Sad 
Very sad 
There is actually some discussion about what is meant, and even Mr MacLean admits that there is more than ONE day āThe music diedā.
May God rest their souls. That was an awesome clip!
I brought back a lot of memories to me.
Thanks for sharing this!
Thatās interesting. I wonder why he chose not to write it like that if thatās what he meant. He could have written: āThe DAYS the music died.ā or āOne of MORE THAN ONE day the music died.ā But he didnāt, instead choosing to write āThe DAY the music died.ā He probably knew that even if it wasnāt factual, it at least SOUNDED better. Sometimes songwriters have the ability to know these things. Ya know? 
Youāre welcome! 
There is a system of thought, that I and some of my music-nerd aquantinces and professors share, that states the worst thing to have happened to the music industry was the invention of recording. One could argue that to be the day the music died.
Iām not sure if I agree with that or not, but itās an intriguing theory. Would you mind expanding on that for me?
Well the main argument is that once recorded music was produced it decreased the demand for live music, both on the radio and at social functions, therefore making it more difficult for musicians to make a living. Before recording any joe with a guitar could conceivably make a living as a musician, but now one needs a CD (not to mention websites and the like) if they hope to make any significant amount of money, and any notoriety, from their music.
OH this is good!
Where do I begin?
First, the tragedy of any artistic life lost before it s time. Mournful. Sad. Agreed.
(I will not mention Mozart, Purcell, or Schubert anymore in this thread. )
Second:
IMO the worst thing to happen to the music industry was not the advent of recorded sound; but rather, that unschooled, untrained musicians with no artistic merit became top sellers.
I would argue the fact that āany Joe with a guitarā who got it into his /her head that they could make a living as a musician without formal training has been far more detrimental to the carreers of real, trained, talented musicians than any recording for sale.
Teenage angst packaged by slick producers sold the 60ās, not talent. (Blue Cheer? Please.) Unfortunately the formula still works today.
The process for a successful musical career involved, historically, certain steps: first, apprenticeship with a master, then maybe work through the Church, or then by Royal patronage, or then by introduction into certain circles by an impresario. Certainly traveling musicians and later, civic guilds offered a possible gate into the craft, but mainly these were family affairs. Itās not until the 20th c where we completely bypass these mechanisms for vetting, fostering and promoting talent. āAmerican Idolāās big sell is that āyes, there IS a way to do this, and MAYBE you can do this tooā. I donāt hear many placed, well-pitched chest voices standing in front of Simon, Paula, & the other guy.
I watched āHelpā last week (or tried to) and couldnt help thinking āWTF did I waste so much time on this rubbish? I cant stand listening to the Beatles anymore. Worse yet, the music was treated subsequently as āclassicā, ātimelessā āmeaningful high-artā (thanks to Wilfrid Mellers)
AS IF a sudden modulation to the flat submediant in back-to-back double periods has never been heard of before. (Hello?) I tell you , they were NOTHING without George Martin, as anyone whoās heard the countless hours of stoned out-takes from Abbey Road can testify.
Itās the PT Barnum factor at work.
Except for a certain segment of the population, what possible weight does the meaning of āAmerican Pieā hold for todayās global music consumer? A news clipping set to song, at best. The typical music consumer today is equally as removed from the Holly tragedy as they are from the Glen Miller tragedy.(AKA āThe day the music diedā, for a previous generation.)
Third:
Recording has a whole list of benefits for the entire industry, which in truth barely outweigh the un-beneficial aspects. I can reach 5000 audience members on You-Tube, but only have played for oh, about half that at one time in person. Musical carreers flourished during the advent of recording, Operatic divas and Conductors benefitting the most in the beginning. Most trained musicians were able to avoid having to do classroom teaching to make ends meet up until around the mid-70ās, when the āLawrence Welkā & Guy Lombardo crowd became too old to go to stageshows, attend concerts, dance halls, regular weekend balls, you name it. By then the big draws were stadiums with 4 or 5 musicians, 3x as many production assistants, and 10,000 in the audience, every show.
This is when it got harder to make a living as a musician: how can a quartett playing for the country club social compete with that? Not because of the availability and ease of purchasing a recording, but because all the mechanisms of production (live and studio) became geared towards big sellers and mega-performances. Touring acts involving a lot of musicians got more and more expensive; touring acts with a rock quartett were moneymakers.
Recordings have spoiled us. In the many many many, many, many, cases where the talent was on the control room side of the glass, production tricks have not only made superstars out of led lights; but worse yet, have fundamentally changed the perception of dynamic range for the untrained ear. Some expect the live show to sound like the CD, and are dissapointed when it isnt; still others expect the CD to sound like the live show and are let down when it dosent. The constraints of early recorded media required a steady, complex waveform with equal frequency response and little or no dynamic change. Rock was much better suited for this than Mahler.
Thank you! Thank you!
And (god help me!) all these years Iāve been actually liking the Beatles?
Iām ashamed of my appalling lack of erudition.
I will hide under a rock.
I will take Norwegian Wood with me, on an iPod.
I am a troll.
( sorry Chasā¦donāt let my tasteless humor, which is only matched by my musical primitiveness, inhibit the free expression of ideas here.)
its cureable. thereās medicine now.
not at all!
Trolls live happy fullfiling, carefree lives, I hear, at least in Norway.
dang. it seems my dad must have been right. he always said the beatles made noise rather than music.
he also said that kids didnāt understand how to dance, and that small cars like the beatle (thereās that word again) would never last.
he also proclaimed the gizmo engineers and inventors were tinkering with was no match for good old human intelligence. i often wonder what his thoughts would have been about using that gizmo to create a world wide internet.
What a crock! What recording proved was that even a poor black guy with a beat up old guitar that could never hope to get into a fancy whitebread music conservatory could outshine a bunch of ātrained musiciansā in their silk corsets by a factor of a million. It cleared the way of stuck-up , no-talent music snobs and the crap they tried to foist off on audiences for REAL music that people were thrilled to finally get a chance to hear.
The snobs have been whining and back biting ever since, as they continue to sink further and further into the obscurity they belong in.
Keep on rockinā me, baby.
djm
No offense, but your dad must have really cleaned up on the stock market! 
Seriously, I was just joking. Iām sure he was a fine gentleman. I couldnāt resist because no one really knows if something is going to be a flop or if it will take off like gangbusters, or for how long the run will last.
Have a great day!
Bubbie
So you agree, then ,
BUT: jazz and delta blues artists had their own audience,(AND their own snobs, BTW) many of whom couldnt afford records, let alone victrolas. They HAD to go live to the show.
Rockās dead, djm. The Who said so.
now, having digested my chinese dinner:
Cāmon. Rock music just isnt..substantive..
and believe me, I lie not: Ive heard and listened to the LENGTH and BREADTH of itā¦
*Donovan jamming with the Beatles in Rishikeshā¦
*Gentle Giant 's live album
*The rest of 'Iron Butterflyās albums
*Creamās commercial for Fallstaff beerā¦
*Lothar and the Hand peopleā¦
from āThe Aāsā to āZZTopāā¦
tho it occupies a precious soft spot for many of you:
face it: Itās disposable.
āOde to Joyā, for example, (and I agree - it;s a cheap shot)
this idiotic simple tune hits a universal human nerveā¦
Most 60ās rock stars couldnt hit a universal human nerve if it was rolled up in a smoldering ez wider and handed to them on an alligator clip.
and as a parting shot, ladies and gentlemen,
I give you the wizard of whiningā¦
the Poobah of pi$$ & moanā¦
the Big Mahoof of btcingā¦
the consummate complainerā¦
the king of kvetchingā¦
BOB DYLAN!
āBob who?ā (my 13 year old niece says). āWas he big, or something? He cant sing. Ew.ā 
The Who may be dead, but I very much enjoy some of the new stuff coming out on my radio every morning by new, young groups.
Thereās another phenom started by the availability of recorded music: collecting recordings of the stuff you like. I have access to historical recordings, like the wax cylinders from a hundred years ago. More people are recording more styles of music every day. I am always open to listening to new things, though I may discover that I donāt like some of it. It is the media of recorded music that makes so many styles of music and so many rare instruments available to me, like ITM and UPs, that I may never have had an opportunity to listen to otherwise. Thereās little enough of it around here, and really good pure drop stuff, none at all.
Pshaw on ātrained musiciansā say I. Let the people dictate what they will have, and let recorded music bring it to them.
djm
OH, I agree with you 100% if youre saying that recordings are, in and of themselves, generally, a good thing;
My position is threefold:
1.) The ārecording artistā is a creation of production machinery which is dictated by saleablilty, and not talent; therefore this is a detriment to not only professional musicians, but speaks to the LCD factor of audiences (an insult to audiences, really) and impedes the general development of regional styles.
2.) Although many factors preceded the era in question (piano rolls, rack-job knock-offās, etc)
the most heinous examples of āno-talentsā becoming driving forces in the music industry occured in the 1960ās. When the attention of production machinery focused on selling these acts in large numbers, this presented a greater obstacle to the working musician than losing gigs due to audience buying the disc instead.
3.) Bob Dylan, at his best, sounds like a constipated central red-state chicken truck driver with a deviated septum. Sorry, thereā s just no two ways about that.
Bull pucky. The RA was created by musicians. The RA does not lead anything. The RA is crafted, albeit for business purposes, to meet audience demand. No demand - no RA. And for every crafted RA you ever see or hear of, there are a hundred that never make it. Because of the RA? No, because the musicians and business people who created that RA missed. <oopsy!> The RA may have been crafted for business reasons, but it takes ātrained professional musiciansā to create a RA.
More bull pucky. You are clearly unaware of the crap that came out in the 30s, 40s and 50s. The prefabricated RA was not a new creation in the 60s. Hucksters had invented the model long before. You should have heard the bad-mouthing that was going around when the prefabricated production creation named Frank Sinatra first came out. But like any other RA, some hit and stick - maybe far too long, but they do stick.
So whatās your point? 
Canāt stand him either. Donāt care for most of his songs.
djm
I;m not really clear what you re saying hereā¦ ācreated by musicians for business reasonsāā¦THIS IS āproduction machineryā. Iām not really convinced all RAās are fostered by ātrained musiciansā, either. More likely the creator is a producer with a certain āsoundā in their head which he/she knows will sell. Odds are pretty slim that producer studied 5th-species counterpoint, OR even ever sucessfuly tuned up a guitar by ear.
Look at āRhiannaā. Moves like a stiff Barbie, lip-syncs worse than Milli Vanilli. If she;'s studied vocal production seriously, it dosent show. Whatās she got, a 5 piece backing band? Betcha the synthe trackās all sequenced. Sheās on network TV, selling plenty of seats and discs. Is there a NOLA groove to it? No. Does it have a kind of Chicago-slick-feel? No. Is it even Hip-hop? Not in my book. Itās simply an LCD formula, the casting couch at its finest.
oh no iām not..I just didnt want to drag this down even further aesthetically by delving into the repertoire of the āHarmonicatsā 
My point still stands, that, even though junk has always been around, (as you ve pointed out, also) There were enough filters in place to keep it in the vaudeville circuit, B houses, the discount bin, etc.
Its not until we get the production situation in mention above, that we get a deluge of ācrafted productā based on a saleable demographic.
These two factors combine to present a greater obstacle to quality , original acts than the prevalance of recorded media.
IN FACT, downloadable media presents a greater opprotunity to reach audience for todayās performers (in any genre) than the old-fasioned record-sales thru a production company recipie.
The next real hurdle for professional musicians (literate or not) is to put the āRhiannasā on the same equal footing, through the internet, as real talent. Already here its looking like the same old ābig money vs. any & all comersā issueā¦
Well, weāre in agreement on one thing at least!! 
I canāt imagine why you are dragging Rhianna into this. She is just a kid selling youth and sex and a steady dance beat. I donāt know of anyone whoād confuse her with musical ability. She sells what there is a market for.
Letās face it, if there is no market for the output of your ātrained professional musicianā then one must seriously question the value of such an entity. If people want to listen to whatever these knowledgeable experts of yours have to put out then nothing will hold them back. Have your wunderkins put up a vid or two on YerTube and let the CD sales fly ā¦ or not.
djm
But this is another issue entirely.
Can we question the value of pursuing art?
Does art have any value for our society if it dosent sell?
Are you saying that all music conservatory students should pack it in , if they dont get catapulted to international stardom at the end of their MM?
Are you saying that all artistic skills that can be taught, and learned, are worthless, if not presented in marketable form?
Should the skills even be preserved, at any cost?
These are much deeper waters, amico.