I guess the music industry for the past 50 years or even more, maybe since the start, calculated that we are the ones that set the trends for the youth. We have always been proud to be the enemy number one for the conservative older generation. When the Beatles had “long” hair the older generation was upset about it. Of course, it became a trend. How Kiss mixed their blood in a cartoon was a great PR trick and the name Kiss wasn’t that short of Knights In Satan’s Service? Every generation had its own style and influenced heavily the kids and their generation. In one way we just took that for granted.

Now we must face that the music industry has lost that position. Trends are going super fast and change every second month and are totally driven by social media. Sure, music is there but more as a soundtrack to a style, not as an inspiration. Music is more like an accessory of a certain trend. Someone said that music must be dangerous to matter. Today music is not dangerous at all.

You see everywhere the signs of this. For example, there are not many political songs right now. Another song about your anxiety and I will puke. All songs are about me, myself, and I. Mainly since songs nowadays are more mass-produced in factories. Today a band like Rage Against The Machine won’t get through the noise. I just hope though this trend will change and get out there. There is so much shit going on that lack of subjects is not hard to find. The strange part is the most political is Eurovision that try to stay unpolitical as much as possible. At the same time, Eurovision doesn’t really have real artists. Here you have just crazy characters in a never-ending freak show. It’s a spectacle promoting countries, not a real song contest any longer.

Last night was the Swedish Grammy Award. Back in the day that was a huge event that was broadcast on national television on the best broadcasting time. There were always scandals and a lot of partying the whole day until the event. This year the gala was broadcast on YouTube. I don’t know how many viewers but today when they released snippets of the winners and performances, they are around 50 views, and the program has 14 comments. My guess is that hardly went over 10000 viewers. Maybe as low as 2000 viewers.

In the big newspapers, the reporting of the gala never made it to the headlines. You had to scroll far down to see anything, by the end of today it will be gone. The interesting part if you went into look was reported it was a long series of pictures and comments on how the artist was dressed. I scrolled for three minutes of pictures of mainly local or unknown artists or artists that were in yesterday’s news. Not until in the end they wrote in an extra fact square who won each prize. It was more important what they were wearing then who won a prize for their music. You know what, my local flea market on Sunday gets more exposure than the Swedish Grammy award. The only “scandal” that you could see a debate around was that Inflames got the Hard Rock Prize, and people would like to give it to Ghost. But of course, hard rock is for old people. Hard rock is not dangerous or political any longer. The comments were from old white dudes who still don’t have installed TikTok and remember the good old days.

Maybe it will all change, but I doubt it. Taylor Swift is the last star. The next artist that we will develop will just have music as a part of their career. Hopefully, though we can get more meaning in the music since it is a powerful tool to get to people’s emotions. But right now, we have to understand that we are not in the driver’s seat any longer to create the latest fashion or trends. We are just a bunch of old followers.