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Are too many CDs being released?


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Are too many CDs being released? John Shand and Bernard Zuel argue the case.

AGREE:

Remember the cassette? Every garage band, wine-bar duo and cocktail jazz act had one. It was like a calling card: they gave it to venue owners, agents and promoters, and then held their breath waiting for the phone to ring. It had to be a cassette, because LPs were too expensive to make, unless you were confident of selling them by the thousand.

Enter the CD, and the price of production plummeted. Suddenly every wannabe professional musician has to have one. They look just like the real thing.

They are the real thing - unless you listen too closely. And given making 500 is not much more expensive than making one, all those garage bands, wine-bar duos and cocktail jazz acts are not just holding their collective breath for gigs, they are turning blue waiting for reviews and sales. What was once a calling card is now a supposed commercial entity. The result is that the market is swamped, and the wannabe musos are left feeling bitter and twisted because the CD they thought of as real is neither being reviewed, nor selling. Add the fact the serious players often document their work more than they did in vinyl days, and that the major record companies dump container-loads of cheap-to-make compilations on the market, and it's no wonder sales are dropping. The proportion of quality to dross has never been lower. Result: people turn to other entertainment..... JOHN SHAND

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DISAGREE:

Is this a question of musical border protection? "We will decide who releases a CD and which ones enter our personal space"? If the music is there, who is to say what can and can't be made available? The record companies? Oh please!

Controlling the supply of music, by owning both the means of recording and the distribution, has been the cornerstone of the music industry's profits. And hasn't it done a great job at bringing us only the best music? Even of the ones the industry did deign to record and release, hundreds - no, thousands - were given no chance and disappeared from the inventories quick smart.

Thankfully, a lucky few have been resurrected by diligent nerds decades later and reissued on CD, bringing the likes of arty folk, weird noise, prog rock and any number of non-top 40 music to listeners who otherwise would be dependent on the choices of the glorified accountants in the industry. Even better, thousands of artists have taken advantage of relatively cheap means of recording and producing CDs to bypass the tastemakers and get their music out there to people who have loved it.

Of course, a great many of the releases each year are tedious at best, utter rubbish in the end and likely to leave both reviewers and potential listeners overwhelmed, thereby making it more likely they will be overlooked. But the alternative is to ossify our listening habits or deny the small percentage of good music that is always out there a chance because we want someone else to do the thinking for us...BERNARD ZEUL

source:smh.com.au

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