Some time ago, I wrote a journal which was basically about how the music industry was being killed by the music industry:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2382815/

I've got some thoughts to add to it.

As I've mentioned numerous times, I'm in the middle of the sisyphean task of cataloging my music collection in MP3 format. The current stage of this task concerns something I call decompiling. Essentially, I'm taking various compilation albums, and breaking them back into individual singles. The collection I'm currently working on is Billboard's top 100 hits from the year 1984. After that I move on to Billboard's Top 100 hits from the year 1983, and so on.

I'm finding cover and label art for each individual 45 RPM, and entering them into itunes as singles. Decompiling the compilation.

I like doing it that way because that way what I end up with is more like a jukebox. Each track has it's own cover art, with it's own correct year (or near as correct as wikipedia can be) and I've made some interesting discoveries along the way. (For example, one song on one of my 80's New Wave Hits CDs was actually from 1978.)

But the point of all this, is that it started me thinking about the hot hits for an individual year. The songs that people actually listened to. The actual popular songs. The ones that defined a decade.

Getting back to my earlier journal, I mentioned the genres that defined each decade. Your Doo-Wop, your Disco, your New Wave, your Grunge...

And I started thinking, what are the hot hits of right now? If there were to be a top 100 album for THIS YEAR, what would be on it?

My guess is, it wouldn't contain anything that was actually on the radio. Because what's on the radio? Classic Rock. Oldies. Talk. I said it before. There's very little space on the radio for anything new. Everything on it is either old, or retreads of old. In much the same way that the Motion Picture industry is keeping itself afloat atop a pile of endles sequels, remakes, and reboots on the grounds that this is somehow safer than taking a risk of showing us something new that we may not like, The music industry is just repackaging and reselling The Same Old Thing.

Now, I frequent a number of Livestream channels, inhabited by the sort of people who would fit the mould of "consumer demographic for current popular music" and during those streams, although we tend to play a lot of classic songs, when it comes to new music, what are we listening to?

We're listening to Pony Music Videos. We're listening to songs bodged together out of Team Fortress 2 soundclips. We're listening to remixes of the end theme to Portal 2. We're listening to original songs written by performers who have never been within a mile of a recording contract.

We're listening to things made by people in their bedrooms.

It's the do-it-yourself ethic that Punk Rock used to embody, gone mainstream. And I use that word with precision, because THIS is the mainstream. This is the now. This is the Hot Hits of this generation. When today's youth look back on this era with nostalgia (and they will) this is what they'll be remembering fondly. These songs may never make it onto a Billboard compilation, if such a thing even still exists on that fateful future day, but this will be what defines the decade.

Radio is dead. The Recording Industry is dead.

Long live the YouTubes.

Long live the bedroom musicians.

Long live the sound of NOW.