SOURCING YOUR MUSIC
Very different from the bygone days when you could only access your music from your radio, then later the TV
I recall a convo I had with my younger son not too long ago. Sitting at my desk at home one day, he came up to me and asked me, “Dad, may ‘Midnight Rider’ ka ba (do you have ‘Midnight Rider’)?”
I stopped what I was doing, my brain going into auto-hold mode, digesting his request. That’s an Allman Brothers Band song. A song from my era and not his. Now, this was a strange enough query from someone who was clearly too young to have heard it while growing up, and he was only 11 at the time.
“Meron (I have it),” I answered, turning to him.
“Sa’n mo narinig yan (Where did you hear that)?” quizzed him in wonderment.
“Sa Lost..” he answered, alluding to the then popular TV series about a bunch of airplane crash survivors stuck on a weird island with unexplainably freaky occurrences.
I never force-fed my sons what to listen to; they have, on occasion, heard the music I listened to and that always leaves a lasting impression on their young minds. It certainly did on mine, when my Grandmother (bless her soul) who was a sound tripper herself, would play her 45-rpm singles collection of Beatles and Everly Brothers tunes, which became my very first memories of music. So, for my sons, it was TV series music and YouTube videos. They would later reinforce their tastes with continually strange requests for music as disparate as The Pixies to Paul Oakenfold to Motorhead to Mama Cass. That last one really threw in a tizzy (again, thanks to Lost).
The Digital Age spawned monsters of its own which fast and furiously dug an even deeper grave for the music industry with digital music that could be shared online, for free.
This was 2004 and it dawned on me that kids then, and I guess until now, accessed their music from the vast expanse of today’s media, and even more so in the past decade, from social media. Very different from the bygone days when you could only access your music from your radio, then later the TV.
In the 60s, you listened to the radio, heard the hits of the day and saw your favorite singers and/or bands performing on TV or at a live performance, a thing that went on through the 70s, only the scales grew larger; radio became more adventurous, with the mainstream on the AM band and the new FM band delving in more experimental, album-oriented music, with the TV still a prevalent, but not entirely dominant music medium. This changed in the 80s with the advent of MTV, the amalgamation of music in video form broadcast on TV, which revolutionized music listening and TV viewing, and systematically killing the radio star, as it were. Or so it seemed.
But, going back to that convo, it dawned on me that music on TV shows/series, as well as movie soundtracks, were a brilliant way to market music, whether new or notso-new.Itworkedforthe80sTVseries , a show about two undercover cops waltzing about in their fancy
clothes in their fancy car fighting bad guys while flirting with the hot girls, all to the sound of the current 80s music from that era. So much so that record companies of that day saw TV as a marketable means of networking their material to a wider consumer market. Lamentably, by the 90s MTV evolved (or devolved) sidetracking music for a more reality-based type of programming and failed to live up to its brand.
The Digital Age spawned monsters of its own which fast and furiously dug an even deeper grave for the music industry with digital music that could be shared online, for free. The mp3 era rapidly changed the face of music and how to access it forever, negating the need for middle men and third parties, as it were, unshackling music lovers from recording outfits and freeing everyone from corporate capitalism. At least for the meantime, and that’s saved for a different story.
Movie soundtracks were a great vehicle for marketing music and also a new way for record companies to make some bucks; some of which were lost to the Digital Age. We’ve seen big screen movie blockbusters like Marvel’s
Guardians Of The Galaxy bursting with music from the 70s, that would have otherwise remained unappreciated by a younger generation, had it not been for savvy music advisors.
Kids now have their ears opened to the beauty of 70s music, the stuff their parents grew up with and discover the pureness of real music made with real instruments and sentiments. We now hear the semi-obscure Swedish band Blue Suede’s 1973 hit single “Hooked On A Feeling’s” ooga-ooga intro being chanted by teens who heard it in the flick; or the Beatlesque bounce of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky” in the second installment of the same Marvel movie.
Music and how we source it is way easier today, thanks to technology.
Fast forward to the here and now: youngsters today have a plethora of options to choose from. There’s social media, there are countless streaming services, there’s torrent, there’s music services like iTunes and the like. There are live gigs. As well as antiquated options such as the radio, usually accessed as a last resort while stuck in hellish Metro traffic, either via the conventional terrestrial broadcast or its digitally streamed broadcast, if the radio station has one, which more or less, does. There’s also podcasts, personal websites and public access radio online. The options are endless, and more so than not, these options are all accessible, conveniently on demand right on your smartphone.
Music and how we source it is way easier today, thanks to technology. Whoever said life isn’t as good as it was then clearly isn’t looking at it from a musical point of view. Life has never been better today, without music.
Music is universal. It’s everywhere and just within your reach, at the tip of your fingers.