I found myself ranting a bit in a comment to a Tim Pierce / Pete Thorn YouTube video ("Tim and Pete's Guitar Show, highly recommended) on the now old subject of the highly successful Washington Post's fake news click bait campaign against guitar. It went something like this....:
I've been teaching guitar for... decades now, and last year was my best year by far.
1) Population continues to increase.
2) Availability of potential exposure to great music is better than ever.
3) "Rock music" has crested the "dad music" wave and is now in a *new* realm; NOT CYCLICAL, but a new era that perhaps could be compared to the progression of indo-European classical music from the beginnings of polyphony - a span of over 10 centuries.
4) Sorry retailers, electric guitars don't evaporate but get re-sold, inherited and given away.
5) Purveyors of academic institutionalized rubric called "marketing execs" and "business professionals" wrecked the romanticism and mystery of music and music retail in the 90's by their Dunning-Kruger afflicted influence. Music retail was a crazy, beautiful thing until then, laid waste by GC/MF/internet. This may change, hopefully, back to a more grungy, mysterious and hidden, rambunctious and bohemian expanse.
6) Millenials tend towards being very accepting of their fate. The cliche of rebellious youth no longer exists. The impetus to do music has changed. We are just now exiting a period of creative flailing based on the baseness of people thinking extremes - who can be faster, slower, more detuned, more evil, more fey, most retro, most post modern, etc.. This was a Gen-X reflex to existential anxiety coupled to requiring everything to be "a career decision". Jimi Hendrix wasn't thinking about "career decisions".
7) The 60's were the American Artistic Renaissance. Appreciation for detail, subtlety in art was never higher. That has been lost post-Cold War. In turn learning to appreciate art/music is a new thing for people in the 21st century. Some people in their 30's-40's may be experiencing a realization of music akin to what "most" kids in their pre-teens felt in the 70's. Which could potentially put us 10-15 years away from things "re-normalizing".
8) Commercialization of music is also cresting a wave. Where there was a time when that meant trying to advertise what was good as well as possible, it moved towards the notion that advertising alone was all that was needed, to now where in my opinion what is left of the "industry" is going through autonomic motions. Some see reality through the false perspective of Apple Music sales. Others through Spotify plays, still others through aggregated plays, Youtube hits, a diffuse numerical representation of what they think consumers are thinking. Instead of looking around, talking to people, investigating first hand and MAKING A DECISION WITHOUT STATISTICS.
(I stopped at this point and posted here - it was about to become my previous blog post on said subject!)
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