Traditional wisdom says that the recorded music industry is dominated by the major labels...there used to be a bunch of them, but over the last 25 years, their number has been whittled down to just three companies: universal (the biggest), Sony, and warner music... Here’s something you may not have know...at last estimate, about 95,000 songs are uploaded to the streaming music services every day...of that number, only about 4% are from those three majors...the rest is from indie labels and do-it-yourself musicians... Let me flip that around: 96% of all new music comes from independent musicians...the market share of indie labels has been rising by double-digits for almost 25 years now... Indie music—or at least material from bands not directly signed to one of the three majors—was an important aspect of the 2010s...major label acts were still important, but without the indies, it would have been a pretty empty decade...but thanks to the sheer volume of new music and some crafty distribution by indie-friendly companies, we got to hear a lot of it... The width and breadth of indie over those ten years was staggering...and without the influence of independent musicians, styles, and trends, major label mainstream rock would have been much different... Let’s examine that...this is part two of the history of rock in the 2010s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We never know we’re living through history as it happens...for example, if we’re trying to assess what happened in a particular decade, we can’t really do it justice if we attempt to analyze things day to day...you need a break, a little time for things to settle into place when it comes to the grand scheme of things... Take the 60s, for example...this sounds a bit weird at first, but they didn’t end when the calendar flipped over to January 1, 1970...decades have momentum—sometimes a hangover—that carries things forward for a year or two or even three afterwards... For example, the 50s carried on until probably 1963...it took the assassination of JFK to really kick off the new decade...historians have made convincing arguments that the 60s didn’t end until 1972-ish... The 70s may have ended relatively on time, brought about by things like the death of disco, a terrible recession, the election of Ronald Reagan, and other markers that said the “me decade” of 70s were done... I’d say that the 80s ended by the end of 1991, thanks to the first gulf war, another awful recession, and a wholesale sea change in music as we quickly transitioned from a world awash in hair metal to the new alternative generation... I’d put the end of the 90s in 2001..buried by 9/11 and the retaliation that followed, the rise of the internet, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the end of the traditional music industry, the introduction of the iPod... The aughts?...that’s another decade that I feel ended on time...so much came to a screaming halt with the financial crisis—the great recession in 2008—and by the time the clouds parted, we were done with that decade... This leaves us at the dawn of the 2010s which was one of the few decades that started right on time...and for the next 10 years, we saw everything from prosperous economic growth to the rise of authoritarism...and technology?...wow...the 2010s saw more people get into tech and gadgets than at any time in history...smart phones, the explosion of social media, cord-cutting... Which brings us to music...when we look back on that decade, what happened?...what did we learn?...and how were trends and styles and consumption different than earlier decades?... Let’s find out...this is the history of the 2010s, part 1... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Continuing to dive into the Ongoing History of New Music archives, here's a show for 2016 that we are surprised has not been posted yet! At some point in your life, you said “I’m never going to become like my parents”…yes, you did…don’t lie…we all did… We vowed that we’d never become old and stodgy and boring and stuck in their ways and closed to new ideas… Do not panic…this is totally natural…this cycle of life has been going on since the invention of music—and it only accelerated with the birth of the recording industry in the late 1800s… Every generation has its thing…and every generation thinks that the people who came before them and comes after them are weird and wrong… This is part two of the more things change, the more things stay the same… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Continuing to dive into the Ongoing History of New Music archives, here's a show for 2016 that we are surprised has not been posted yet! Have you every heard yourself say this? kids these days! What’s wrong with them? All their crazy music. It’s just noise! That usually leads to… music isn’t as good as it used to be. When i was younger—high school, university—music was awesome! That’s followed by a list of bands and songs you believe to be the greatest ever, a lot of which aren’t as popular as you still want them to be…and then things usually end up like this… if today’s kids would stop and listen to what we used to listen to, they’d see that i’m right! Then we’d start getting some goodnew music! Don’t worry…if any of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is totally natural…  People always hate the music of the generations that are coming up behind them…and I mean always… The young are always denigrated for their music, their way of dancing, their technology and their overall disrespect for their elders and history and the way things used to be…  It’s the cycle of life…and it’s been going on for not just decades, but centuries…here…let me show you…   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we go back into the Ongoing history vault from 2008 and the second of two parts on world records. Most people want to leave this earth being known for... something. We want it to be at least a little memorable... to some, so that our time on this planet won't be forgotten so quickly. It's that whole sense of self my soul has self-esteem issues thing that we're all born with. Maybe you want to be known for being kind to animals. Maybe you're good at math, and you want people to remember your gift for solving difficult differential equations. Or maybe you want to be known as the only man who has ever eaten an airplane. You heard me. Michelle Lottito is also known as Massio Monge-tut, which translates as Mr. Eat Everything. He's the world record holder of the largest meal ever eaten. In this case, it's a Cessna 150. This is an airplane, and has a wingspan at just over 33 feet and weighs about 1100 pounds. It can carry two people at a maximum altitude of 14,000 feet for just over 400 miles, and this dude ate one. Apparently, he has a stomach lining that's twice as thick as it should be, which allows him to digest things like nuts and bolts and sheet metal and chain. Wonder what kind of wine goes with the prop assembly. Anyway, Michelle Lottito will be forever known as the guy who ate an airplane. A meal that size is a world record. Which is another thing that got me thinking. What are some of the superlatives and some of the weirdness that comes from the world of New Rock and alternative music when it comes to stuff like this? So I started looking, and I found out a lot. This is the Ongoing History of New Music Book of World Records, part two. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices