I was driving in my car earlier today and I ended up on the 10s Spot, SiriusXM's station that features music from the 2010s.

That wasn't my intention. Actually, I was switching from the news band to one of the music bands, I wanted to dial in John Mayer's channel, but I must have hit something by accident, and I ended up on this station. And they were playing Halsey.

And I heard the thump. Is that the defining feature of today's hit music? The bass, the beat, the 808? You even get it in country. Never has an era of music been confined to such a narrow paradigm.

The Halsey track was okay, but then they played "Rude Boy" by Rihanna. I seem to be the only red-blooded male who doesn't have a thing for Rihanna, as a matter of fact, most of her career slid right by me, because by the time she had hits... MTV & VH1 were no longer a factor, you didn't have to hear the Top 40 hits if you didn't want to. So "Rude Boy"...I recognized it as one of the songs Rihanna played at the Super Bowl. And if you were a fan, if you listened to Top 40, you were thrilled and sang along, the rest of us were nonplussed.

So I'm driving down Santa Monica Boulevard thinking about how we got here.

Well, during the MTV eighties, and the fumes of music television thereafter, it was about the single, but the single was promoting the album. A label might put out a single for a minute, to gain traction in the marketplace, but as soon as the track hit, they'd delete it, forcing the consumer to buy the entire album if they wanted to hear the hit.

This was concomitant with the rise of the CD era... Suddenly you were paying twice as much and oftentimes you found out that the song you liked was the only good one on the album.

But other times you dove deeper, and got into the rest of the act's work on the album, maybe then went and bought albums from the catalog.

Whereas today, it's about the hit and the hit only. There might ultimately be an album, but all you've got to look at is the streaming numbers on Spotify, the hit has been played disproportionately, oftentimes the album tracks' streams are de minimis.

But who would want more from the Top 40 artists, whose songs are oftentimes written by committee, whose productions go through layers of mixing and... These are commercial products. This is the business the major labels are in, this is the business that gets all the press, but never has it been such a sideshow.

Now Top 40 ruled for years before the late sixties. FM radio made album rock burgeon. Along with "Sgt. Pepper" (maybe it started with "Rubber Soul" or "Revolver"). The act was making a full-length statement, that you wanted to hear. And FM started off free-format, not only would they play the obscure, they'd play entire album sides...it changed the culture of music, suddenly rock was a serious art form that deserved respect, that ultimately the entire nation, the entire world, cottoned to.

Now FM became formulated, thanks to Lee Abrams, there was a tight format, but it was understood that it was still all about the album, the track on the radio was just the sample, excised from an opus you needed to consume.

And then MTV took this formula into the stratosphere.

Now when Napster came along, suddenly you could pick and choose the songs you wanted, and only the songs you wanted. Which was the business model of iTunes and then Spotify, et al. At first the labels hated this, because they were baked into the old model, they thought they could only make money via albums...Daniel Ek proved to them that this was untrue. As for the acts...they were pissed, because they didn't want their full-length opus messed with, you were supposed to listen to it the way they wanted you to. Remember when acts were concerned about leaks, of not only albums, but work tapes and live tracks? That's fallen by the wayside, your deepest desire is that people will find you at all, listen to you at all, and it's your hard core fans who are keeping you alive, and you want to superserve them.

And then there were acts who said they were going to give it one last shot and then they were no longer going to make albums, like Sheryl Crow. But the problem was that no matter how much hype there was, you could not get the public to consume an entire album by someone from the prior century, it was nearly impossible. Then those acts stopped making new music at all...why put in all that effort if no one would hear it?

So today we've got the Top 40. Which is akin to the heyday of MTV, but the acts have no depth, the album isn't where it's at, it's only the single that counts, that people are interested in (of course there are exceptions, but don't nitpick).

There are acts doing it the old way, not on major labels, oftentimes complaining they're not being paid by streaming outlets and... Do they deserve to be paid? Is their music such that masses of people want to listen to it?

Oftentimes no.

So what we've got here is a sphere of Top 40 vapidity, and too many acts that don't deserve attention on the other extreme. And the business won't be healthy until it starts promoting those acts who are creating bodies of work that are worth listening to.

The major labels don't want to do this, the lift is too hard, never mind the amount of time it takes to break through. They just keep repeating the formula of dreck. To the point where music has never gotten this little respect in my lifetime. It's seen as ditties, entertainment, warring camps of fans, there's no there there.

But music used to be the bleeding edge, that's where you went to find out what was really going on.

In the old days, with so much less music, great would surface. Not anymore. And even if it does, it may take years to shine through. Such that the thinkers who can create this music that deserves attention don't. They oftentimes don't even start. They go into tech or finance, where the odds of success are much, much higher. And even if you do play the game and gain success you get no respect. The intelligentsia laugh at you, whereas the intelligentsia used to have to take notice... Everybody watched MTV, EVERYBODY! Those were universal hits.

Today's hits are niche.

We can talk about distribution platforms, a changing market, but we can also say that we're not inspiring artists, and that those who are inspired are not given a leg up, are not promoted because they don't sound like what's on Top 40, as if most people want to pay attention to today's Top 40, which is really the Spotify Top 50.

It starts with the artists. How do we encourage them, how do we get them to take their work seriously, how do we get them to say no to opportunities that will hurt their image?

Today music is dominated by the lowest common denominator who have no options, they're going nowhere fast, the model is the Kardashians, not the Beatles, never mind the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, the Eagles...

But after we inspire the acts, we much change the focus, to those who are creating a body of work worth paying attention to.

We need to realign the vision of the labels, the press, we have to stop celebrating the penumbra and go for the nougat, the essence. Enough with the fashion and the brand extensions, how do we make music number one?

There are examples, most notably Rosalía with "Lux," but experimental, limit-testing music used to be the standard, the goal, the mainstream, by time we hit the seventies Top 40 was a sideshow.

But to the casual listener, and it's the casual listeners who need to be corralled to lift the status of music, the Top 40 is tripe, they're listening to oldies (keeping the major labels' coffers full). The music business has successfully marginalized itself. And no one will take responsibility, especially the major labels, which will tell you they're businesses, first and foremost.

But excitement about quality new music lifts all boats.

But right now we're sunk.


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