I saw this article, titled The Tragic Decline on Music Literacy (and Quality), that pinned the decline to the quality of music people listen to the decline in the amount of music classes available. I often find these articles unconvincing because over sells the ability of education fix real or imagined woes. It isn’t a societal cure all and I want to focus on one point, the decline in musical quality that he blames on musical literacy.
This article spends a lot of time on pop music’s homogenization and the fact that so much of it is written by two people. Also new music technology is partly blamed because this was written by a fogey old fart. What the author misses is that his complaint about musical homogenization is due to consolidation of the music industry, a trend that started in the 70’s. To illiterate this trend it should be noted that In the 90’s there were 6 major record labels: Warner Music, EMI, Sony, BMG, Universal and PolyGram. Since then EMI and BMG were acquired by Sony, respectively, in 2012 and 2008 and PolyGram merged into Universal in 1998. Which means there are now three labels and they control something like 80%+ of all music sales. This is a huge problem for economic and cultural reasons but education won’t solve that sort of macro level problem. The real solution is, of course, to bust those trusts.
Art and music education is important, I took six years of band classes and learned 3 instruments and I’m happy that the county I took those classes will fund them into the future. With that said and, despite the wishes of the author, increasing musical literacy isn’t going to stop people from listening to Taylor Swift or Kanye West, it certainly hasn’t stopped me.
A Pocket Full of Scratch 