Recording Business Makes for a Sad Song
I’d really like to keep my mouth shut, but musical passion makes it impossible.
Your articles on Warner Music Group (“Warner Music Chief Expected to Quit Today,” May 3) and Disney Hollywood Records (“Trouble in Tunetown,” April 30) pry my lips apart because they tell the same story--an American tragedy.
If America has made any lasting artistic contribution worldwide, it has been in music: jazz, swing, pop, rock and more pop, etc.
It was in the mid-1970s that music people, people with ears instead of briefcases, began being dislodged at the top and replaced by attorneys and “businessmen.” And now, 20 years later, artistic stagnation and frenzied corporate feeding are the natural results.
It’s like the imaginary forest inhabited only by predators. Eventually everything is consumed, even the forest--and, of course, the talent.
HAL YOERGLER
West Hollywood
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