America used to be known for a lotta pretty cool things. Streamlined cars with super fins, a cheeseburger with everything on it, and rock & roll to name just a few. But those innovations have gone the way of the Dodo bird, they’ve fallen afoul of a corporate need to re-dress everything that was, in order to make it cheaper,and to give it mass appeal; which also happens to make most things produced here today (which are very few by the way) suck! I don’t care about cheeseburgers, and you can’t buy a 1965 Thunderbird convertible anymore unless you go for an original, which’ll probably set you back a couple of hundred thousand bucks. No my beef is with Rock & Roll.
In the 1950’s rock & roll was born from Blues, R & B, gospel, and country music, Elvis thought he was a country singer until some girls saw him swinging his hips and began screaming uncontrollably, and from that moment on the cat was out of the bag so to speak, and it would never be put back. Rock & roll began to evolve.
It used to be that you would record a song, press it to a 45 disc, and take it yourself to your local radio station and literally give it to the DJ. If he liked it he would play it, and his audience would respond, and if they responded en-masse you had a hit on your hands, and you could record more because people liked your stuff, it said something to them, resonated with them, meant something.
Sadly today this is no longer the case, most of those independent radio stations that were run by people who cared about music, have been swallowed up by corporations who need to sell advertising on the strength of their listenership. These companies in turn rely on record labels to supply them with product, and that product is rapidly becoming a mystifyingly over produced hodge podge of insanity that leaves everybody wondering what the hell happened to good songs you can tap your feet to, or get involved with. Well, luckily for us singer/songwriters our local radio stations have now gone global.
I make music because I love making music; I write songs that I want people to relate to; and I am happiest when I have an audience. I’ve tried promoting my music to American radio, and I have good success with independent stations that care about music, but I am shutout of the syndicated stations because their Nashville pop playlists don’t play well with really innovative country rock music.
But it’s okay cats and kittens, we have a friend over at www.musikandfilm.com, his name is Stephen Wrench, he’s a musician himself, and God help him, he cares. He cares enough to have made your local radio station one in Paris, or Budapest, or London, or for that matter in any town or village worldwide. And get this, every time you release a song the last one, or two, or three are still there. So if a DJ suddenly cottons onto your sound, he has other songs he can draw on, and you’ll be getting played. Of course convincing the audience is still your job, and now you’ll get to sweat over the song, the vocals, the arrangement, and the mix. But at least you’ll have an audience, and believe me, that is worth its weight in gold!
