Kendall Vaughn's Take on the Music Industry

By Kendall Vaughn

Reporter

Everyone can name something good about the music industry, but it being reluctant and corrupt is hardly mentioned.

Something that many people don’t know is how hard it is for foreigners to adjust to how America works compared to their home countries let alone start their music careers here. It is often said that the US music industry is xenophobic and racist.

“I feel like people don’t understand how hard it is to adapt as a foreigner, anyone who makes it big in the US should really be proud of themselves and their accomplishments,” sophomore Sydney Staples said.

In the 2018 Video Music Awards only two out of the other eighteen categories, “Best New Artist” and “Best Latin” had foreign nominations that weren’t features of american artists songs.

There is a common theory that famous music companies somehow cheat their way in gaining achievements and blocking their foreign competition from doing so though, nothing has ever been confirmed.

“It’s really sad that the US can’t accept foreigners breaking barriers, I feel that they are pretty biased and will never take their music seriously like Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ and Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’.

A scene from the hit song Despacito

They’ll only ever be trendy songs that everyone took as a joke and never respected musically,” show choir student Amber Johnson said.

A famous Korean group BTS gain so many achievements that even US artists struggle to achieve but only ever get nominated for social media awards. Many sees this as that the US doesn’t take them seriously and willingly ignores any foreign artists and especially ignore you if you don’t speak English.

Staying on the topic of BTS, their recent album release debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 200 and they are the first foreign artist to achieve multiple #1 albums on the Billboard Hot 200 within the same year yet, it is almost never acknowledged besides from Billboard themselves.

It was also confirmed that within the first day of their music video release, around 31 million views were deleted.

Views are usually deleted because they are proven to be fake or as some would say ‘bots’ but there were no proof of bots and YouTube never released an official statement.

This amount of deletions of a YouTube video has never happened within 24 hours so people were wondering, why did it happen to BTS?

The hit Korean group BTS

Despite having that unfortunate mishap, the group still beat the record for most viewed video with 24 hours with 56 million views. People speculate the deletion of views were to keep Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video as #1 as it was the previous record.

Also, BTS has had multiple songs at once on the Billboard 100 yet still isn’t taken seriously and is only known as the group with “crazy fans”. People want to know what will it take for the US to open up to foreigners and see them as real artists.

“I hope the US welcome’s foreign artists with open arms once they finally realize how much an impact they’ve made and are gonna continue making,” said sophomore Ajia Stallworth.