Tony Bennett Slams Modern Music & Corporations Controlling It
Tony Bennett, the 87-year-old performer who’s still going strong and is considered worldwide even at his advanced age as one of the greatest living singers, had some pretty spicy words about the state of modern music when the BBC spoke to him in an interview released Thursday. When asked if he planned to record any new songs, Bennett used the question as a springboard to launch into a rant about the lousy state of of affairs the music industry has succumbed to, and specifically how corporations are to ones to blame.
“The songs that are written today, most of them are terrible,” Bennett said. “It’s a very bad period musically throughout the world for popular music. The corporations they took it over, and they want to make so much money and they don’t care whether the public likes it or not. They think the public is ignorant, so their attitude is, ‘Don’t give them anything intelligent, because it won’t sell.'”
Tony Bennett also said something pointed out by many observers of the music industry: that the myopic focus on the young by labels is robbing them of the economic diversity they need to survive.
“I grew up in an era when the record companies just sold records to everybody. And the whole family bought songs. Today, record companies are failing because because they’re putting their accent just on the young. And I think it’s rather silly. They’re missing out of thousands of people that would love to buy records, but they don’t buy them because they don’t have a lasting quality.”
Speaking of lasting quality, Bennett started his career in 1949, and still draws sold-out audiences across the world, and his voice is considered as strong as ever. According to Bennett, learning has been the key to his longevity. “I still have a lot to learn about music.”
March 20, 2014 @ 9:20 am
Never been a huge fan of Tony, but he knows from music. He had a big hit with “Cold Cold Heart” in the 1950’s.
March 20, 2014 @ 9:22 am
I agree completely, but I think the general public is to blame as well for accepting a lower quality of music
March 20, 2014 @ 9:46 am
The public accepts what their institutions give them. Institutions have an obligation to the public and to society to uphold a high standard and do right by their constituents. Read what Tony said. Music corporations have no respect for their consumers. They think they’re brain dead, and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. They’ve never been educated in what good music is because they’ve never been exposed to it, and music education has been eradicated in public schools.
March 21, 2014 @ 12:42 pm
I think the real problem is that at some point, music became synonymous with beauty and sex or sexiness.. I saw an interview with Shania Twain where she mentioned that she cannot sing like she use to. I listened to her album. She still sound the same to me. She did not lose her voice. She never had one to begin with! She was just a pretty girl who could halfway carry a note. As cruel as this might sound, she is just no longer a young sexy girl. She is now, what, in her forties? Since, people are no longer distracted by her beauty, they are seeing her for what she was in the first place, mediocrity. Same story goes for Faith Hill.
March 20, 2014 @ 9:52 am
The problem with what you said is that teenagers and young people in college aren’t the general public. They’re just the only general public the record industry is really investing in marketing to or creating music for. There’s more good music out there than there has ever been before. The record industry is just spending their money on a much narrower slice of it (even Big Machine Records which is a privately held company with a distribution agreement and not a corporation).
March 20, 2014 @ 9:35 am
Unfortunately, the corporations are correct. The public is completely brain dead. The popular music is just a reflection of a decaying culture.
March 20, 2014 @ 11:27 am
The corporations are only correct because they are not offering alternatives.
March 21, 2014 @ 9:59 am
I don’t think so. The corporations just want money. If they thought they could make money off Country music, they’d record Country music. But 20 year old jack-offs with their hats on backwards just don’t want to hear Jake Hooker.
March 20, 2014 @ 10:06 am
If anyone has the right to speak to this issue it’s this guy.
March 20, 2014 @ 10:47 am
The casual listener will never care whether a song has meaning or intricate/difficult to play arrangements. They’re in it for the summertime anthem, the words they can drunkenly sing along to without taking up too much space in their brains.
There is over twice as many people on the planet now as there was in 1960. The larger a population becomes, the more pop music is made. I think it’s just history repeating itself on a larger scale.
March 20, 2014 @ 11:28 am
I think you’re underestimating the listening audience.
March 20, 2014 @ 1:40 pm
I’ll be honest. I like some mainstream music. I also like underground music as well. I don’t agree. Some people doesn’t know there is other music unless they are introduced to it. Not everybody gets on the internet. Some people only access to music is mainstream radio.
I had to drive my mom and dad somewhere. I played Holly Williams cd .They both liked it so much they got their own individual copy.
My sister has a dinner for small group of people. Mom asked me to get Holly cd. Pretty much everyone there liked it. They were people asking me about her. There was even a guy who wanted to see the cd case so he could buy it. He asked me where I got her cd. I saw him several months later. He was listening to The Highway. He said its one of his favorites and he listens to her a lot. I’ve introduced Sarah Jarosz to people just by playing her music.
March 21, 2014 @ 6:54 am
I’m just saying that the majority of pop music’s audience is not into deep meaning and impressive instrumentation. I don’t know how you could argue against that.
March 22, 2014 @ 11:51 pm
The reason they’re not is because they’re not presented with any other options. There’s definitely a large portion of the population who just listen to whatever is popular, but if mainstream radio offered more variety there would be more variety in what is popular. And since the big record companies have realized there are people who will listen regardless of the quality, they have no reason to put any effort into the music they produce and just churn out the same cookie cutter bullshit. People would rather listen to crap than nothing, so they just adjust their taste and become desensitized to how shitty it is.
It is for this very reason that “underground” and independent music has become more popular than ever in the past 10 years. If young people only listened to shallow crap, this wouldn’t be the case.
March 23, 2014 @ 8:11 am
Well said, Eric.
March 20, 2014 @ 11:36 am
Larger corporations market to larger demographics. By extension that results in supplying to the demand of the lowest common denominator.
it doesn’t matter who is good, who has staying power, etc, etc. The market will eat them up.
Until the marketplace ‘fills out’ with companies that have some actual ‘muscle’ then nothing is going to change. An artist who breaks out is only going to be lured to one of the big companies and thus feed the vicious cycle of selling out and losing artistic control.
A healthy small label environment would be the antidote to that. Some way to enable a quality breakout artist to ‘scale up’ without selling out. To keep control, yet still make superstar money. So, this automatically calls into question big companies’ hold on radio, plus access to big tours. Until a breakout artist moves to a big label, so much of what they do will feel like swimming upstream–struggling–when, by comparison, with a stroke of a pen on a Big Machine contract so many things become so easy.
No wonder they do it, and then are contractually prevented from disparaging their benefactors when they have to record ‘1994’, or equivalent.
March 20, 2014 @ 2:05 pm
A class act. 🙂 And right on, too, especially regarding songwriting. Granted, there’s plenty of good stuff out there if you know where to look for it; but for the past several years or so, I’ve felt like song craft is a dying art at least where mainstream country, pop and rock are concerned.
March 20, 2014 @ 3:20 pm
Tony is an icon and a good mentor. Tony is gggrrrrreaaat !
March 20, 2014 @ 3:32 pm
Good on him! Mind you, I reckon 95% of the music in ANY given genre is crap and only the discerning will ever seek out that other 5% I was having this exact conversation with some co-workers yesterday when they were laughing at me for listening to country music. I quoted what I just said above and just said “Billy Ray Cyrus, Shania Twain and Taylor Swift are not country music – that’s pop music. Country music is something else entirely”. They got it. We are VERY lucky these days with the invention of the internet everything is available at our fingertips.
March 20, 2014 @ 5:35 pm
I agree with Tony in questioning the notion that the “18-34 demographic” is all that matters. I’m in my 50s and buy a lot of music, most of it from local and independent acts since they’re the only ones who give a damn about me or what I’d like to hear.
Funny thing: I have a lot more disposable income than I did when I was 18.
March 21, 2014 @ 7:46 am
It is still an advertising and marketing world we live in. They deregulated ownership of radio stations and monopoly took over. Most music produced is safe and dictated by a clean perfect click track (metronome) BPM shalacked sound alike contest mentality. Americanamusic.org is one of the best places to check in with REAL human being music. Ya just gotta dig a little harder and deeper. Lauramvula.com is one of the best artists to emerge from England. The real deal in Pop. All the best, and we LOVE Don Williams. RodeoandJuliet.tv
March 21, 2014 @ 9:36 am
I just read an article that showed that music industry in N.America earns 40 percent less than it did in the 1970’s.
revenue is going down, and won’t go back unless they do something different.
there is no doubt that part of the reason for that is the crap that they offer. absolute garbage in the mainstream. any branch of pop.
Lots of people, millions of us, all ages, can tell the difference between music industry crap and good music.
so we’re saying no thanks.
We might be in the longest period of output of crap music, in the history of popular music in North America.
March 21, 2014 @ 9:40 am
As two examples, how in the hell are Lindi Ortega,, and Sturgill Simpson not signed to big record deals?
They both have everything that record industry should be looking for.
Why do they have to struggle paying for their own albums? Playing small venues, no touring help, losing money etc.
It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s just stupid.
March 22, 2014 @ 7:56 am
It’s all time and chance.
It rains on the just and the unjust.
Timing and circumstance.
Then, there’s ‘favor’. There are those who have ‘favor’. We don’t get to decide who has that.
March 22, 2014 @ 10:00 am
If y’all want to hear a talented guy, with an amazing voice and lyrics that mean something, you should be listening to Thomas Tillman.
Google/YouTube him, or go to http://www.ThomasTillman.com
March 22, 2014 @ 2:37 pm
Hasn’t Tony Bennett being saying this for years? I bet he hated the Beatles at the time. And I think he slated Nirvana too.
March 23, 2014 @ 8:55 pm
Though I couldn’t find any documentation saying so, given the context of what the man sings and loves it is more than likely when things like rock and roll started to get going he probably shat on too seeing it as garbage sounds for garbage people. Could go for Country, Punk, and Hip Hop too.
He could hate Merle Haggard, Led Zeppelin, and The Misfits just as much as he hates Luke Bryan, Chief Keef, and Skrillex for all we know.
Not saying it is true. Plenty of people have have taste outside of their genre but I figure after a certain age maybe you just stop accepting new sounds regardless of their quality. A counterpoint to think about.
March 24, 2014 @ 6:39 pm
I wonder if Tony has ever heard Paul Anka’s awesome swing version of Nirvana’s – Smells Like Teen Spirit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM_xvTaYavw