SnowGhost Music

For once in my blogging life, I sat down to do a little research. I had an interesting idea, and rather than simply giving my own opinion and reinforcing it with even more opinion thinly veiled as some kind of fact, I figured it might be a good time to see if there were some numbers I could crunch or point to. The idea in my head sprung from thinking about friends I had in the real estate business. I’d heard that some of them were seeking second jobs or abandoning the practice all together because the housing market was stinking like the fish market. Well, I postulated, did this mean that hundreds, if not thousands of would-be Halls and/or Oates would cut their budding mullets and keep their day jobs and steer clear of the sinking ship that is the music industry? Surely the would-be suits of the industry were charting out alternative, lucrative, and possibly evil new paths. But what about the long-haired high-schoolers with key chain picks and Guitar Player subscriptions? Were they parking mom’s car in the garage instead of their dreams? I dusted off my lab coat and hit the net, sure that there would be some sort of statistical proof that a musical exodus was taking place.

My first investigative instinct was to look for production clues. If there was a steady decline in record releases over the past few years, then that would likely infer that bands were producing less, and thus it could be considered that there were less bands. Though I’m hopeful that some such list or chart exists, I could not find it free of charge. I did find a list, week by week, listing every known release of each year since 2001 on Wikipedia. Of course, the lists are by no means comprehensive. We can be certain that bands are handling their own production and merchandising now more than ever. But the lists were very detailed, and thus very long, and with no interns or assistants to force counting up totals by year, I could only visually ascertain that the number of releases over the past few years ‘appears’ to be about the same.

Wikipedia also featured several other intriguing but not exactly proof-sustaining lists, like bands formed, re-formed, or disbanded in each and every year. The dearly departed bands listed, many of whose demise I was unaware (Oh wah! Some were just so young and promising!), usually outnumbered the reformed bands (who were likely trying to cash in on unproductive reunions), and there were scant mentions of formed bands. In reality of course, there were likely thousands of new bands born each year that not many people will ever actually hear from. The dramatic rise in the global population will mean a greater number of new bands each year, but it is likely impossible to ascertain a per capita number to give us an idea if being a ‘musician’ is becoming more or less popular as we near the end of the Mayan calendar.

If only musicians were liscensed, like our brothers and sisters of realty, I wished. And then it struck me that I could check the membership numbers of song publishing giants like ASCAP and BMI. Both royalty and copyright enforcing groups boasted American memberships above 320,000, but neither would say at what rate those numbers had grown over the years. Also, I consider myself a musician, and I’ve never legally published a song, nor have a majority of my musician friends. We could probably dig up some figures for a pretty little growth chart for licensed songwriters with their info, if we could find it, but we’d have to draw the pretty little line at that.

So after several other visits to fruitless orchards, I finally gave up and did what anyone else does when they realize they are getting nowhere: I went to myspace. I figured I could at least get an idea of how many bands were out there right now, since virtually every band has a myspace page, dead or alive, voluntary or not. There were over 400,000 bands listed. Luckily I did not have to count that high, much less visit every band, but I did check out a few. I highly recommend it for anyone with some spare time. How else will you ever come across the German rapper Scarface, who apparently doesn’t let having the scar-less face and body of a 12-year-old blond girl keep him from pulling huge bong rips with fellow middle-schoolers and dropping some serious beat bombs straight from the slums of Dusseldorf? A frighteningly high ratio of the random bands I checked seemed to be unintentional jokes, nonsensical foreign things, or people with very high opinions of themselves. But there were actual bands. It is safe to say, however, that there is no shortage of bands from all corners of the globe, and if anything, the internet is making it easier for them to expose themselves.

So I pretty much found myself where I started, in terms of having no numbers to plug into my increasingly empty powerpoint presentation. I suppose I may as well have set off trying to determine how may ‘artists’ there are in the world, or how many soccer players live in Brazil. For some reason, I actually thought that the seemingly dreary economical future of musicianhood would show up somehow, whether there were less bands actively recording, less strings being sold by Guitar Center, or fewer battle of the bands on crappy local radio stations. In searching for proof of decay, disinterest and indifference, I found mostly the opposite. I honestly don’t think people give a rat’s ass what the record industry may or may not have in store for them; they’re just going to keep doing what they’ve been doing or been wanting to do. And if they happen to get rich and famous doing it, then as Scarface might say, ‘Lang lebe Rock n’ Roll, hundinnen!’