Originally Posted By: Roger Brown
It's always been a young persons' business, but I call BS on the idea that consumers over the age of 25 aren't interested in music - they're just not interested in the juvenile-targeting crap that's hogging the airwaves and filling up the spotify playlists. I wonder if a label will come along and test my theory - it gets discussed a lot in the publishing companies/music business related offices I frequent.


That's an interesting point Roger. You started at 25. If you made it say 25-40 yes, if it was new versions of rap/hip hop it might work. It presupposes there is enough people who would actually buy older styles of music to make it worth it for a label to be formed to create and push those older styles.

If you go any further than that then those older styles are REALLY OLD. Like 35-45 years old. A few years ago I was scanning FM radio stations in my car just to see what was out there. This is in LA so there's a whole lot out there. I stopped at one because I heard a DJ saying this is (whatever the station was) your home for classic hip hop, the way it was back in the day, and then they started playing the usual crap hip hop stuff (to our ears anyway). I can't tell what the difference is between 30 year old hip hop and modern hip hop. It was like a wet slap in the face, hip hop is 30 flippin years old??

We don't realize how huge hip hop was and still is because we never followed it and can't stand it. It's a whole huge era of music that to us doesn't exist. But considering Jay Z is now an iconic mainstream billionaire should tell you something. Consider this. How long was the era of classic rock? Basically mid 60's through the mid 80's. That's when all of our iconic bands were at their peak. Hip hop and rap completely eclipsed that by double. We didn't see it and didn't acknowledge it because to us rap/hip hop was some kind of fringe thing, not real music. We still thought we were and are the big deal in music, it's all about us. Well, forget that.

Switching gears another tell is keyboard sales. I frequent the Keyboard Corner forum and this subject gets discussed there all the time too because most guys are about the same ages as this forum is. Lots of classic rock players going up to the 80's. Very little talk about music newer than that because thats when the computerized highly automated "music producer" thing completely took over with DJ's more than live bands. There's no need for pro keyboard players joining or forming bands to do covers of 90's into the 2000's era hits.

The big talk on that forum right now is the new Roland $4,000 high end workstation keyboard, the Fantom. This is the first new flagship keyboard from Roland in about 6 years. All the older guys on that forum are talking about it but what they're all talking about is it good for doing classic cover songs. Well it probably is but all the video demos of it that were just released last week do not show any of that. Not one I've seen so far. It's all about integration with your home studio DAW system and music "production". And what kind of production is that? A big deal is the OS closely emulates Ableton Live. They hired some of the best keyboard players to demo this and there is zero piano playing in some of these vids. It's all EDM, synth pads, electronic movie soundtrack sort of stuff.

Another thing is organ. We all know how huge the B3 is in classic music. Well, there has been not even a mention of organ in this new Fantom. Not a peep, not a sound in any demo. There's speculation on the KC forum does this thing even have any organ in it? Every other demo I've ever seen of a flagship keyboard has been all about the keyboards. Acoustic pianos, EP's including all the different models of Rhodes, Wurlies, Dx7's and of course organs. Hammond,s, Farfisa's, Vox, all the classic sounds going back to the 60's. Absolute silence in these new Fantom demos about that.

The modern definition of fusion music is not jazz/rock/Afro Cuban latin no, it's EDM, hip hop, dubstep and drops. And the thing us old farts can't get our heads around is even that stuff is 10, 15 even 20 years old! It's the modern classic music, it's not cutting edge today stuff. One guy who is a great player spent 13 minutes on that before he finally demo'd what the Rhodes sounded like for about 30 seconds before going back to the electronic stuff. Daniel Fisher of Sweetwater is a very good keyboard player and he never mentioned anything about how great this new Fantom would be at doing classic covers. Not once.

It's obvious these companies don't care about us any more, we talk a lot, complain a lot but we're not the ones actually buying. I see things like that and just feel our time has come and gone and these companies and labels know it and there will never be any targeted marketing of music to reflect our tastes again.

Bob

Last edited by jazzmammal; 09/15/19 08:17 AM.
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