Steve Lawson said on Twitter

Ever heard anyone complaining that there’s no good music around any more? Those people are insane. Ignore them.

But I think Steve Lawson, thought he has a point, is still being a little bit on the harsh side, and although the people he rails about are indeed quite wrong, I can understand where they’re coming from.

When these people were in their teens and early 20s, they had plenty of time to discover new music. All the best music was well outside the commercial mainstream; they listened to the radio late at night, bought music papers, went to gigs, traded tapes with friends, all of it to discover the good stuff.

Now they’re older, with jobs and mortgages and kids, and they no longer have the time do that. All the new music they hear is the lowest common denominator slop served up by the mass media, drivel like X-Factor or daytime commercial radio.

What they forget is the mainstream media always was rubbish. At their seventies peak even huge selling acts like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were conspicuous by their absence from TV or daytime radio, and people who weren’t active music fans were unaware of their existence. TV was filled with the likes of Brotherhood of Man and The Nolan Sisters in the same way as today has formulaic landfill indie.

Same as it ever was, if you want good music, you have to go look for it.

I wonder if the people who’s annual record purchases consist of 2 or 3 CDs a year from Asda don’t realise that all the music the mainstream will hear is pre-selected by such a small clique of people, and how cosy the relationship between the BBC, the major record companies and the music press has become. Do they know they’re sheep, or do they just not care?

Personally I think BBC radio and TV is failing to satisfy the public service remit of the BBC charter by it’s marginalisation of all but a narrow range of genres of popular music, and I find it hard to justify the existence of some BBC radio channels in their present form.