The Music Industry - Doing Its Bit For The Environment?

The music industry is always trying to focus our attention on how new a particular piece of music, sound, or band is. It helps them to sell things to us, after all, if they were to clearly point out to us that La Roux is in actual fact, just a more modern yet banal version of Eurythmics, we probably wouldn’t go out and buy her album. I’d probably be more inclined to nick my mums cassette copy of ‘Sweet Dreams’ instead.

It would appear, and most of us have probably suspected this for a long time, that the music industry really is just recycling music from times they thought we had forgotten, sorting through the platform shoes, the glittered flares, the humongous mobiles, and finding those little gems in the cultural dumping ground, dusting them off and putting them back onto the shelves of HMV.

Of course the exact same thing happened in the 90s. Bands such as Suede, Supergrass and Oasis took the country by storm. For some, a golden age of music, for others, lots of bands sounding like The Kinks but louder, with less Ray Davies and not dressed quite as sharply.

Recycling the styles of bygone eras has been a popular and reliable money making tool of both the music and fashion industry for quite some time, and generally, I think were happy with that. So long as the music coming our way sounds good and allows us to forget our meaningless existence (for some of us anyway) we don’t mind how original or groundbreaking it is.

But is now the time, I wonder, for us to ask ourselves, are we not being short changed? The music industry knows that we have a hunger for new music, for fresh, exciting and original sounds, and they respond with what? Synth pop? And what about the artists out there who are pushing boundaries, artists who are utilising the very latest technologies, rethinking how we compose, deliver and consume music, why aren’t they on the cover of The NME?

From sound artists, challenging our perceptions of sound and of music, pushing the boundaries of performance and what technology can do, through to dance music pioneers, exploring new worlds of texture and connecting with audiences through ever expanding mediums.

These artists are out there, working in what we call the underground, but don’t they deserve a little more attention from our mainstream music media? A little more credit perhaps? And we, the music buying public, don’t we deserve a little more?