Counting Crows did well in the gatekeeper era. Their music was greenlighted by those that controlled the FM airwaves, those who selected which artists received valuable word counts in print publications, and who to invest money in for major concert tours. I’m not going to call them lucky. Instead, I’ll just say that they were able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The band achieved so much success without the tools that artists have at their disposal today. I asked Adam if he would rather be trying to break into the industry in 1993 or 2023.
“I wish we’d had social media to promote stuff with when we were coming out. But I also really enjoyed FM radio as a kid. But there’s a difference between being a kid listening to FM radio and being an artist,” he said. “I think social media is a great equalizer in a lot of ways in that you don’t have to just go through the label. You could do it yourself, which I think is really great. The main thing is just whether people were going to buy records or not. Cause we lost half the income in our industry at one point with streaming or with file transfer. We lost literally half.”
Adam was on a roll with his take on the changes in the music industry. I decided to push forward and get his thoughts on the changes in the way artists record music and the way that consumers purchase music. (Or, should I say, don’t purchase music!)
“Most industries can’t survive if you lose half your income. That’s what happened to the music business,” he put simply. “There were a lot of problems in the music business before then, too. Digital was really too expensive. Now you can make records yourself on your computer at home. You don’t have to have a record company; you don’t have to press records. You don’t have to spend all this money pressing records and then spend all this money getting them on trucks and shipped to record stores. Now, you can just upload them to band camp. That means anyone can make records in their bedroom, which I think is great. The only downside is that no one buys them. You can still tour. We still have that. But the promotion stuff, I don’t know, you kind of want all the tools you can have. I don’t know whether I would choose anything over social media except that I really enjoyed FM radio as a listener when I was a kid.“
Duritz told me there isn’t an easy fix and that he believes record sales aren’t coming back any time soon. He places the blame on the labels; not the consumers.
“I think the mistake was made at the very beginning. When you have an album that costs $15 or $10 and then you have a digital album, which costs the same amount of money, even though they don’t have to press up a record, people could see they’re getting ripped off,” he said. “The mistake was made right in the beginning because once you’re ripping people off and they know it, it’s hard to really justify to them why they shouldn’t just download it. I think that was the mistake made right at the beginning. They were greedy right at the top. If you’re going to make a digital record and then tell people they have to pay the same amount as a physical record, they can see through that. People are smart and that is dumb. So I think that’s the problem.“
Always curious about what other artists are listening to, I switched gears to ask what Duritz is listening to these days. He mentioned David Bowie, Flaming Lips, and Wilco, before falling just short of calling himself a Swiftie!
“I spent a lot of time listening to Taylor Swift the last few weeks because we went to see her show and I wanted to kind of really research her music cause I hadn’t listened to her as much as I did in the beginning of her career. My girlfriend made me some playlists and I studied a bunch of her music and got really kind of blown away by how good she has gotten. I really enjoyed that concert. She’s been on my mind a lot the last few weeks,” he confessed. “I thought it was really, really, really good. I thought that it was a big production, but it’s not for the sake of flash. They must have spent an incredible amount of time conceptualizing the special effects and the art and the screens to go with the music because it’s not just stuff that’s flashy, it accentuates the songs. It was incredible. I thought on every level that the bleeding-edge technology was great, too. They’ve pushed it so far forward with what they’re doing on stage, but also very much in the service of the songs. I was floored by how good she was, too. I mean, she’d be fine just playing with the band on stage by herself or just playing by herself. And, she’s great when she does that, but they’ve also made this whole show that actually makes it worth it. Seeing something in a stadium, which is not really my bag, but I was floored by the show. Absolutely floored. It’s really mindblowing, the work that must have gone into making this thing on every level. It really could be just a bunch of bland dancers and a big screen and it’s so much more than that. It’s transporting. It really is. It’s entirely transporting. It’s some combination of a Broadway show, a theme park ride, and the way I felt the first time I saw Avatar in 3D. It’s so incredibly immersive and transporting.”
Counting Crows tour with Dashboard Confessional will keep him busy for the foreseeable future, and touring may be in the cards for the rest of the year! Duritz said there are potential plans in the works to tour South America this fall. He hopes to get back in the studio before the end of the year.
In the meantime….
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