There seems to be a pattern with people (mostly guys) who in high school and college in the 80’s and 90’s had music as one of the most important things in their lives.  These are people who had huge music collections despite limited disposable income, they picked their bars based on the juke box, they took pride in discovering new bands and would spend countless hours making mixed tapes for every occasion.

MC5
Kick Out The Jams

They debated things that truly mattered: Best Debut Album (MC5’s Kick Out the Jams), Best live album (also MC5’s Kick Out the Jams), best b-side (Led Zepplin’s Hey Hey What Can I Do the b-side to Immigrant Song), Bon Scott or Brian Johnson era AC/DC (Bon Scott even though Brian sold way more albums), How can the Beatles be the best band in the world but the Stones are the better rock band (don’t know how but it’s a fact).  There was passion, energy, commitment.  Then something happened to 90% of these folks when they reached their 30s.  They stopped listening to new music.  They just stopped.  They stopped searching, they stopped seeking it out, they stopped putting themselves in places where they may have a life changing musical experience.

What’s sad is that they are still listening to music just nothing new.  They still go to the occasional live show but only to see the bands they loved in college.  What’s confusing is that they still see themselves as music people.   The first thing they claim is that they just don’t have the time they had when they were younger.  But that doesn’t make sense – they have more money and access to tools that make it infinitely easier to access and consume new music.

One of the main contributors to this is that there is so much more music out there and so many more ways to access it than ever before.  Today it takes a lot of work to find something you’ll love.  In the 80s and 90s it wasn’t easy to record music and even harder to make it available.   When you think about it there weren’t that many bands to choose from and there wasn’t all that much music available.  You went through the album bins, read Rolling Stone, listened to college radio, watched late night MTV (they used to play music) and that was about it.  Simple.  Today even the smallest bands have their music published on Itunes, Spotify and Band Camp and they are able to support themselves through endless touring (difficult for small bands in the 80s & 90s to make a living touring) creating a nearly infinite amount of new bands.  Now discovering bands that you’ll like takes work, finding the right show to see takes work.  This is where Dingo Vinyl is trying to help (that and to rekindle the above debates).  In our efforts to find these bands some of the tools we use are created and maintained by the artists themselves like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Facebook where they describe their music.  I was intrigued by this month’s 7’ artist Twin Steps’ description of their music on their Bandcamp page using the tags “difficult punk” “romantic shred” and “soul violence”.  Even after multiple listens I have no idea what these tags mean (how’s that for a segue).