How the Music Industrial Complex monopolized censorship of free music.

In 1989 I released my first high-quality musical album into a Music Business that rewarded musical merit. Releasing a new album of quality music today sees a very different valuation of merit.

In 1989 I released my first professional level good-quality musical album into the British Music Industry. I spent some 45 years in that business of music, like any other capitalist business seeking return on investment, in which, historically, specific criteria decide success or failure.

Since that first album, over the next twenty-year period, I released maybe fifty more high-quality musical albums in the UK, some of which almost broke-even as the Music Industry rewarded merit in the artistic process of making albums with some actual sales-revenue through the distribution and retail sector of the Music Industry. I saw early on that the albums that made the most money were not the ones that had the best musical values.

The 80’s, when I was a professional musician reliant on gigs for income, was a time when talented musicians could make a good living by becoming skilled at playing and recording instruments. When songwriters could create music in an unregulated self-motivated fashion. It was possible to articulate ideologies and beliefs in a three minute lyrical format that, in many cases, profoundly affected the thinking of the listener, inviting into the global Zeitgeist an entirely new way of thinking that, occasionally, uplifted the general intelligence and empathy of the Collective unconscious beyond any recidivist return to the dark ages of Conservative submission. And get paid handsomely for their contribution to raising the bar for all humanity.

Before I get to the point of this blog, which is to compare and contrast how releasing albums into a musician friendly Music Industry then, and releasing new music now into an Industry where merit is a disadvantage, for those readers not professionally familiar with the working of the Music Industrial Complex, here is my brief historical background on a business that has supported me for almost fifty-years.

Lets start with how commerce met the subjective nature of manipulable popular taste in the manufacture and sale of music. As a commodity.

In practical terms, the birthing component of the music industry arrived in 1877 with Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph, nicking the 1857 idea of a brilliant French inventor by the name of Edouard-Leon Scott, paving the way for sound recording and distribution that took a commercial form in the forties with the advent of vinyl records. Edisons first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder, offering limited sound quality for recordings that could be played only a few times

Vinyl arrived In 1948, when CBS introduced the world’s first LP (Long Play) vinyl record. Created by Peter Goldmark, this vinyl record had a capacity of around 21 minutes per side and was 12 inches wide, playing at a speed of 33 1/3 RPM. This changed the face of the music industry to the album-centric format. Shortly after, RCA Victor introduced their own LP, which turned at 45 RPM and was just 7 inches in size.

Vinyl was durable, affordable, and able to provide high-quality sound. Vinyl was a physical product you could manufacture at one cost then sell at another. Commonly at a 1,000% difference. Canny business executives were drawn to this new and exciting opportunity to make a profit out of capitol investment. Spend some money on a physical product and spend more money making that product popular, then. Ker-ching. You’re in the money. A whole new market for savvy investors to turn a healthy profit.

The Music Industry was born.

In the forties the emerging Music Industry began manufacturing and selling those first Vinyl records, competing like any other business in a capitalist supply and demand curve. Music Companies emerged to compete for this business; Marrying supply and demand. An investor would fund a product. A marketing guy would create demand for that products release, often by radio plays. Then a retailer would sell that product to the interested buyer. In that transactional process, the buyer had to exercise some discrimination based on what they heard. They had to choose what they bought based on what they liked.

Above any other consideration, the musical merit of the recording was the determining factor in whether the buyer would hand over their cash for the product. The Music Industry was built on selling music that was good. Merit mattered mightily. Musicians had to acquire demonstrable skills before they could expect any success in the music business. They knew how to get to Carnegie Hall. Practice practice practice.

The demand for Vinyl records increased the size of the Music Business. Increasing revenues enabled marketing experts to compete for more of that market share. Very quickly the packaging became as important as the content. Album artwork emerged and became an integral part of winning customers in the music industry. This visual aspect of buying music giving an early indication of the music business truism, you listen with your eyes. Increasingly as vinyls sales grew, the cover had as much bearing on the sale as the content.

In the beginning, the formula for success in the popular music business was merit in the recording. Nothing more, nothing less. To become popular, to win that sale, you needed to be better than the other guy. Or at least, you had to convince the buyer that you were better, giving rise to a whole new sector of the Music Industry, the marketing department with their packaging and image design to target growth for the Company.

Success in early popular-music-businesses followed two key selling points; First and most importantly was musical merit. The merit of the songwriting. Customers of this business would listen to a combination of words and music, subjectively judge the merits of what they heard, then if that musical effort resonated with their existing taste, they would buy a copy of the recording that they would own and play repeatedly, often memorizing the song that would form a learning component of their ideology.

The second key selling point was convincing buyers with limited musical awareness that the product was what they should buy. Manipulating their lack of musical awareness to close a sale based on criteria other than music merit.

Very quickly the science of sales identified how effectively this manipulation could be refined by awareness of behavioral psychology. Elements in wooing buyers that might be as simple as, color. For example; A top notch new-release in the Country Music sector with a Yellow Cover would grow stale on the shelf, while a crappy one with a Red White and Blue cover would sell out like Hot Cakes. Sound unheard.

Traditional marketing techniques worked for selling musical products more effectively than the content itself.

So far, so simple. The Music business had three moving parts. The Talent. The Business. And the Consumer. Get those three to work in the right balance and you could make serious return on Investment.

If you had talent, someone with some money and an interest in profitable return, made a deal with you. A recording contract. They then spent money making a recording. Then they spent more money promoting that recording to create demand for that brand. A brand they owned by contract, inviting a whole new genre of opportunism into the Music Industry.

The Music Industry Law.

Soon after the beginning of the Music Industry, lawyers arrived and the role of the lawyer quickly became more important to the success of an artist than a lifetime of practice. The Music Industry lawyers who wrote the contracts securing the rights of the money to the talent.

If the business-owners followed this formula efficiently, which commonly meant using a good lawyer, then listeners would become brand loyal, either because they liked what they heard, or because they were told they would like what they heard. Money changed hands. Merit earned payment. The buyer rewarded the artist for their art (at the discretion of the businessman and his legal contract). And the canny business executive made a profit in this process of investing in talent.

Everyone was a winner in some way, to some degree. The talent. The business. And the consumer. Each rewarded in a balance that caused the music business to grow. In popularity, in revenue, in quality, and most significantly, in societal impact, as art uplifted entire social orders. In a steady gradual upwards growth curve through the fifties to the early sixties.

Increasingly this new vehicle for transferring information in a learning, teaching, therapy-sharing arrangement between music and words became an defining influence on the thinking process for an entire generation. ‘The dawning of the age of enlightenment’ that followed the religious-fascist-conservative madness of WW2 was about to arrive, Pilgrim-like in a new occupation, from Liverpool.

Where did it begin?

The boom in popular music in the early 60’s came with the advent of a new ideology that music writers were able to supply at that time of demand for an alternative to the conservative narrative of religious conformity young people faced in the sixties. For the first time the language of the liberal left arrived in the conscious awareness of curious youth.

Growing prosperity in the post war years invited new opportunities for an under-stimulated youth under-served by that bland Conservative diet of Christian Elvis Presley, The Platters, The Clovers and the Bend Me Overs, whose career stalled then disappeared from the history books after that misunderstanding in the Clarksville Station men’s room.

The music business boomed from multi-millions generated by the early star recording artists like Ray Charles, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers, and bespectacled Buddy Holly, to multiple-billions following the advent of a new style of informed music attracting the imagination of young people in the early 60’s interested in the language of the liberal left.

From the beginning of the Music Industry the business side was from the conservative right. People with money to invest in new start ups generally were from the Christian Nationalist Conservative right. The artists they signed represented this ideology, especially in the USA where most of the Music Business start ups were starting up by signing acts delivering Christian Conservative narratives of cheerful conformity. Lets rock around the clock shall we. Then perhaps do a jitterbug. A steady diet of bland conformity led a young generation into the conservative ideological choices of the business owners selling them records that reflected a simpler, less literate time

Pretty Pretty Pretty Pretty Peggy Sue. Lets Rave on. Its a crazy feeling.

Things were going as well as any business profiting from a Religious Conservative product selling religious conservative conformity to an obedient market of submissives might expect. A business with growing influence over the thinking of the new generation that became a business-of-interest to Government for this reason.

And then the music industry changed with a light-switch moment. The right time, the right place, the right face, the right sound. The right message. In one astonishing day, one astonishing recording session gave rise to a new musical currency in which a global Music Industry worth several-million a year by 1963 went to several billion a year by 1965.

Ground Zero for the age of enlightenment is February 11, 1963. This event arises thanks to a gay Jewish Liverpudlian entrepreneur, Brian Epstein, 28 at the time, who had a grand vision for the future of humanity. I like to believe that without Brian Epstein, I would never have had a career in music.

On that particular day Brian delivered John Lennon, 22, Paul McCartney, 20, George Harrison, 18, and Ringo Starr, 22 to the EMI Studio in London, where in one ten hour session they recorded an album called Please Please Me.

Prior to that one day session, the Music Industry’s biggest selling product was Percy Faith’s "Theme from 'A Summer Place' with 9 weeks at #1 in 1960. It is only slightly ironic that the record that began the multi-billion dollar popular music boom forcing a wedge of liberal left thinking into the secure cacoon of conservative right conformity was made by four young musicians singing and playing live in the same room, on a two-track tape machine with most of the instruments on one track and the vocals on the other, unregulated by any ideological oversight.

Once those songs and that sound reached the ears of the worlds youth nothing was the same again for the expectations of young people. Both girls and boys equally.

Hearing thought provoking musical efforts by songwriters and singers like the Beatles, combining words and music with a presentation reflecting a long-haired lifestyle free from the conformity of conservative religious buzz-cut right-wing old farts created its own commercial momentum.

The age of enlightenment this heralded can fairly be described as the beginning of the counter culture in which critical thinking was not limited to opportunities for rich clients of extremely-educated cocaine sniffing Austrian Psychoanalysts. Suddenly any kid who suspected the Right-White culture of obedience to God and Country requiring prayer, weaponized submission and constant unquestioning faith in a Christian leader class who knew more, had an adjunct to the books of George Orwell and Mark Twain to inform their curiosity.

Young people would share their prized vinyl possession in group experiences; playing, for example, their copy of ‘Here come ol flat top he come groovin up slowly’ with other young people, creating a new forum for discussion and the exchange of fresh-ideas that birthed a new interested, liberal generation of thinkers. Who is ‘Ol Flat top’ and why does he come grooving up slowly.

The shared experience of listening and being influenced to learn and share what they had learned led to many connections being made in the development of mindfulness for many young people, like a form of global educational group therapy.

Ethically. Morally. Pragmatically. Romantically. Aspirationally. Motivationally. Politically. Intellectually. Socially. And crucially, in self awareness.

An entire smörgåsbord, of possibility became instantly available to anyone with the discrimination skills to choose wisely; which songwriters depiction of world events best aligned with their hopes and dreams of growing up to be more than what their parents represented. A creative Left alternative to the War obsessed Right.

Imagination-fueled possibility flowed harmoniously, resonating from those three-minute rhyming tunes into the curious minds of a hormonally-charged generation experiencing curious arousal, in mind, body and spirit.

Commercially, the amounts this new business was generating meant a career in music that had previously been unthinkable in the Percy Faith era of a thousand-bucks for a number one hit song. In 1959, a writer could expect to earn around 50% of $1,000 to $2,000 for a number one hit song on Billboard. If you had six #1 hits a year you could generate as much as $6,000 a year. Which in 2025 dollars is the equivalent $65,937.94. But of course, no single writer prior to the Beatles had multiple hits in any given year. The Music business was small. Musicians relied on low paid gigs, often seven shows a week, to live a modest low-income life pursuing their art for art sake.

Suddenly, post Beatles, songs started generating hundred of millions for each successful brand, allowing thousands of students to forego their studies to pursue the best version of themselves through a career in music without have to first take a vow of material abstinence before pursuing their creative identity.

The demand for more creatives making music drew in many highly skilled people who would otherwise not have been able to pursue a creative lifestyle.

The 60’s saw the first generation enjoying post war prosperity that often included their own cars, their own record players, and their own free time to think about what they had just learned from the new album they had just been able to buy, forming their own opinions in a developmental pathway to critical thinking that the music encouraged and enabled.

Bob Dylan asked ‘How many times must a cannon ball fly before they are forever banned.’ Millions of kids wandered what the answer was. Many didn’t stop wandering after they heard the song.

Like rib wife Eve taking that naughty bite from the Apple Tree of knowledge, starting the tragic chain of events for mans eternal misery as Gods preferred punishment for learning new stuff; this new style of thinking challenged conservative dogma with the same certain outcome.

There would be no going back to settling for what the system had on offer. Come hell or high water. The Beatles and Bob Dylan had let the cat out of the bag from which there was no undo button.

As more and more refined studio recordings circulated in ever larger numbers, the most advanced musicians presented ever more improved musical recordings that served to educate others on a level not known before this widespread distribution of musical performances.

Affecting equally; musicians pursuing mastery of an instrument learning by imitating; social historians becoming more aware; and aspiring philosophy majors interested in becoming writers who share. Uplifting the consciousness of entire generations that followed that first Lennon/McCartney spark to a generational flame of lifestyle possibility.

Younger developing musicians and writers learned from listening to these merit based releases as as they learned by listening to this incredible resource, many went on to raise the bar ever upwards as the currency for releasing new music remained the excellence of the musical product.

Merit not only mattered in this emerging business of music, it was the single most significant criteria for releasing new music. Without merit there was no way a shrewd music entrepreneur could justify investing the fortune it cost to make a recording and then the even greater fortune it cost to promote and release that recording, in a capitalist model of investment providing return on investment to become successful.

For decades this was the reality of music distribution marrying the most excellent music writers and performers to an interested audience. Music Companies had departments called ‘Artists and Repertoire’ whose skill it was to pair songs with singers with a marketing package that would resonate with a specific demographic. Give the people what they want. A business model predating the current; tell the people what they want.

The Beatles became the template for business to share in the enormous riches made possible when superb songwriting skills joined with immaculate musical performance, production values and promotional skill in honestly representing a choice for the listener. A transactional process followed.

‘Have a listen to this. If you like it, then pay your money to own it.’

Beatlemania began a spike in Record sales that had never been seen before. Lennonisms became the currency of a whole new mindful generation imagining no religion. Music of this kind presented a commercial possibility that had never been seen before, becoming lucrative for the business as well as richly rewarding for the consumers.

Kids were buying, unwittingly perhaps, tutorials in critical thinking, for the price of a piece of plastic, presented in colorful cardboard, coming to life with the scratch of a needle.

Paul’s ‘Yesterday’ became one of the most played royalty-paying songs of all time, especially at funerals, helping people come to terms with loss. Its quite likely that Yesterday has generated royalties in the region of $50 million. Not bad for five minutes work on the songwriting piano.

The post-Beatles music releases represented far greater content value than the frivolous fashionable ear-worms from the conservative conformist models of Republican croon they replaced. This new thoughtful style of songwriting shaped the way people thought. And how they behaved. Liberal thinking very much at odds with the prevailing norm of religious racism of the conservative nationalist right. And so the battle lines became increasingly drawn.

American Christian Nationalists hated the long haired irresponsible liberals for this intrusion into their Christian Racist Orthodoxy. Increasingly the conservative right, in many cases the money men behind the Music Industry, set out to silence the challenge to their Christian Nationalist White Right to control the narrative to the next generation of young conservative racists.

By 1965, Beatles products would be burned in piles by baying Christians Nationalists defending their White Supremacist way of life. Starke in Florida had the distinction of becoming the first place in the US to burn Beatles records in 1966. There was also notable involvement of the Ku Klux Klan in campaigns against the Fab Four.

In South Carolina the popular Christian Klan Grand Dragon Bob Scoggins nailed a Beatles record to a large cross and set it on fire to loud applause. Other Klansmen justified their Ban and Burn the Beatles campaign on the grounds that not only were the Beatles blasphemous, but that they were not really white' either.

The first glistening rot of metastasizing foul corruption. That Mason-Dixon Line between the conservative right, the Music Industry owners and the liberal left leaning Musical writers.

In the adversarial sense that business represents, the idealistic non-adversarial messaging of ‘love is all you need’ and ‘imagine no possessions’ invited a new arrangement between the conservative corporate establishment and the free spirited artists, most of whom had yet to learn about fighting fire with fire.

The first glistening rot of metastasizing foul corruption began its creeping rise to dominance by manipulating and propagandizing popular taste when the Conservative majority saw the enlightening effect that unregulated music was having on young people.

The drug influences. The introduction of liberal philosophies. The anti christian encouragement to imagine no religion. The anti racist messaging. The anti apartheid messaging. Free love. Flowers in hair. Tuning in and dropping out. Wandering ‘How many roads a man might walk down’. Calling out ‘The Masters of War’. Questioning loyalty to the flag. The anti Nationalism agenda of global human rights. Spreading the narrative of self-accountability and personal choice. Threatening the christian patriarchy’s absolute god-given right to absolute-authoritarian-control. Blaspheming with corrupt claims that ‘War is Not the Answer.’

Battles lines in the Music Industrial Complex’s War for the ears and minds of the Youth of America.

This war between the conservative Christian right and the articulate liberal left was bloody and violent, as much as it was surreptitious and silent.

A spate of assassinations of these liberals writers by Christians followed. Just two examples. Marvin Gaye wrote;
Father, father / We don't need to escalate / You see, war is not the answer / For only love can conquer hate / You know we've got to find a way / To bring some lovin' here today.

Marvin’s father, Marvin Snr, was a devout Christian and so he shot his anti-Christian-War son. The Christian Conservative establishment supported this Christian effort to stop the anti Christian anti war liberals. The punishment for murdering Marvin Gaye?

Marvin Gaye Sr. was sentenced to a six-year suspended sentence and five years of probation for the manslaughter of his son, Marvin Gaye. He did not spend any time in jail as the sentence was suspended

Mark Chapman, another Christian, was horrified by John Lennon’s blasphemy. On December 8, 1980. Chapman ambushed Lennon outside his New York home, firing five shots, four of which struck Lennon. Chapman was arrested and pleaded guilty to the murder. He is still in Jail, however, the Christian Majority know that Lennon is in Hell, for all eternity, while Christian Mark Chapman, when he dies, is already assured eternity in Heaven.

There would be no more anti-religion songs by John Lennon. Or Marvin Gaye.
I Imagine that if you tried to release ‘Imagine’ or ‘What’s Going On’ today into the Music Industrial Complex owned by the Conservative Christian Zionist Right, you would max out at around 100 likes, generating approximately 0.27 cents in royalties for both songs combined.

Why did The Conservative right need to silence the liberal songwriter generation.

In this new way of thinking by the next generation inspired by the thought provoking content of the music, conservative leaders were rebranded as ethical dinosaurs, reliant on endless war for their unchallengeable entitlement to rich-white-man hegemony, assuring their right to kill off the weakest-least-white; rather than waste Good-Government money that should continue its traditional passage directly to the strongest white Christian men and their all white families.

A counter-counter culture music product emerged around this time, designed by corporate right lobbies. A type of passive aggressive defensive Pop music, intended to counter the liberal free thinking of music produced by the most musical that was giving kids all kinds of ideas about the possibilities a free life represented. The decision was made to STOP THAT NONSENSE RIGHT NOW.

Soon after dumb-down-bubblegum pop. along came Mike Curb leading the way for Nashville’s gift to all humanity, Christian music. Similar to dumb-down-bubblegum pop, but with added Jesus.

Music as a messaging force to promote a narrative didn’t have to be limited to what Bob Dylan or John Lennon had to say. The Conservative religious Nationalist Right had every right to get their side of the story in through that same door. Musical indoctrination, Music sold for the the specific purpose of promoting a belief or ideology, became a valuable genre in music business sales.

Christian Music sales soared. No longer did the businessmen have to contend with the random musings of long haired stoners arriving at universal truths that threatened the patriarchy. Now Record Labels owned artists to serve a genre in which they could use the same major chords to write the same minor variation on the same song to perform the same way in a personality exempt rinse-and-repeat model of low-to-No cost productions that invested 100% of the copyright and all its proceeds to the Record owners. Generating thousands of Millions for the Jesus Music Copyright owners.

The growth of the Jesus Music industry has been driven by increasing popularity of worship music on streaming media and the mainstreaming of Jesus music, leading to more lucrative tours and IP acquisitions. In 2022, the Jesus-on-Tour industry alone generated $6.28 billion, while recording sales revenues in the US reached an all-time high of $15.9 billion.

Capitol Christian Music Group (CCMG) formerly known as EMI Christian Music Group, is the world's leading Christian Music company and market leader in recorded music and music publishing, generating most of the $15 billion a year that this genre represents. As of 2024, Capitol CMG operates under Universal Music Group-owned Interscope Capitol Labels Group (ICLG).

Universal Music Group, the biggest music adjacent company in the world, claim partial or complete interest in the vast majority of music distributed on the Internet. Across every genre.

The dawning of the age of anti enlightenment. The dumbing down genre of popular music.

Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep topped the charts in 1971, heralding a new dawn for the dumbing down of young people; for political and commercial motivation by the conservative religious establishment. Intended to ensure ongoing protections for the rich-white-man leader class by diverting young peoples attention as far away from the liberating influence of actual music as possible.

Popular music became increasingly weaponized by the Conservative right, pairing perfectly with religion to road-block those avenues of curiosity that hearing brilliant words and music by free-thinking brilliant musicians offered young people. Herding them into a dumbed down compliant-obedient right, where many young White Religious Conservatives believed this manufactured formula for deliberate-moronization was their musical choice. It was popular so why wouldn’t they like it unless there was something dysfunctional going on with their herd instinct.

Generational Christian indoctrination played its role in creating, arguably, the most idiotic self harming generation in annals of idiot delusion fighting for their right to be idiots.

Weaponized dumb-down-pop manufactured by the conservative christian corporate right to dumb down vulnerable clueless kids before they had the means to discriminate between good or bad; tasteful or tasteless, clever or dumb, dumb or dumber, mindlessly moronic or just plain idiot-schooling repetition to ensure they become dumber than dumb. Or even just; Dumb all over.

Once the conservative corporate right controlled the majority of the lucrative Music Industrial Complex, the counter-music pop-system for manufacturing idiot-narrative compliance for the racist religious right it represented, didn’t take long seizing control of the other side of the musical process.

The market that musicians had formerly enjoyed access to on merit was strangled and killed off. Who needs talented musical artists when you can manufacture hits by committee and agenda. And have machines play the parts they learned by stealing performances in AI training.

That malign purpose unfolded over one short decade, well-served by the advent of the internet and Napster, ending the opportunity for musicians to fund work on merit.

The freedom that comes with monetary reward for merit ended with the free distribution of stolen music that then morphed into a virtually-free legal theft of music, led by Spotify. Expensively produced quality songs that previously generated around $1 in return for each sale, now generated 0.0026c. Legally. Slightly more than zero, and certainly not enough to pay the costs of even the cheapest bedroom recording. Unless you were in the billion-plays club. When you pay so little per play, it only works when you get a billion.

The most-viewed YouTube video of all time is "Baby Shark Dance" by Pinkfong, surpassing 15.9 billion views. Who do you suppose gets the revenue for that copyright. It's followed by "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi with 8.7 billion view. From the dumber-than-dumb genre of songwriting, consider the first verse.

Oh, Fonsi! DY!
Ooh, oh, no, oh, no, oh
Hey, yeah!
Dididiri Daddy, go!
Yes, you know I've I've spent a long time looking at you
I must dance with you today (DY!)
I saw that your gaze was calling me
Show me the way that I will go

In that decade of decline, as the corporate conservative right seized total control of the Music Industrial Complex, 99% of the worlds musicians lost most of their legacy musical recording livelihood. Its not easy to write articulate quality music for the upliftment of a literate audience when your valuable skill set acquired over a lifetime of hard work, possibly involving one or more graduate degrees, is suddenly less valuable than an Uber Driver’s share.

Before long all music centric professional production outside of the Televisual sector became commercially unviable. Why would anyone spend what it cost to develop a high quality album, employing all the requisite skills that making a great album costs, when the market for selling product of this costly type no longer existed. Dumb-down-pop and Jesus-Music costs nothing to make. When you control the audience taste, why would you spend any more than the minimum making content. They will play whatever it is you tell them to play when you own every part of popular music programming.

Why then would any skilled musician spend years developing advanced skills in any aspect of the musical process when they know they could earn a hundred times more stacking shelves in the closest walking distance supermarket.

Why wouldn’t the new owners of the music industry spend a tiny fraction of what they save not-paying for professional musical skills, signing troubled kids capable of making lo-fi dumb-down auto-tune drivel on a home-computer, then telling the market; those kids who know no better, that this is popular music because they say it is.

They, the corporate owners of the Music Industrial Complex, control the listening experience for an entire generation of kids arriving at a music interest. Those who don’t have musically literate parents to advise, educate and protect them, that is.

In general, up until the late nineties, there was a market demand for music in which excellence met reward, and small labels like mine could just about break even selling music on merit. Then, over the next decade, the Music Industrial Complex monetized dumbness at the expense of musicians and artists

The end came from two directions. The Internet and the home studio. In about five short years the recording studio business lost 90% of its demand as amateur sound-engineers bought Macs and started making their own lo-fi recordings. Not to compete with the quality music-on-merit market the Beatles pioneered. Instead to compete for the hype driven dumb-pop music market the Conservative right Corporates opened-up to shut down unregulated free-thinking music creation and its allowable distribution.

These cheap-home made recordings proliferated, creating a new supply for new music demand. Except, in the main, it wasn’t music. Cheap recordings by unskilled unmusical amateurs invited by a karaoke mentality into imagining anyone can make music if they just buy a Mac with autotune and a USB microphone. Songwriting is easy. Just like music production. All you need is three chords and the famous Richard Niles book ‘Learn to play like a professional in 30 minutes’. Just buy the only book you need How to get rich quick from Music. It explains; buy any Drake Album. Copy that.

As the Internet digital era invited anyone with a iPhone recorder to upload their tracks, the supply and demand curve for new music imploded. Along came a wave of new artists promoted by the conservative corporate right to phrase the narrative of conformist mediocrity that was anti-music as much as it was pop.

For me, that mass popularity for dumb all over music in service to the Conservative Right starts in 1983, with Madonna in the pre-autotune era. “We need a Holiday ” with red lipstick replacing any need for musical merit. The moment the majority started listening only with their eyes. Selfish Music for Money and Greed above all else. The narrative of the Conservative religious Zionist Right, promoted with all haste by the Owners of the Music Industrial Complex, to replace the undesirable writers composing music that did not celebrate populist materialism.

The conservative-entitled populist drivel followed like a river of toxic material-grill waste as the corporate majors seized that bottleneck to popular taste. No longer did young people choose what they liked to then buy the single. Young people were told what to like and fed it by algorithm.

After the end of CD’s and the digital streamed music-only market, winning a record deal required no musical talent at all. Only proof of a following on Social Media. Kids could get signed just by reaching, for example, 100,000 followers on Instagram.

New amateur stars earning mainstream distribution deals where the content is as irrelevant as the talent of the songwriter. The sole necessity for winning a deal is one number. How many followers. Often the company signing these contracts would not need to listen to the content. The audition was sight of the page confirming the artists follower number. With no capitol outlay to protect, the MIC could flood the supply and demand market where the return comes in likes and the data mining they now control by the billion.

The more contagiously frivolous the writers intention, the more bland the performance, the more suitable it became for its owners. So long as they didn’t need to pay anything for their cut of the rights to distribute into the Music Industrial Complex they owned. This Universal monopoly in content distribution enables the company to list their successes on the Billboard Top Hundred. Where people could, and still can, discover the truth in the adage; “Popular music charts are a mirror of the society they reflect.”

In one example from the decade that brought us here; Kanye West became a super rich hit artist with albums like his #1 smash hit Jesus is King. This self-accredited hugely-popular amazingly-talented hit artist was a fixture in the Billboard Hit charts with 107 entries, 56 top 40s, 18 top 10s, and five number-one singles. Not only a marvel in the studio, Kanye the singer delivers the goods as a live performer. One capable of matching Freddy Mercury when headlining Glastonbury with a karaoke cover of Bohemian Rhapsody that is a tribute to his musical talent as well as the educated taste of the enormously appreciative fan base who have enabled him to claim a net worth of $2.77 billion. Way more than the less talented Freddy Mercury every made, proving the ‘cream rises to the top’ analogy for the streamed music generation.

Popular music became so formulaically conformist that writing a soundalike-hit took only the reordering of some ten words inside a three minute repetitive loop, heavily processed through autotune, over a mechanized reordering of as many as ten sound generators on ever more expensive computers.

The lyrical component in Hit songwriting was very much intended for a specific purpose by the owners of the popular music charts. How dumb does this track make the listener.

For many decades, I used to review the top ten weekly, mostly by listening through the first few seconds, to stay in touch with what popularity meant. On one occasion I noticed the first ten songs all contained the same five words, in different order of presentation. I wrote it down so I would remember. “Bitch. Ho. Smack. F*ck. Nigg&r”. A far cry from when two word sentences seemed like lazy writing.

The biggest hit from the past decade, spent 15 weeks at #1, making it something of a standard. For nostalgia, and your own musical education, why not sing along. You know you want to. It will make you feel smarter when you do. Music to uplift and inspire, educate and illuminate. 15 weeks at number one. The best of the best Music has to offer from the past decade in which pray appears three times in the first verse.

Baby, I like your style

Grips on your waist
Front way, back way
You know that I don't play
Streets not safe
But I never run away
Even when I'm away
OT, OT, there's never much love when we go OT
I pray to make it back in one piece
I pray, I pray

That's why I need a one dance
Got a Hennessy in my hand
One more time 'fore I go
Higher powers taking a hold on me
I need a one dance
Got a Hennessy in my hand
One more time 'fore I go
Higher powers taking a hold on me

Baby, I like your style

Strength and guidance
All that I'm wishin' for my friends
Nobody makes it from my ends
I had to bust up the silence
You know you gotta stick by me
Soon as you see the text, reply me
I don't wanna spend time fighting
We've got no time

Releasing new music today is very different to how it was when I first released new songs 40 years ago. For one thing, its hard to compete with the high standard of musical literacy that populate the charts. For another, when I made music, people used to pay me to listen. (True story. People used to pay musicians.) Now you have to pay to get anyone to listen to your music. Even your existing followers. There is a tax on the portals of distribution by the monopoly who own the Music Industrial Complex.

My very successful music industry friend once told me “People listen with their eyes not their ears.” He also told me “making money out of music is easy. You only need to remember how stupid people are.”

The owners of the internet music portals know that. When you release a song, on any platform, the bots invite you to pay a premium to ‘boost’ your post. Unless you pay this premium, your song will not appear on potential listeners feed. Unless you pay this premium your lack of visibility is assured, irrespective of any merit. No Pay. No Play. But who are these people you are boosting your post to. The demographic of someone who clicks LIKE on a boosted post.

If for example you released a brand new never-heard-before song today called ‘Yesterday’ by a young mop haired Liverpudlian stoner, recorded in the finest studio with the finest session players, using a gold plated AKG C 12, with a perfectly mastered version for this new song by unknown Paul Mac, then you would face a key decision.

If you did not Pay the Boost Tax to buy an audience, then I think, and you can let me know how wrong you think this is, that the $50 million dollars this song actually generated when it was released in the sixties, would not generate as much as $5 dollars in total if released today. Not because the song is any less valuable today than it was then, but because the Music Industrial Complex has changed that much. It has run full circle. The talent that gave rise to a Music Industry in the first place, has been consumed by the greed culture it attracted. the majority of people who click like on adverts for the music they will click like on, are not interested in Music. They are products of a generation raised on a very specific ideology governing their interest in information processing.

Merit now counts for nothing. We have become that dumb in our approach to the arts. This change means the listening public, some 80% of the population who play streamed music, don’t get to decide whether they like a song. The MIC CEO does.
And with this power he can more or less get the kids to side with whatever he decides is most lucrative for his benefit.

Lucian Grainge is quite probably the most influential Jewish man on the planet bar none, in that never before in Music Industry History has one company owned so large a share of what people listen to.

So. How are you going to release your excellent new album if you won’t spend $3 per follower to buy your audience from the Music Industrial Complex.

The amount of new musical content being released into the Music Portals is as enormous as it is indiscriminate. Millions of new hopeful releases arrive into the streaming portals every day. The platform owners with their monopoly on selling audience-followers are able to charge what they like, which is the beauty of any unregulated monopoly.

With a new album release for Logan Twain’s INCOMING STORM album I have done the numbers for promoting this new release on the big Streamers. It costs, on averages, $3 of spend to confirm on new follower. At $3 a follower, assuming they play Logan’s 17 tracks tens times each, my upside in a best case is approximately 9 cents for every three dollars I spend. Seems like good business. But is it.

Here’s the math that applies when you're looking at the demographic you want to sell into if you have a valuable music product worth something to a music audience. The vast majority in the potential market for your musical product, a minimum 80% of Music consumers today, are either incredibly dumb, or dumb all over. The ones you are paying $3 to Facebook to reach are 80% likely to be too musically illiterate to begin to understand the language of music. You will be wasting not only your money in the hope of turning $3 into 0.010 cents return, but also your time, because the reality of this ‘Boost feature, is that the 80% it will present your product too will not be interested in anything that has musical merit.

That leaves a demographic of just 20%, at most, who may have the capacity to appreciate the art of skillful music. The 20% Milgram’s Psychology experiment shows have some critical thinking at their disposal.

Globally this limits your target market to 20% of 8 billion. That is around 1.6 Billion people who have critical thinking skills and will therefore be able to form their own independent view of what your art means to them. If you assume 10% of those will be interested in quality new music; that leaves around 160 million people as your target demographic.

Thought-capable Human-beings interested in musical art, able to appreciate music from a position of musical awareness.

How you reach these 160 million amazing-thinking people willing to pay ten bucks for an album is a separate matter, beyond the scope of this Substack piece. I do know though, for certain, that its not done by paying $3 to the MIC for access to their mechanized AI driven version of a Music fan.

Instead; I would like to offer up my new album with a simple $10 buck exchange.
You buy an album, as an MP3 download on Amazon or iTunes, the two sites who still offer Album downloads by MP3, for less than ten bucks. And I will assure you that you will receive 17 Logan Twain songs from the THE INCOMING Storm album.

You get to choose.

Amazon Music with download option / Apple Music. (With link to iTunes for MP3 download.)

Or; Listen to THE INCOMING STORM for free on:
/ YouTube Music / PANDORA / Tidal / SPOTIFY / DEEZER / Anghami /