Vintage Music

In an iTunes world, it's no longer an accomplishment to create one good song. "That's right," said Fred and Tommy Tutone agrees. For better or worse, there is now little significance in producing a song that forces someone to stop and listen for 3 minutes and 23 seconds. So what if you get to work and haven't finished a song? Just press pause on the bottom of the click wheel and catch it on the drive home.

Is this not the death of music? What ever happened to the good old days, right? I'm old enough to joke about 8-track but young enough to have no idea what an 8-track looks like. I can remember cassette tapes, though, and I grew up during the boom for CDs. Napster, Song Spy, and later Kazaa, transformed personal computers into personal schooners for techno-pirates riding open-sail over a sea of unmonitored bandwidth. Each successive development rendered the former obsolete and making music, and more specifically songs, incredibly accessible. The pirates have mostly all gone the way of their seafaring predecessors and we're left with a whole new enemy to music: the teenager.

This week, two of the top five songs on iTunes are songs by Miley Cyrus. The number one album on iTunes currently is an album by Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana. I rest my case.

Yes, there will always be mainstream pop music, built upon the carcasses of yesterday's one hit wonders - a collection of increasingly made-up men and barely-clothed women. who knew Twisted Sister was the pinnacle of pop?

On the other hand, this is still a time of unprecedented (until it becomes a precedent) musical diversity. Much to John Mayer's Twitter chagrin, the old tunes aren't going away, and still the number of artists proliferates. Thus it is that true music snobbery remains alive and well. So it is with nose-upturned, that I salute the unique musicians. There are those who are balanced somewhere along the middle who attempt to create a unique sound, but at this point, few sounds are literally unique. Very few bands sound only like themselves. So then, what makes an artist unique, in my humble opinion, is the ability to create a unique sound consistently. This is judged not by the quality of a song but by the quality of the album. Ironically, then, in an iTunes world, the same as it was in the world of every other music medium, accomplishments are measured by the album.