"Life after Woodstock: Where Has All the Music Gone?" (Sept. 2009)

Woodstock. The term conjures many things from the imagination - an iconic moment in time, a musical revolution, a cultural touchstone. Call it what you will, but one thing is certain - the music world of today is nearly unrecognizable through the gauzy lens of yesteryear. While radio and records delivered the "soundtracks to our lives" for that generation, today those terms mean drastically different things.

I was a little kid when Woodstock went down, but certainly the echoes of the event and the music reverberated long and loud throughout my youth and musical development. Some still like to think of it as the music of a movement, perhaps unparalleled in our busy and overprogrammed present. Who could imagine a huge concert as a catalyst for social change now? In fact, it's hard to imagine 100,000 people gathering anywhere for anything other than a huge concert or a sporting event. Certainly street protests don't generate that kind of crowd nowadays.

There is a fully matured musical ecosystem sprouted from the seeds of Woodstock - the modern music festival. Uber-fests like Bonnaroo and Coachella, folk and singer/songwriter-oriented events like the Kerrville and Falcon Ridge Folk Festivals, or the hundreds of cozy private or quasi-public fests that take place each year beneath the commercial radar; they all took an essential element of Woodstock - a community gathered around common vibes - and grew their own.

But while Woodstock may have been about freedom and peace and music, the fact is that the music was far from free in pretty much any sense of the word. The corporate music machine that ruled the era of Woodstock and beyond is all too familiar to my friend and bandmate Les Thompson. He left the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at the pinnacle of their success following the epic Will the Circle Be Unbroken album, deeply frustrated from being powerless over the music they released and the money they made for everyone but themselves. Most musicians who tasted any sort of success in those days has horror stories about the extravagances of managers and record company execs, all the while being told that the band had yet to turn a profit and they still owed bigtime on their record advances and another one is due in four weeks.

Fast forward 40 years, and the tectonic convulsions tearing apart the foundation of that industry seem to happen with ever-increasing frequency. Anyone outside of the music biz can summarize the fundamental and radical changes of the last decade with a handful of iconic terms - iPod, Facebook, Napster. There is a steady stream of articles and blogs about major and mid-level indie artists using social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook to revolutionize their own careers, implementing some exciting and occasionally ingenious fan-driven creative collaborations as well as generating career-sustaining commerce. And increasingly, they shun the major label/corporate entertainment machinery in the process.

The direct-to-fan approach means that you the listener are an investor and a shareholder as well as a consumer of the music that we make and the artists that we are. And on your terms. You can be the "check my portfolio once a year" types who might come to a show with some friends once a year, or buy a CD online as a gift for a friend. Then there are the "ticker-watchers", keeping up with favorite artists as often as a few times a day and feeling more involved in the details of the artistic process as well as mundane life moments. For the folks who have sat in expensive suits and boardrooms at the top of the music business for a long time, adapting to this has obviously been a huge struggle.

I'm lucky. My career started to blossom alongside of email and the internet becoming a part of everyday life. The idea of interacting with fans and friends who enjoy my music directly as well as in person after shows is pretty well old hat. But the dizzying array of ways to do so and the way they fragment our collective attention are the huge obstacle that replaced the old talent scouts and artist development model.

And truth be told, perhaps we the public were well served by having some gatekeepers of artistic quality, for as long as that lasted. Maybe had the music biz not gotten even more greedy and lost sight of that vital role in the 90s, when developing artists for the longterm largely gave way for extracting the most money for the flavor of the week, we would be more inclined to be a little more sentimental about their impending demise.

There certainly seems to be more music than ever. Anyone can write it, record it at home, and then blast it to a couple dozen websites to sell or give away without a single other individual having a hand in it. No rewrites, remixes, artistic or production flaws addressed - raw, unfiltered, unedited. The volume of music in the ethosphere now is so vast that it becomes too much work to sift through it ourselves, and while there is plenty of good, there is plenty of less than good too. What those gatekeepers at the record labels and big freeform radio DJs used to do is maybe exactly what we're missing now. The soundtrack to our lives seems more like a cacophony of soundbites.

There's plenty of music. We're drowning in it. What we're missing is that trusted voice in print or on the airwaves compelling us to hear this or that - to raise the bar up and say this is something truly excellent. Nowadays when we the artists are really lucky, you find our music, or it finds you. If it means something to you personally, then it's good. The new millennium has arrived, and for now, this is what it looks like.

The 40,000-odd young people gathered in the rain and mud at Yasgur's Farm on that long ago August weekend knew they were part of something historic. History may yet render some different judgments on what that something was. A lot of those already popular artists went on to become legends, others turned to recluses and slipped into quieter lives. Certainly the spirit of music-centered community lives on at festivals around the country and beyond. But while they may have gathered there to hear the music and to dream of a better world, I would imagine that none of them dreamed how different the music world would be in their Golden Years.