Where Did All The Garage Bands Go?

When I moved into my neighborhood 25 years ago, if I went for a walk in any direction I would eventually run into the sound of a band practicing away in a basement or garage. I always liked to stop and listen to the songs they were playing to hear if they’re were doing their own music or some covers. There’s nothing wrong with cover songs because that’s how we all learn, after all. Today I’m struck with the dearth of music in the air. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I heard a garage band rehearsing anywhere at all!

When I think about it, I rarely hear music at all except for the occasional tinkling of a piano lesson from my neighbor’s eight year old down the street.

This cannot be good for the long-term survival of the music business as we know it. In fact, we may have already passed “peak music” (much like “peak television“) and it’s all downhill from here.

But Why?

Why the absence of garage bands, you ask? For one, there’s no incentive anymore.

Playing in a band is hard. You have to commit to regular rehearsals, play the inevitable band politics, and then if you’re lucky, find a place to gig as a payoff, and then continue to do all of the above all over again and again.

It’s so much easier to sit in your bedroom with your DAW of choice and create your own music, thanks to the plethora of loops, samples, and composition tools available today.

You can do it on your own time, without any negative input from a “partner,” and not have to bother with learning how to play beyond the rudimentary.

Or you can go even simpler by having a friendly AI compose the music for you.

YouTube Players

“But there are so many great players on YouTube,” you might counter.

I have a friend who plays in a moderately successful band that’s auditioned some of the best YouTube players you’ve seen. None of them even sniffed the gig. The problem was that, beyond a single song, or even worse, section of a song, they can’t play.

They have no repertoire, and no idea of how to listen to other players in a band situation. Let’s face it, that’s what a band is all about – listening to the other players and reacting to them.

What’s worse, they can’t improvise, because they’ve never had to. Jamming to a loop is soooo different than jamming with real people that there’s really no comparison.

To be fair, I’m sure there are exceptions to this, but unfortunately that’s seems to not be the norm today.

Incentives

Coming back to incentives for a second, there’s no reason for the best and brightest of our youth to even consider music as a career anymore. You can make more money in tech or finance, and get there a lot faster. This is something that I wrote about over 10 years ago and it’s only gotten worse since then.

As an artist or band it’s harder to build a sustainable audience than ever because there are fewer venues that ever, and that’s only going to get worse in the future. Most clubs make their money from alchohol sales, and club goers today don’t drink much, so there’s no incentive to open up a venue either.

Okay, forget the whole playing live thing. That’s too much trouble.

If you try to make it strictly online, there’s more competition than ever, and much of it is coming from AI music generation that no one wants to listen to. It fills up the pipeline, making it more difficult to cut through the noise. Of course, the online music distributors won’t do much about this because they make more money from it from it than from artist-driven songs, especially if they’re the ones generating the music slop.

To make matter worse, the major record labels are more intellectual property managers these days, as there’s little risk with catalog and you don’t have to deal with a pesky artist who, god forbid, wants to get paid.

Is it any wonder there are no garage bands anymore?

My biggest fear is that there will be no long term artists, no music legends or superstars, that keep the doors of the largest venues open 20 years from now. Today, live music is where it’s at for an artist to rise to the top, and if that dies or even diminishes a bit, the industry is dead. Music has really become disposable. After the hit is gone, it’s time for something else.

The Bright Side

Wow, that was pretty negative, but let me paint a more promising picture.

Music is nothing if not resilient. It twists and turns and evolves and changes with the times. It has a love affair with technology and is the first entertainment property to incorporate any new tech as soon as it comes out.

There will be a new trend, and if history serves as an indicator, it will come soon. My personal hope is that this trend will be centered around live music featuring live musicians, instead of more technology. If that happens, the garage bands will return, and music will once again fill our neighborhood air.