The bright lights remind me of heaven. I sit atop my drums like a king and pound my soul through the instrument. The ancestral craving for release electrifies the club. The energy we throw at the audience is flung back at us tenfold. After a dizzying hour and half spent in eter-nal bliss, we play our last note. The audience screams for more as I walk off stage, elated and exhausted. Backstage a young woman massages my back while another brings me a drink. As the band discusses our recent triumph, an outsider makes himself noticed. I’m about to grill the guy for wearing a suit to a rock and roll show when he intro-duces himself as the Artists and Repertoire representative from Geffen Records. I allow him to speak. He goes on about current rock trends and how we could sell millions of records, and then he drops the bomb. “I’m ready to offer you guys a recording contract.” I could see dollar signs in my guitarist’s eyes and spotlights in the lead singer’s. I could hardly control my breathing. In the twentieth century, this is any musician’s dream come true. Unfortunately for us it’s the twenty-first century and it’s just a dream.

The music business isn’t what it used to be. In the late six-ties, rock and roll exploded on the music scene and every-one wanted a piece. Bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Doors ignited the masses and music be-came more than just and idle pastime. It became a way of life. By the early seventies, the business men jumped at the chance to make a buck off of talented musicians and their

dedicated fans. It made sense. Most artists have no busi-ness sense so they paid people to take care of the business side. The partnership worked because the more popular the bands became, the more money everybody made. By the turn of the century, a gradual paradigm shift had oc-curred, rendering the classic music business model useless. The music business has been in limbo for the last decade, unsuccessfully trying to reclaim the high sales figures that ran the industry for the past forty years. Unless some se-rious changes are made, the music business will continue to plummet, leaving musicians and fans wondering exactly what happened.

In the classic days, the magic phrase “record contract” meant a shot at stardom. It wasn’t a guarantee, but it meant that a major record label believed in a band enough to give them a fighting chance. The company paid top dollar for the production of a high quality album. Expensive stu-dios, famous producers, and rented instruments all came from borrowed record label money. Once the album was released, the band shot a video and had the single played on the radio, more borrowed money invested in the suc-cess of the band. The radio was usually the deciding fac-tor. The more the song was played, the more people would purchase the record, all based on the appreciation of one radio song. With the record selling, the band would hit the road, usually playing with a band from the same label. After all this, if the band sold well, they would do it again. It usually takes two or three records to start seeing a profit. That’s why there are one hit wonders and power bands that release record after record. There’s not much in between because if the band couldn’t keep up after one hit, they

Dawn of theNew Age of MusicBy John K. Burkholder

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