8 comments

  1. I’m stuck in the 70’s for the most part. By the early 90’s it was apparent that people were not much interested in quality, talent, or effort and music in general dive bombed and never recovered. Pretty much the way all of society has went….straight to the gutter. That video was sort of mesmerizing.

    1. By the early nineties we had not only formulaic composition of songs, and lyrics, and band members, and what they looked like, we had CD’s which do not contain the same quality of music as the analog reproduction of earlier years, and the beginning of everything being heard on earbuds or at best headphones and headphone sized speakers.
      None of these are at all conducive to hearing recorded music as it would actually be played in person, in real life.

      1. “CD’s which do not contain the same quality”
        ========

        This.
        I have several 10’s of thousands of dollars worth of high end mid 70’s audio equipment here in my home office, but I rarely listen to it. But, when I do listen I expect perfection and that is simply NOT possible with CD’s or any of digital derivatives. I hear something different in the digital stuff, some refer to it as being too “sterile”. I also hear something else and the best I can describe it is, a gradual increase and then decline in the volume. But that’s not quite right but I don’t know what else to call it. And this difference must be very subtle to others as I have asked numerous people if they can hear it and none have.
        So when I do listen to my music I listen to decades old 70’s rock on 10″ reel to reel tapes that I recorded at slow speed in the 70’s and 80’s.

        1. That’s true. CD’s are sort of “sterile”. I think it’s a sort of mechanical effect resulting from the fact that digital music is sampled, so the frequencies and harmonics are incomplete and stepped; not smooth curves like real live sound. I either camouflage or eliminate much of this effect if I put it through my Hughes AK-100. I bought that unit on the promise that it would produce a remarkable transformation in my music, which I never heard, but it gives the CD’s and even AM and FM a kind of “fullness” they lack without it.

  2. I was surprised at how long Elvis Presley was visible – considering he started long before that chart’s first year, that’s an amazing career. I guess that’s why he’s called The King.

  3. I’d be interested to see how much of the total market these top performers captured over time. I can only speak for myself, but over the past few years I’ve become fan of a number of performers who all have large followings and who sell out large venues, but who never seem to make it far up the charts. Consider, for instance, Joe Bonamassa. I listen to a lot of music that is recent, but none of it seems to be hugely popular. My friends are almost all over 30, but the younger ones of those are similar. They don’t listen to the same music I do, but the music they listen to is also not charted high. I can’t help but wonder if the “top 40” music doesn’t capture the same share of the overall market today that it did in 1980.

  4. I mostly recognized names because of the publicity they garner for their stupid stunts and messy lifestyles. The large majority of the recent ones I wouldn’t recognize if I heard a cut on the radio.
    One that I’d never even heard of is somebody named Drake. Who the hell is he, and why is he selling 8 to 9 million albums per quarter.
    I wish that they’d kept to a static scale. I’d track someone and they’d drop positions. After a while I noticed that the particular artist was still selling the same number of albums but the scale was elastic.
    The music industry has been poormouthing for years, but the absolute numbers seem to still be growing. I don’t think the industry is in as bad shape as they claim.

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