Music Industry

I suspect the phenomenon of American Idol has seduced millions into thinking that a booming career in the music business can be established in no time, that just about anybody who can halfway carry a tune can be a superstar. Although over the years there have been many exceptions (indeed too many to name), it's not that easy, folks. Not everybody can be the next Beyonce. Besides, one is more than enough. But don't give up all hope. So you can neither sing nor dance, but maybe you have a talent for writing catchy songs.

A REVOLUTION has occurred in the way music is distributed, and the big record companies are in a state of panic. With an abundance of music now available free on the Internet, the major labels have essentially lost control of their catalogs. But they are not casualties of new technology so much as victims of their own arrogance.These days, it's possible for anyone with Web access to download hours of music in an audio format known as MP3. The downloaded music is of surprisingly good sound quality and can be played out of computer speakers or on a special portable player.

Walk into a Tower Records anywhere in the world, and you'll find promotional displays that look essentially the same as the ones at home. Nor is there much difference in the CD bins, where you'll find international superstars like Celine Dion, U2 or Janet Jackson.Some things, though, are quite different. Take the world-music section. Here in America, we think of world music as being foreign and exotic, performed in incomprehensible languages by singers with unpronounceable names. It's Oum Kalthoum and Marta Sebestyen, Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

It may be billed as the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival, but the two-day concert at Sandy Point State Park in Annapolis is hardly a musically exclusive affair.Sure, it boasts plenty of well-known bluesmen and women, including Buddy Guy, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Koko Taylor and Saffire the Uppity Blues Women.But it will also feature performances by acts that are anything but pure blues. For instance, there's Delbert McClinton, whose current album, "One of the Fortunate Few," has done well on both the Billboard country and blues charts.

It's Saturday night in Annapolis.Tourists emerge from restaurants and saunter toward the water. Impeccably dressed midshipmen sit on benches. And drunken, rowdy 20-somethings pile into bars to bop their heads to the sound of their favorite band.This eclectic mix of visitors and locals is nothing new to Annapolis. Yet, walking down Main Street, a passerby can catch a glimmer of something new emanating from the bars. Music. Foot-thumping, gut-jerking, distinctively original music.Barely five years ago, Annapolis was known as a place to hear cover bands running through the usual play list from "Brown-Eyed Girl" to "Margaritaville."

The eminent composer Robert Hall Lewis died last Friday, just before his 70th birthday and barely a year into his retirement from Goucher College and the Peabody Institute.He is survived by his wife, Barbara, and his daughter, Renata. He is survived as well by his beautiful music: more than 70 orchestral works, including four symphonies and innumerable chamber works.Especially noteworthy among the latter are four string quartets, the last two of which are intense, highly concentrated examples of some of the best work in that medium done in our time.

MURPHY, N.C. -- The CD rack at the Wal-Mart in this small town in southwestern North Carolina, like the racks in 2,300 other Wal-Mart branches around the country, is a world of shrink-wrapped packages marked "edited," "clean" and "sanitized for your protection."Other compact discs are not marked this way, but they, too, have been altered from the versions sold at most record stores. Some teens here aren't happy about this. But they have no choice: the closest record stores are 50 to 150 miles away in Georgia.

Getting the garbage out of rock musicMany heartfelt thanks to Blockbuster, Kmart and Wal-Mart for carrying only those CD and VCR tape editions that removed the pornographic, violent, blasphemous, racist and graphic messages that some artists and their producing studios insist we need to experience.Don Rosenberg, owner of the Record Exchange, laments that those stores are ''a group of retailers that don't care a whit about music or the music industry.'' I say he is a music producer who doesn't care a whit about our society.

Poor Milla. Here she is, still on tour behind her first and so far only album, "The Divine Comedy," when what she really wants to do is get her new songs recorded and into the CD stores."

The 15th annual New Music Seminar got off to a slow start this week in New York with sparse attendance at most events and an overall sense of ennui.The opening session was highlighted by Atlantic Records President Danny Goldberg's keynote address, exhorting conventioneers to continue fighting for freedom of speech without tilting over into bigotry."

The thousands of fans who filed into Morgan State University's auditorium for Khia Edgerton's funeral yesterday could recite her accomplishments: recording artist, radio personality, leader of an underground music movement. But during the two-hour music-filled ceremony, those fans learned how Edgerton rose from spinning records in her family's Randallstown basement to become "K-Swift," leader of Baltimore's club music scene. The story is a by-the-book lesson on the value of hard work. "She's didn't talk about building an entertainment empire - she just did it," said Marc Clarke, of radio station 92Q, where Edgerton was the first female DJ. "She didn't talk about losing 170 pounds.

As he cruised down Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive, Good Charlotte singer Joel Madden battled spotty cell-phone reception to talk about band life, family life (he and girlfriend Nicole Richie are parents of a baby girl, Harlow) and the state of the music industry. His group, Good Charlotte, which got its start in Waldorf in 1996, is headlining the AST Dew Tour's Panasonic Open tomorrow night at Camden Yards before it embarks on a summer tour with Boys Like Girls. The band's latest album, Good Morning Revival, was released last year.

Daniel Bernard Roumain, known in the music world as DBR, says the violin has saved his life. Rather fittingly, he uses his life saver to reach out to others and dive into the deepest of topics in his new piece, "One Loss Plus." "For anyone, it's nice to have an antidote, not only in a time of war, but when you are sad and feel alone," Roumain said. "Music can serve as a wonderful antidote to a very harsh and cruel world." Roumain, 36, of Margate, Fla., started playing the violin when he was 5 years old. By age 10, he was composing and playing in rock and jazz bands; by 15 he had "plugged in," or attached his violin to amps; and now he has released an album (etudes4violin&electronix)

Among veteran digital music fans, it's hard to generate much sympathy for the recording industry. For years the record producers battled to keep digital music out of the hands of listeners - not just pirates, but legitimate users who were willing to pay for it. At the same time, the industry engaged in a conspiracy to fix the price of its CDs at the retail level, conduct that was outrageous on two counts. First, it increased the average price of a CD to something approaching $18 when the price of every other form of electronic entertainment was decreasing.

I can see the vinyl disc spinning on the turntable at the old Hochschild Kohn music department. The song was "Chanson d'Amour" as sung by Dotty Todd and her husband, Art, the man whose obituary ran this week (he was 93). His musical career began on Kentucky Avenue in Northeast Baltimore, and he credited his mother - and her piano training - for sending him on to a career in music. Like so many, I also grew up with a piano, in our case an upright Charles M. Steiff that sat at the bottom of the stairs, between the parlor and the dining room.

Having spent last week on vacation sans Internet, I had to wait until today to extend a slightly belated happy 25th birthday to a gadget that forever changed the way we entertain ourselves. On Aug. 17, 1982, the first compact disk (or disc) rolled off a German production line, paving the way for a generation of devices that can now cram a thousand hours of hours of music or more into a box the size of deck of cards. The technology that made the CD possible has also changed the dynamic of the music business - including the role of artists, the companies who market their music, and those of us who listen to it. Ironically, that same technology now threatens to make the CD irrelevant.

Elton John's recent public outburst about the Internet's effect on pop -- he suggested that a five-year cyberspace shutdown might be the only way to renew the music's creativity -- was greeted with eye rolling and the general consensus that he should splurge on an iPod. But his consternation is understandable. The music industry is in tatters; the noise that amateurs once kept to themselves emanates from every corner of cyberspace, and between the money-obsessed mainstream and the hype-addled underground, there's no agreement on what will endure.

Amazon is finally taking on Apple. The Seattle-based online retail powerhouse said yesterday that it would open a digital music store with a consumer-friendly twist that, Amazon hopes, will give Apple's iTunes a run for its money. The difference: Customers can do anything they want with the songs they buy. Dealing a blow to a pillar of the recording industry's anti-piracy efforts, Amazon.com Inc. said none of the millions of tracks it planned to sell would be encumbered by software that restricts copying.

Darren Williams remembers well the day he almost died. With one bullet lodged in his lower back, he lay in the street as the man who shot him made ready to finish the job. A woman screamed, and the man - a phantom to this day - vanished. Williams survived, but more than six years later, he still walks with a limp and a cane. He's no longer a member and recruiter of the Bloods, but he still encounters gang members daily. He's the leader of a group called the Precision Youth Power Program that tries to persuade gangbangers to give up their guns in return for a chance at fame and fortune in the rap music business.

I suspect the phenomenon of American Idol has seduced millions into thinking that a booming career in the music business can be established in no time, that just about anybody who can halfway carry a tune can be a superstar. Although over the years there have been many exceptions (indeed too many to name), it's not that easy, folks. Not everybody can be the next Beyonce. Besides, one is more than enough. But don't give up all hope. So you can neither sing nor dance, but maybe you have a talent for writing catchy songs.