Life and death in the pop music industry.
The Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg, like many gifted artists throughout history, suffered for his art. Popular artists of the modern era have kept this tradition alive. Today's popular music scenes are cheeky. The pop-cultural scrap heap, to derive the term of journalist Drew Magary, lies high in pile with the dead or broken bodies of young musicians whose personal and musical aspirations clashed with the aspirations of those who built the commercial buildings around them, which gave them turn into revenue-generating commodities whose role is to meet erratic and ever-changing consumer demands. Many of those musicians end up feeling choked, caged and possessed by their sitters, exploiters and fans. And many end up dead.
How big is the pop music industry problem?
The rock scene is a fleeting blend of glamour, instant wealth, risk taking, rebellion and psychic distress, accompanied by presumed assumptions that pop musicians will live dangerously, abuse substances and die early. Journalist Amanda Hooten, who writes about Robbie Williams, identifies the components of the classic rock'n'roll script as “sex, drugs, rehabilitation and bitterness”. Why do so many pop musicians die young? Few studies have systematically examined the population of popular musicians to determine the extent to which problems have been codified in the media comments above. Existing studies have a limited scope. Adrian Barnett, for example, tested the” 27 club hypothesis ". Tucker, Faulkner and Horvath included only a limited sample of the population, that is, musicians who died between 1959 and 1967. A study of John Moores University only looked at artists with top quality albums. On the other side of the scale is the study Howard Sounes in his book 27 mentioned, over-inclusive because it includes not only performing musicians, but also songwriters, record producers, managers and promoters.
