Will There Be A Future For Rock N’ Roll?

Will there ever will be a future for rock n’ roll again? I think the better question should be WHO would be the future of Rock n’ Roll? In this day and age of people that love to consume content, the old model of doing the music business isn’t enough anymore. Before, you can just be a musician and live it out. Rock out, do gigs, just make music and not worry about anything else. A record label will take care of your marketing, book your gigs, organizing your transportation, put you on the radio, TV appearances and all that stuff. The evolution of how people consume content would be one of the main cause of why this is happening and how it directly affects the state of the music industry.

In the 60’s to the early 90’s actually, musicians sell their music and make a living by selling records and you can only hear their music through those records and you get to hear them live by going to their concerts. In this type of business model, everyone is funneled to just a few things to access their favorite bands/music.

At present time, it’s a different ball game. You have streaming services/platforms all around. You have Itunes, Spotify, Deezer, Sound Cloud, Tidal, Youtube, Vimeo, and so on and so forth. There are so many avenues of music publishing now that it destroys the old business model. In business terms, there is no limitation on the supply. You can get it almost everywhere. With that, it actually devalues the music itself. Now if you want to have a name in the music industry, you have to keep up. Even when you’re starting out, you are not a musician anymore. If you want to make it big, a musician has to think of them as a “brand”. And as a “brand” you have to do everything on your own and need to be consistent with it.

We are now living in the culture of boredom. People get lost in black holes of just dwelling into content. That is why there is a trendy term called “binge watching”. We have to acknowledge that this is the world we are now living in. So as a musician, aside from being a brand, they have to think of themselves now as a content creator. Creating engaging content consistently and most of the time, free. This is how you get people’s attention now. You have to add value to them first.  But of course, you need to have music as the main hub of what you do. But aside from that, they need to make their own videos, merch, gigs to make things happen for their “brand”. Everything is almost always DIY before you get to the top.

Given this brief description of how it all works today. We need to accept the fact that the old business model of music is now almost dead. The only question is, who will rise up to be the next rockstars of our generation with the correct mindset that can push through all of the challenges and competition we have in the music market today.