that wasn't the essay i was looking for, was it? there might be an extended version of it somewhere, or i might be thinking of something else. it is nonetheless the basic truth, though, and i guess i have to extrapolate, myself.

that was what happened in the early 90s - independent labels started to compete with major labels. the precursor to this bernie sanders line about 1% of the wealth, which was maybe more relevant in understanding the way the world actually works, was that there were five major media companies that owned almost everything you consume. each one had a record label, before they tried to merge emi with warner, which was outrageous.

these independent labels mostly came out of the generalized punk scene in the late 70s (generalized punk would absorb industrial, techno and hip-hop - these things all happened around the same time and had very similar operating philosophies) and were built up over the 80s as an....alternative...to the mainstream music scene, which was obsessed with bad pop and worse metal. by the late 80s, the independent labels had begun to diversify in looking at art rock, prog, disco - the side of mainstream rock that wanted more artistic freedom, and less corporate oversight. so, people like peter gabriel (a big rock star, at the time, that did not come out of punk) and sting (a big rock star that sort of did) ended up on indie labels to get out. the result was that some of these indie labels started getting pretty big.

by the early 90s, the gen x kids alive at the time (i was a little young...) just basically all rejected the msm narrative, tout ensemble, which was maybe a little scary for some of the western oligarchs given what was happening in eastern europe. artists signed to major labels were all of a sudden unable to compete with artists signed to smaller labels.

so, the major labels did what you would expect them to do - they started buying out the smaller labels, one by one, and merging them together to form bigger ones, or dissolving them into the bigger ones. this process lasted roughly 15 years, from 1990-2005. it started with the big indies like geffen, but by the mid-90s they were just snapping up everything they could find. there was almost nothing left, by the end of it.

the entire concept of indie rock changed about 2005, and the buyouts were what was underlying it. in 1995, "indie rock" was still just synonymous with "artsy punk rock" and meant a band that sounded like sonic youth, or pavement. by 2005, the term had been co-opted and redeployed to refer to the kind of 80s pop music that indie rock was supposed to be the opposite of. that's not an accident; the genre was destroyed on purpose. meanwhile, the term "punk" got completely redefined to refer to the type of hair metal that was punk's antithesis in the mid 80s, by completely co-opting terms like "emo". this is no accident, either.

since then, we've been living in this backwards, co-opted reality, where we have fake indie labels run by majors and these words mean the opposite of what they're supposed to mean, and rather than push back on it, millennials have largely (not entirely, of course) bought right into it.

that means we're basically back to the same point we were in in 1975. we need the kids to take control of the means of production, somehow. and, by an accident of birth, all i can really do is stand back and watch.

i've ruled out joining a service like spotify; i don't want a better cut, i just don't want to use it at all. but, what if we could create a hybrid streaming/sharing model, where we share files like torrents but stream them like a streaming site? such a site would necessarily be free, and it could cut out the bourgeois layer. it would not be an end point, but it might be a start to get people out of the corporate system.