Only in it for the money

Record companies have always promoted the hit. As such they were vanguards of popular culture. Now popular music is losing its value. Britain's ‘Top of the Pops' was discontinued because it was no longer possible to turn a handful of our era's pop songs into a culturally significant television programme. Nowadays, people consume music, rather than listen to it. Music provides background noise for mundane activities: jogging, driving, dishwashing. This is music's new purpose, and as such it still carries huge economic force, but its cultural relevance is none. Even financially viable pop songs are mercifully forgotten one, maybe two, month after their release. The BBC all but admitted that ‘Top of the Pops' was axed because today's pop music was rubbish.

A record company's lifeblood is trained talent and it is on account of the absence of a strong cultural drive towards education in musical discipline that record companies are floundering. Record companies can only market what is on hand. It is not their task to encourage education. If there are no trained, talented artists to be had, their marketing departments will market untrained, talentless ones. The public's taste will become accustomed to their meaningless, tuneless songs and aesthetic standards will erode further. It is a vicious cycle of decadence.

Whereas the Beatles acted out a common man persona, current bands are made up of common men; current artists are common men. The spirit of the Sixties actively sought to bring about a more democratic musical ethos. Its slogan was: music by the people, for the people. As the ultimate consequence of this attitude our pop music has descended into karaoke. Aesthetic standards are now so low that almost any cheerful hobbyist can have a career in music. To be an artist has become an entirely mundane pursuit, increasingly taken up by mundane individuals. (Mobile phone salesman sings opera.) Aesthetic considerations are pushed ever further down the agenda: mundane people are concerned with making a living, not with making an enduring cultural impact.

With the decline of record companies, our music industry now seems ruled by a kind of shopkeeper mentality; artists as mean-spirited little salesmen, flogging their dubious wares by means of flimsy hype and virtually undisguised cons. An artist's viability is measured by his talent for shameless self-promotion. There are some talented artists around today.