How Corruption and Greed Led to the Downfall of Rock Music

Okay, this is going to be a really fun video because I'm going to explain to you how corrupt the

music

business was when I got into it, but it actually started in the mid '90s, around 1996, and eventually led to the demise of

rock

music

. but actually, in most music and this

corruption

in particular happened on so many levels that it's a really complicated story, so I'm going to have to explain it in a couple more strokes to go into greater detail so you can follow it because you. You're going to be scratching your head, wait what do I have here Jim Barbera Jim was on my channel once before Jim tells us a brief story of your career I've done radio promotion I got by driving and crying I've been a producer he was an editor and I was an executive at Geffin during the era that we're going to talk about today, but if you want to know more about me, you can read me on substack, it's called Stars after stars after stars and I'm writing. about all of these things it's in the description, okay, so we agree on one thing: 1996 was a pivotal year because of the Telecommunications Act that Bill Clinton signed, Consolidated radio here in the United States, and essentially two companies that Clear Channel and Cumulus bought.

Before, most radio stations had local stations that would be controlled, let's say a company could own six stations in a particular area, these stations would be supported by local companies that advertised on them, but what was the theory on them? developed in For this Communications Act, the original idea before then was that the media should be locally owned and should have as many different voices as possible and the people who wanted the Telecommunications Act meant that we would have more influence on the market if 100 stations, what we missed before 1996 was that when you only own five or six stations, you have to have individual program directors for each of the stations that you own and what happened after that happened when someone bought 100 stations.

American companies hate duplication and jobs. So they fired all the local program directors and put one person in an office in New York or Atlanta to program all the stations. There you have the program director, who is the head of the radio station. Now you also have DJs, most of them. the people I interviewed talk about a station that really broke them Andy Summers talked about this there is a station that broke the police almost everyone I have interviewed from these big bands a station breaks them it is very rare that something jumps out like it did a Nirvana, they put the video on MTV and it just blew up and that was it.

Well, when you have a family business, the individual people who work at the radio station, the DJs had a lot more influence and would do it later when everything is controlled from a corporate headquarters when everyone is told what to play for their entire shift. when I played in a band in the late '90s. I knew people who worked for record labels who lived locally and were radio promotion people for the labels that would go. on stations and the likes of 99x Leslie Fram, so because they weren't owned by cumulus or Clear Channel at the time, she still had the autonomy to play whatever she wanted and add whatever records she wanted to get a person in.

You'd have about 15 minutes or so to give your pit, they'd have a room full of people and everyone would have their records, they'd release when I say records, it would be a single from a band, it was a real badge of honor for some of these stations were the ones that They found a new artist, so there was a lot of competition in the community. Radio. People in the community wanted to say, "Oh yeah, I discovered this band and it became a hit, so there was a real motivation for people to listen." to as much music as they could, so a big part of the equation all these years was promoting independent radio.

The independent promoters, no offense to my friends who worked in radio promotion, were basically the buffer between the labels and the radio stations because Payola was still around the whole time. The way through all these eras, so Peola was when you used to pay radio stations for records, so when they made it illegal they just had independent people that you would pay and they would be the middleman so it wouldn't be illegal. I didn't really know what they were doing with that money that you sent them in an envelope once these stations were purchased, they said, "Okay, who are we going to program these 150 stations that we bought?

Oh, let's find a person who What happened? ?Actually, there was basically one guy who programmed Mo on almost all the

rock

stations and some of them programmed all the alternative stations. I won't mention who they were, they were people who were paid by both the record label and the radio stations. or the big companies to program these stations and they would get a particular sum of money for each station they had an ad on, although they had control of the playlists, they basically paid themselves to put the records on the air of a strange way and in one case one of the guys ended up becoming a manager for some of the bands they were paying because the bands made money from AirPlay Radio of which he got 20% when he was the person who put them on the radio and deciding how many laps they would get per week doesn't seem like, you know, that should be happening, that's right, and those of us who believe that competition is good, this becomes a real problem because what I really have is the taste of one or two individuals who determine what happens on the radio so that people start making their records, mixing them and mastering them in a way that they think would attract this person who controls all these radio stations, so there were people that said that they, when I was producing, people were looking for the next Nickelback, they were just what people wanted because the people who played Nickelback, the guys who controlled the playlist, that was the standard and that they were a band that sold records and people wanted that because people who liked Nickelback liked Nickelback, so they played it.

It's a real problem for me here, so the stations are being controlled by people who don't live in the market and don't actually have to listen to what's coming out. over the air, so you get these records that are all mixed together so they sound the same and if you start listening to a rock station in Detroit or Cleveland or Atlanta for 2 hours, all the records, if they're playing new records, they blend together nicely. First of all, many of them were produced by the same people and were mixed by the same people. There were a handful of producers who produced every rock record from the late '90s until about 2012, when rock music completely died. not just produced by this handful of people, so there were a handful of mixers when I say a handful I mean less than five, so the records would play, sometimes you'd listen to the radio and you'd hear 20 songs in a row that were all mixed together. by the same person and they could have the same drum samples, the same thing, you know everything, the same bass sound, the same type of compression, things happen if you are doing tests for your radio station in your market, suddenly you discover that you wait I have to play records that were made before 1995 so people don't turn off my station.

It wasn't a terrible situation, oh the bands are in a terrible situation. The records don't sound very good on the radio anymore, so people are leaving. going back and playing older records, what was considered rock or alternative radio, suddenly becomes this kind of hybrid, you get one or two new records on a pile of old ones, there's another layer that's really incredible, Jim. and I was laughing at this, there were also these people called producer managers. Now producer managers started in the '80s, I think, but in the '90s there were a handful of producer managers who managed not only all the producers, but they also managed them personally. recording engineers and mixing engineers and then record label executives, so you could have a person who had the head of a major label as his client negotiate his contract with the record label and get a cut of his signing bonus or they would get 10% of their contract, plus that person would hire a producer that the manager also manages and then they would hire a mixer that the managing producer manages.

Producer managers were earning a 15% percentage. I think it would be from The producers finance the people who produce the records, in addition to doing that, every producer that I worked with or knew at the time had their own team and why did they have their own team because their producers told them to They will buy equipment so they can rent it back to the band for the labels to pay for, let me give you an idea of ​​how these charges happen. This is another way that the producers and really the production managers would make extra money, so I own this Marshall jcm 800. an amp that we are going to use for the session well I'm going to rent it to the band for $100 a day even though I bought this amp 30 years ago because this is not part of the budget and this is part of my sound, so we are going to use it, in fact, we are also going to use this here.

This is an old Lany clip amp that people don't have and I'm going to charge $100 a day for it too. you know, J my jcm 2000, that's going to be $75 a day, oh this is high, yeah this is an extra $125 a day, so people would charge this day after day, on top of the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that a studio would charge. it costs when you're making a record and sometimes you work for two three four months, 5 days a week, but you get a block 7 days a week, so it would be $14,000 a week just for the studio time and then when we use the amps we add all those together maybe it's 500 600 $700 a day on top of that for the days you use them let me give you another example so let's say this comes with the studio these are the PRs of the microphone that They are in the studio these are B a e Neeve type Mike PRI but that is not really my sound my sound is my Mike PRI rack here these microphones helos PR and this is what we are going to use and since the studio does not have these and I Am I going to charge the band a thousand dollars a day to use my Helios PR microphone?

You could even charge them more to make the study time two thousand dollars a day, but there's an extra surcharge here and who does that? Well, the producer. you get some of the money now, they've already owned this for about 20 years so they're just making money every time because they can, but ultimately 15% of that goes to the production manager and they're the ones who are cheering producers to do that. Another thing to add money to the band's budget was drum rentals. Producers almost never use the drummer's drums. They always rented them from a battery company. They brought a bunch of different drums plus a bunch of different snares and then they had a bag that worked for this drum company they tuned the drums and changed the heads every day there was a record that I worked on like in a band where the rental of Drums and drum tech cost, I think, about $25,000 to change the heads and tune the drums during the week we tracked the drums.

Now these are legitimate costs, renting battery and things like that, but by producing users like me, I owned all of this and I would do it. I didn't rent the stuff to the band because ultimately the bands needed to get the money they spent on the record back from the sales of the record and since I was the producer I needed to get that money back too because I got a $3,000 advance for it. song from my producer. I needed to get back on my feet before I started collecting royalties, so this didn't really benefit anyone except, of course, these producers and managers, and just took the labels' money as much as they could.

This is an era when debut albums would gross $250,000. budget and they wanted to make sure they got as much of that budget as possible and leave less for the artists to live well, but you're forgetting something else, okay, these same pretty smart producers and managers said, hey, if you're going to hire my mixer to mix your single. He would get a point for mixing the single. Well, the single is what sells your CD. Wait, let's explain this. A point, a point, is a percentage point when a band, a new band, signed in those days. they would get 13%, that was their deal or whatever the retail price of a record was, so if that were the case, if a record was 10 bucks or they made 10 bucks, the band would make 130 per record, okay, so of those 13 points. although they would have to give the producer three points and the mixer one point because someone, these managing producers thought that the mixer should also get a percentage point because if they weremixing the songs for radio then that would be selling the record, so they should make that money. so you mix one song but you get one point on the whole album, so they decided to just mix the whole record, yeah, and mix one record at that time so they'll charge you.

These mixing engineers would charge money for rent. their Sony 3348 machine, so they would pay $2,000 a day for studio time and then they would get paid three to $5,000 per mix, that's just the mixing part and the people who were okay with this at the record companies shared a manager with the producers. and the mixers are right, this is why production managers would say that Rick Biato is not a team player and everyone thinks I'm being funny, but I actually heard that language. He wasn't a very good team player either. I just thought it was outrageous to charge for these things and what a lot of people didn't understand at the time is this.

It didn't make any difference to the record companies because it didn't come out of the record company's part of the sales, it all came out of the companies' part. artist sales, so all this money, all these additional charges are being recovered from the artist's royalties. they're paying for all this, that's right, people were feeding at the trough together and then all the records started sounding more and more similar and more similar, well in 1999, although Napster happened and then the college students were like, well, no. I'm going to pay 19 dollars for the album, I can get it for free and also there is only one good song on the album because record labels would only focus on a few songs, they spend most of the budget on making those songs successful and then the rest The album was filler.

I will forever maintain that if the records had sounded better and there had been more variety and there had been opportunities for more bands to break up, Napster would have been a blow, but it wouldn't have been fatal, yes, to the model. record business, but the fact of the matter is that Napster, uh, was the beginning of the end of the ability to make huge amounts of money for producers to kill the CD's list price of $18.98, which undermined the fact that everyone was paid to make the album. model, yeah, and then budgets started going down, so in the 1990s, a typical record budget for a new band at a major lab was about $250,000 now, if you get a, it sounds like a lot of money, but there were bands that had bidding wars.

I have budgets of $750,000 two albums guaranteed $150,000 for your support videos guaranteed I made some of those signings, yes, and in 2005 the idea that you wanted to make an album with a budget of $775,000 was ridiculous, people said: what are you thinking that you don't are? I was going to spend so much money to make a record, so what the label started to do began to depend on people like me. I could go. I could co-write the songs with the bands. I could, uh, I could touch the parts that I wouldn't have. hire session people because they could play their parts if they needed them because almost every rock record you know from the mid 90s onwards had a session drummer even though there was a drummer in the band, not all of them, not all of them were Dave Gro, but a lot of them could have a session drummer until Pro Tools came out and once Protools came out and people started picking up beats, then you could have the band's shitty drummer playing and you could fix it, although they'd still hire session people. and use beat detective.

I was once executive producer of an album that hired very expensive drummers and then passed them off as a beat detective. I wasn't the producer of those tracks, but it was very common to hire session people to do it well when there was no budget to hire session people, the labels would tell me, okay, I have this is the budget I have. I have 50 thousand. Can you do the whole record for that, including mixing, so that's the catering budget on a 1998 record? true and then it was like well, we don't have a budget, so no, eventually people just didn't sign, there was just no signing because rock music started to decline in popularity.

I started doing background royalty-free sessions for solo so I could get an extra $500 per track, yeah, because everything changed a lot. I mean, I always say I started producing 10 years too late, if you had a million-selling record, you'd make $300,000 as a producer if you had a multi-platinum record, something that sold 3 million records, you'd make a million dollars as a producer. Of course, your production manager would accept $150,000. All those bands from the '9s from Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Allison Chains. Nirvana furious as the machine all these things were multi-platinum Sound Garden records so the people who produced those records that they made a lot of money off of it was the copy of a copy of a copy that really killed the rock music that it was.

It wasn't just Nickel Back that was people trying to find the Nickelback ARR. People were afraid to sign things that sounded original because every time they signed something they were risking their job well and they were risking their job because radio had changed so much that you couldn't look for a dishonest promotion person to go to a dishonest radio station and find out if your record was a hit, so if I signed a band in 1993 1994, there was a good chance I'd find out I could get it. on the radio somewhere and try it and try it and then you play some records in the stores in that market and people start buying them and you can go to another market and say oh this record is a hit in Chattanooga Tennessee or Knoxville or Birmingham Alabama on the next radio station they are more likely to try and sometimes it took six months to create a hit record, but it could be done.

They would call record stores to see if things were selling. They would. This was common on the radio. the stations would do research the record companies would do research look, we put it on the station here in Atlanta wax and send faxes to W Street, whatever record stores were here, you know we're selling, you know, 20 records a day of, you know, 10 spins we make If this week all of us in the music industry were drunk on catalog royalties for reissuing stuff on CD, there was so much money in the early and mid 90s that people weren't really paying attention, There were a handful of people in the recording industry who understood how devastating the Telecommunications Act could be, but most people simply didn't see it coming.

I have a radio promoter friend here, Randy, who lives here in the city, he was the one who told me back then that That was what was basically killing the music industry, all that underground FM radio, let's put it to us. Like, an attitude that was still maintained in the 80s and 90s, there were still people running radio stations that came up that way and were discouraged from keeping that spirit alive, was eliminated at the end of the century. I remember when Urban Hems came out next to the verb and Bittersweet Symphony was a single and the 99x DJ played it eight times in a row and said it was amazing.

I'm going to play it again during drive time. I can't believe that song that just kills me. I'm going to play it again. I'm going to play it again eight times in a row. That would never happen and that was because it wasn't owned by one of these big corporations, well we both have friends who were DJs who, in the early 2000s, had no creativity left at work, they were told what to play, in At best, they could choose between two or three. records and you had to play the same type of record at the same part of the time during the day, it was all supposedly scientific about what would make people listen to the radio more and all that research basically destroyed what made people love the radio. radio on First of all, Jim, what's next?

Can rock music become as popular as it once was or is it something that has already disappeared? I look at rock music and there are two things that I really love about all kinds of music except rock. One in particular is the freedom for creativity and one thing that has been wonderful in the last decade is that young artists who have no prayer or hope or idea of ​​appearing on the radio have had the freedom to be creative in ways that is a really nice moment. go out and listen to music, but what you and I are missing is the collective experience of everyone enjoying a record together, and I hope you have some ideas, it's a really frustrating thing for me to think about, well, until we get to that point . when you say enjoy it together, that collective experience of the artists, whether they know bands like Nirvana or Pearl Jam or all the bands from the early '90s that were huge, they were world bands, they were famous everywhere and that's when Rock ruled that.

It was the last time rock dominated Lincoln Park. I think it was probably famous around the world, but a lot of the other bands from that new era of metal weren't and there was a real divide. People in England weren't necessarily listening to new medal records. I listen to Lincoln Park, but I may be wrong about that. Am I wrong Jim? I think they did. I just don't think it had the same urgency. The notion that everyone is talking about an artist is something I think people miss. being the biggest artist in the world, i think she is the biggest cult artist that ever lived because i know dozens of people who care deeply about music who claim to have never heard a note of her songs.

I imagine people say that about Zeppelin too. or the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Joanie Mitchell Jackson or whoever, the good news if you are a musician is that you can find a passionate AR fan base, you can dedicate yourself to your art, there are people who are discovering ways to make money being artists . What we're going to miss forever is the feeling that everyone in the world has to talk about this record on this particular day, right? It was a feature, I mean, part of it was the radio, it was the radio. I know a lot of music fans.

I know people who are very committed to music, I love talking to them, we should accept what we have with it, but I miss it, yes, you miss it, we talk about this a lot, this is an ongoing conversation between Rick and I and I think this is a bit. window into what has been 100 hours of conversation about this between us. I wanted to capture this one of our conversations here on this topic and, uh, this will probably go on forever, but, uh, Jim, I really appreciate you being here today. check out Jim substack. I'll put the link in the description and I'm working on an interesting project where Rick has previewed his full body motion capture, live performances of musicians.

It will be available through an app in the meta. search in about 3 months we will put up a link so you can sign up to receive information from Soapbox, that's the company, it's amazing and it's really creative and it's an attempt to bring music to a wider audience in the post-radio era. radio era Jim thanks I appreciate it, it's always fun