We had the pleasure a few weeks ago of talking with Steve Postell, he of the famed group of studio musicians known as Immediate Family (HERE), who had a lot to say about the importance to him of freeform radio and the arts in becoming a musician of note (so to speak). But he also had some very salient things to say about art and commerce in his business that continue to resonate with me.
First, Steve said, we should expand the subject of freeform radio because that period of astonishing creativity was reverberating through all of the arts and society itself. But he also talked about when it changed and why. He said when Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Seagram’s heir and wheeler-dealer, bought Warner Bros. Music, Steve said to himself, “Oh, I get it. Now music people won’t be running the music business anymore.” Warner Music Group today is headed by Robert Kyncl, self-described “entrepreneurial leader and creator economy pioneer.” That pretty much says it all.
It happened in music and eventually it happened in all the arts. The bankers took over. We live now in a world where healthcare is run not by trained medical people but by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, agriculture by the genetically modified seed and herbicide companies, and the songbooks of our greatest composers are owned by hedge funds, their music distributed by $multi-trillion dollar corporations. Freeform seems like a quaint term these days, an artifact from before consolidation, but worth valuing too as a concept in opposition to an inexorable trend.
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