DISConnect

Today, mainstream, terrestrial (as opposed to satellite) radio caters to rap and country fans, blue-collar immigrants and people who are some combination of poor, old, new in America or not interested in new music. The explosion of talk, sports and news radio on the AM dial is also in response to today's high-tech realities. Music's place on the radio seems destined only to shrink, and the stuff that makes it on the air is going to be very formulaic and familiar. The best places to hear new rock bands today -- at least in the old media -- are TV commercials, teen dramas like The O.C. or films like Garden State. And with each passing year, it seems more and more likely that a good chunk of America's pop, country and R&B stars will be anointed by American Idol rather than by the traditional music business machine.

The second reason for the glut of bad music is more complicated on the face of it, but it really just breaks down to simple mathematics. In any society, there are going to be a few truly talented musicians. Back in the days of vinyl and the early days of CDs (before it became ridiculously easy to make your own), for a band to have a record on the market signified something. It usually meant that they had someone in their corner who believed in them enough to help finance the recording and pressing of a record, and more often than not, it usually meant that the artist in question had some talent and had worked hard enough at developing that talent to garner a hefty financial investment from some other party. Today, any jackass with a home studio and a computer can make a record, and just about any band with a record can find some independent label to back them, and with a little luck, a blogger or two to sing their praises.

"The music industry is one of the only industries that, as the demand for what you sell decreases, production doesn't," says Kurt Brennan, co-owner of Montrose-area record store Sound Exchange. "They haven't slowed down releases or making CDs at all, even though Americans spend millions of dollars less on CDs than they did the previous year. Any other business would cut production as demand went down. And yet every ten years, the amount of music that's available increases 15 times."

"If you look in a release book for a one-stop [CD distributor], there's thousands of CDs being released every week," says Escalante. "Can you imagine if a store bought one of everything that was released every week? Within a year you would probably circle the earth with CDs, five times."

"I guess the good thing is that there's some good stuff out there that's getting ignored right now that will be discovered in ten years," Brennan says. "But we are a store that specializes in small labels and the amount of stuff we get offered every week amazes me. It's well over a thousand, every single week. And you're just like, 'Gaaah. Another band that sounds just like Bright Eyes…Another Williamsburg hipster band…' And that whole freak folk thing has gotten ridiculous."

And with the explosion of music blogs on the Internet, many of these bands are intensely overhyped. Here's my best guess on how this happens: Some blogger with some juice among the others of his ilk is having a great day -- his rattletrap vintage Volvo passed inspection, and that foxy barista he's been chatting up at Starbucks every morning for three months has finally cracked and surrendered her digits. So the blogger drifts home in a pink cloud of joy and writes up a glowing review of the first slightly-better-than-competent Williamsburg hipster clone band CD in the stack of 15 on his desk. Some guy at Pitchfork reads it and wants to stay cutting edge, so he piles on, awarding the CD something above an 8.0 on their ten-point scale. And it's Katy-bar-the-door after that; dozens of bloggers will sing hosannahs about this unoriginal hipster band's unlimited potential and reinvention of rock and roll for the new millennium, all before any of these commentators have seen them live or even have listened to their record more than three times. The band will announce a spate of gigs opening for The Hold Steady, but already a hater parade backlash will have set in, one that is no more informed than the initial wave of hype. And then the band hits the road, where they are exposed for what they really are -- a competent indie rock band, no better or worse than the five or ten bands like that in every major American city. That's when the gust from the haters reaches hurricane force, and the band is never heard from again.