The old music industry had a cover charge. If you wanted to play, you paid to play.

And the more people you wanted to reach, the more it cost.

When I printed 500 copies of my teenage thrash metal band's CDs, that still meant over a grand investment up front.

Scale that to a national release and you needed serious capital.

That's why the system favored major labels. They had the money and the connections, and since every release was a financial gamble, only a handful of artists were ever deemed worthy of the bet.

Shelf space at record stores was finite.

Airtime on radio and MTV was finite.

So basically, if the gatekeepers didn't pick you, you didn't get in. 

Today the gate is gone. It cost me a couple bucks to upload "American Scream" through DistroKid, and that same upload can reach a hundred people or a million (we'll see). Anyone can enter the arena. 

The beauty of streaming is that anyone can upload their music...

And the horror of streaming is that anyone can upload their music.

The clickbait articles tell us that in 2024, Spotify was reportedly taking in about 120,000 new songs every single day. That's more music in a day than the entire industry released in all of 1989.

Great bait for the clicks, sure.

But also true.

Democratized access sounds great in theory.

In practice, the music-to-shit ratio looked a lot better in the product era.

The stuff that got signed and pressed and played on the radio had to at minimum be well performed and well recorded. So maybe there was something to a little gatekeeping. Yes, those same "evil corporations" gave us butt-rock, disposable pop, and industry plants. But they also gave us Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Depeche Mode, and Metallica. 

Now we've got AI background noise and stock-music spam eating into real artists' payouts, plus a few thousand amateurs with keys to the factory.

And it's only getting worse.

Say what you want about the old gatekeepers.

I'll take one Puddle of Mudd over a bucket of AI slop any day.