"The Way Music Died"

The episode of Frontline I chose to watch was “The Way Music Died.”  This episode talked about how the music industry is making it very hard for musicians to become rich ad famous.

 There are about 30,000 albums made each year and only about 100 of them are hit records.  One reason why the amount of records does not become hits is because of MTV.  MTV was the beginning of an end.  MTV was what everyone watched, and if a new artist did not have a song on MTV, then hardly anyone ever heard of them.  However, if an artist did get a song on MTV, then that was about the equivalent of getting their song played on 100 different radio stations across the country, leading the artist to fame with a hit record.

 Record sales dropped severely from $40 billion to $28 billion in the course of three years. This is because the music being created is not as good as it used to be.  When an artist makes an album, they will often make a single from that album to be played on the radio.  When the new audience hears and likes that single, they go out and buy the album.  Sometimes the rest of the album is not nearly as good as the single is, and the listeners get mad because they just spent a bunch of money on a whole CD when all they want is the one song.  This is what led people to illegally download music from off of the Internet. 

The episode interviewed four different artists, David Crosby, Mark Hudson, Sara Hudson, and Velvet Revolver.  Throughout the episode, there were many interviews with these artists covering what they were doing now.  At the end of the episode, it was mentioned that some of them became famous, and others were not able to launch into fame.