Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been regularly watching Leland Sklar's YouTube channel. Lee is a legendary session and touring bass guitar player. He also seems to be a very down-to-earth human being. It has been very interesting to listen to his stories about music, musicians, and the overall music industry. It's great to also watch him play bass along to the tracks that he's played on with all of the artists that he has worked with over the last forty years.
Unfortunately, Lee will regularly run into a situation where the YouTube algorithms block some of his videos because he is playing along to an album track that is copyrighted. Usually, he will get the video unblocked after contacting the artist (who he is usually still good friends with) and jumping through a number of hoops with record companies (or whatever is left of record companies today). Lee and other music industry people like Rick Beato have been making the point for some time that these blocking policies for old recorded music don't make a lot of sense. Blocking prevents a whole new generation of listeners from hearing this music - which is usually around 40 years old and isn't selling much anymore.
This situation reminded me of a lecture that famed Canadian record producer Bob Ezrin gave about the state of the music industry back in 2005. He was making some of these same points 15 years ago. Although I don't think that Bob correctly predicted the future, he did make some incredibly prescient points about how CD's had become a "tired format" and that something else would come along to replace them - which ultimately happened with streaming.
Yesterday, I took another listen to Bob's presentation and I am still impressed by it. He doesn't pull any punches - no bullshit.
The five parts of Bob's lecture are as follows:
Comments
Post a Comment