have to listen to entire albums to make sense of things.
Hell, I was just at a G3 concert last night - Joe Satriani, John Petrucci (with Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater) and Paul Gilbert. It was a good three hours of excellent guitar and good music. If you heard any of Satriani's or Steve Vai's albums, you'd realize that listening to the whole thing is very different from listening to just one song.
Now, I really do not know about other genres such as pop/hip-hop/rap/R&B but as far as I know, there are still some good musicians out there whose entire albums are a joy to listen to.
Hell, that's why good bands still have folks buying their music. It's not because I cannot download their songs online, but it's because they make good music and I'd like to support them, even if they are small [threequarterale.com], local bands [efohio.com].
In fact, the last band that I linked to, Eddie from Ohio, is not signed up with any record label and yet do really well. Shows you what quality can achieve.
Then again, I probably do not make a very good sample of the typical CD-buying demographic.
Parent
Enough with the snobbery already. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're two entirely different styles of music. It's like the difference between a symphony written for full orchestra and something written for a four-part chamber ensemble. I don't think that many people would really argue that the orchestral piece is inherently 'superior,' in any sort of quantifiable way besides personal taste, to the chamber piece, they're just different. (And, more to the point, many composers have written for both.) It's as bizarre as saying that novelists are inherently "better" writers than essayists, because they produce longer stories. It doesn't make sense.
The three- to four-minute "song" has proved to be an incredibly popular format for popular music over the last century, and I don't think you can chalk that up entirely to the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry." Probably a lot of credit goes to radio, but if people really hated individual songs, there's no way they'd be as popular as they are.
It's a format people enjoy, and there's nothing inherently better or worse about it than a long album. To be honest, I'd argue that an artist that could communicate effectively in either format was probably better at their trade than one who's mostly restricted themselves to either 70-minute concept albums or 3-minute ditties, but it's really an academic point.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The three- to four-minute "song" has proved to be an incredibly popular format for popular music over the last century, and I don't think you can chalk that up entirely to the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry." Probably a lot of credit goes to radio, but if people really hated individual songs, there's no way they'd be as popular as they are.
So, to sum up
The attention span of the average listener is typically 3
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Labels still have an advantage: marketing depts. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right: actually producing a fairly good "album" (which, in today's world, means a few songs, sometimes related in some way, generally involving the same principal musicians) really isn't that hard, if you have talent. It's a few thousand dollar ordeal at most, and you could probably do a passable job -- equal to professional job a few decades ago -- with equipment most people have plus a few hundred bucks. (Again, assuming talent. But there are a lot of talented amateurs out there.)
But where I've seen band after band falter, is in the advertising and promotion. It's getting the songs and the name of the band out to potential listeners in the first place -- that's the one place where the labels still have an advantage over most independent efforts. They pick a few bands that they think match what people want to hear, and promote them aggressively, pushing them on the radio, on MTV, on shows like Saturday Night Live, and get the songs into advertisements and movies where they get exposure.
Online and 'viral' marketing have helped some bands, but viral marketing is tough to "do" effectively. There's no real recipe that you can run through and have it work. In contrast, as the 90's "manufactured pop" demonstrated, you can get people to listen to anything if you just promote the living hell out of it, day in and day out.
In time, I think the labels are going to fade, but it's going to take a long time and they're not going to go quietly. Technology -- cheap DAW software, CD burners, and inexpensive ADC interfaces -- have lowered the barrier to entry involved in actually recording music. But letting people know that you exist as a band, and getting your songs out to the people who might want to pay for it (or come to a concert, buy a t-shirt, etc.), is still tough, and the labels have some advantages left.
Parent
Re:Labels still have an advantage: marketing depts (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand the blunt force trauma method of assaulting the listener via repetitive radio plays, television promos, etc, conveys to the listener that this is "the new song" from "the new band", and instantly adds a level of perceived quality to the music because certainly it is impossible that everybody would be going crazy about this new band unless they were pretty good...right? And if this unknown band was any good they'd be heard on a mainstream source by now...right?
No one gives a second thought that a musician might not want to alter their art to suit the "lowest common denominator" market that popular music must appeal to. Luckily we are quickly moving to a system where good music can find you on the Internet even if you're hardly trying, and the public will inadvertently relieve the RIAA of its stranglehold and abusive domination of not an industry, but a form of art and human expression.
Parent
Re:Labels still have an advantage: marketing depts (Score:5, Interesting)
But mainly I wanted to comment on your statements about marketing. It seems that bands can make a decent living without advertising, but they have to have something pretty unique. Then with a little time and some well placed live shows, they tend to develop a following with no major advertising of their own. I know the last five or six new bands I've found have all been through word of mouth. Sure, they're not as big as top 40 bands, but they have a devoted fan base that's far less fickle than the masses that like someone simply because they're the "next new thing".
Maybe it's the music snob in me, but I tend to think that the only bands that really need marketing to survive are those that aren't much good to begin with, or want to be bigger, faster than good music will get you on its own. In the first case the marketing is counterproductive (blocks air-time and brain space that could be used by better bands), and in the second it seems like all the advertisement does is turn a band with potential into a one-hit-wonder that goes on to release a couple mediocre follow-ups and then implode. Even a great band can never match the insane expectations set by a marketing-driven surge of popularity, because 3/4 of the crowd will move on to the next new face, and the label will push for a repeat instead of letting the music mature.
Parent
Re:Labels still have an advantage: marketing depts (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is the music snob in you. To use an irrefutable example, just look at The Beatles. Just because they were marketed out the ass and probably thrust into the spotlight a little early doesn't make them a poor band. What it did do is expose them to a larger audience. Most people in the US wouldn't have known about The Beatles without marketing, no matter how good they were. Look at a band like The Kinks, who weren't marketed in the US and have almost no name recognition among average people here, even if they were just as good as The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, etc. So yes, good bands will probably survive and endure without marketing, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. Most of the great artists of all time were over-marketed. To stay with the British theme, the bands I listed above probably wouldn't have even formed if it wasn't for American blues and rock and roll being sold to them by the record companies. Just because the record companies try and push complete shit a lot of the time doesn't mean that the concept of marketing and selling music itself is bad.
Parent
Re:Labels still have an advantage: marketing depts (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever you think of their sound they were as ground breaking as Elvis or Sinatra and without them you wouldn't have the music you have today.
Parent
Re:Labels still have an advantage: marketing depts (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, at least Piero Scaruffi [scaruffi.com] (a well known musical critic) seems to disagree with you:
Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason. They could not figure out why the Beatles' songs should be regarded more highly than their own. They knew that the Beatles were simply lucky to become a folk phenomenon (thanks to "Beatlemania", which had nothing to do with their musical merits). THat phenomenon kept alive interest in their (mediocre) musical endeavours to this day. Nothing else grants the Beatles more attention than, say, the Kinks or the Rolling Stones. There was nothing intrinsically better in the Beatles' music. Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney. The Stones were certainly much more skilled musicians than the 'Fab Fours'. And Pete Townshend was a far more accomplished composer, capable of "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia". Not to mention later and far greater British musicians. Not to mention the American musicians who created what the Beatles later sold to the masses.
The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic. If somebody had not invented "beatlemania" in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time to read a page about such a trivial band.
(Note that I do not agree completely with this, but at least it shows that the status of the Beatles as artistic geniuses is at least debatable)
Parent
Boston - 30 years old? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:About time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I would really enjoy seeing the RIAA's member companies decide to all price their CDs at $35 a piece. Yeah, just try that, guys.
It would be the best thing that ever happened to non-RIAA music and bands, though. I also suspect that sales of blank CDs (for copying) and tapes (for recording off the radio) would skyrocket, and internet traffic would go through the roof.
I s
Possibly -- but it's a tad risky. (Score:3, Interesting)
Something to try (Score:3, Interesting)
So turn it into advertising. Have a DJ put bumpers around it. At the beginning have a voice announce it like a DJ, talking over the record, and as the song ends, have the same voice announce the artists again, tell the listener the record label, and even spell the name of the band.
It worked in radio, why not online?
Why not at least try it for a bunch o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ridiculous. Get out of the current mainstream and there are literally thousands of such LPs, if not tens of thousands.
Tired argument (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess my point is that if you like a song by a particular artist a lot, you should give their album and/or their wider catalog a good hard look before you decide the other songs are crap. Buy the album, and sit down and give the entire thing a listen. Several times. Not skipping any songs. See what grows on you, if anything. I have listened to full albums by one hit wonders - some of which were actually pretty good, even to the point of lamenting the fact that they were never given a chance. Don't call an album "45 minutes of filler" just because the record companies want you to believe that. They don't want you to enjoy all twelve songs on the album because that means you will savor it a bit longer before buying again. The artist probably takes a different view.
Don't misunderstand, I agree that there is plenty of crap out there written and produced by people without a lot of talent. But there is a lot of legitimately good music out there that never gets a chance because of this old tired argument. Decide for yourself whether the music is any good, not what other people think or want you to believe. How many of us have "guilty pleasures" that we never admit to liking in front of our friends?
Parent