Another couple cents (I think I already gave two cents before).

"Nashville" (and L.A., and wherever else we think of The Music Biz beijng located) is interested (in my opinion) in *selling records* (or whatever passes for records nowadays--CDs?). The market for those records appears (my opinion) to be more people like my teenaged daughter. Not me--I have yet to buy a single CD (though I've been given a couple). The other musicians I hang out with appear to be mostly the same way; if they buy anything, it's sheet music. More importantly, our audience appears to be the same way: they may be going out of their way to attend live performances, but they're not buying CDs.

In part, that's because there's nothing on CDs they want to hear, and the live performances are playing stuff they want to hear--but I don't think that's the whole reason (or all the reasons). I'm really not sure if Our Kind Of Music were available commercially that they would buy CDs anyway. Part of it is probably that the live performances are a social occasion, important for people in the country (it's a lot like the concerts I went to in college, with smaller amps and fewer illegal substances), and part of it is the experience of Real People Doing Creative Things--important, I think, in this largely spoon-fed, run-by-experts world.

If Nashville (or whoever) isn't going to make any money off selling CDs toi those people, why should it bother to cater to those people's tastes? People like my daughter, on the other hand, are Guaranteed Sales of the whatever-the-parents'-wallets-will-bear variety, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised or bothered that that's what The Music Biz is catering to.

I admit to being personally bothered that a lot of creativity (namely, mine) is being lost to a potentially wide audience because of this syndrome. In other words, I think I'm bothered by Nashville Missing The Boat primarily because I'm in it.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Joe

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