Music 2.0 Music Chatter Social Rambling: american idol dmca downloading jens lekman pop idol x factor
by Matthew
29 comments
Toad 2.0
Why Aren’t They Moaning About the Fucking X-Factor?
In amongst all the hoo-ha over Christmas about that karaoke bimbo’s brutal bum-rape of Leonard Cohen’s wonderful Hallelujah, and the brewing legal nightmare caused by indiscriminate wielding of DMCA legislation, I started to wonder a little about the music industry, who is fighting who and why, and so on.
Of course I entirely accept the music industry’s position that evil free music is killing babies and committing acts of terrorism and so on, and that it is largely people like you and I who are to blame for Britney Spears and Robbie Williams having to lead the deprived lives of poverty and servitude into which they have so cruelly been forced in the last few years by the unlimited evils of ‘right-click, save as’. I mean, it’s just obvious, really.
One thing I don’t quite get, though, is why it is only filesharing that they hate. Apart from the impact of the music-as-data model replacing the music-as-product model, which has clearly confused and annoyed the shit out of everyone with any sort of vested interest in the latter, there has been another pretty seismic shift in the music industry in the last few years: karaoke pop shows.
Surely one thing that blogs and message boards and aggregators and MySpace and all this other shit shows pretty clearly is that the fans of independent music have seen the flames of their ardour fanned rather than dampened by the onset of digital technology. There’s a touch of competitive jealousy, I’m sure, because acts on Polydor or Universal or whatever can’t pretend to be ‘indie’ any more, because we can all find real indie bands far more easily, but beyond a little childish foot-stamping, I am not sure what they’re moaning about – we haven’t closed our wallets.
I can’t prove it of course, but surely the biggest problem for the music industry has been losing the casual fan. I can’t shake the impression that the obssessives still spend just as much money on music as ever before (although we may spend it in different places – feel free to go crying to your mum if you can’t deal with that) but that the casual music fan is in significant danger of being lost altogether. Infantile vanity-fantasy dross like the X-Factor and Pop Idol and so on must take a massive chunk out of the casual music dollar, surely. You know, the people who maybe bought a handful of albums a year and maybe a couple of singles; or the teenagers with a bit of extra money who only ever buy music so that they have the socially acceptable soundtrack to spin when their friends come round to visit; or the adults who don’t really care, but just want to be able to hum whatever everyone else happens to be humming, and chat about it round the water-cooler at work.
Surely downloading is barely a factor with this kind of people – the sort of people who used to make disposable pop tat such a cash-cow for the major labels – compared to their increasing devotion to soap opera talent shows. Their money, their energy and their loyalty are now devoted to the contrived drama of the program itself, not to artists or recordings. Money has flooded into this market because it commands the audience, and the record industry is left to fight for the scraps. The music is secondary in this scenario because, guess what, for this audience, no matter how much money the record industry used to make from them, the music has always been secondary.
Music in this context serves as social glue. It’s ‘culture as tribal bonding’, no more than that, and the precise nature of the music is far less important than its ubiquity, so that everyone can sing and dance along either before they head to the pub on a Friday, or when they’re stumbling around the dancefloor later on that same evening. So if the the most ubiquitous music is now being delivered by Cowell and his Cronies, who actually needs the record industry any more? Actually, who even gives a shit about them, except as a manufacturing service to the TV shows so they can sell a few plastic frisbees at the end of each run. But is the manufacturing or distribution of the recording crucial to this new model? Of course not – viewer numbers and loyalty mean advertising revenue, which must be massive compared to the sales of a few piddly CD singles or mp3s via iTunes*.
So what has destroyed the record industry is more likely to be the mass-migration of their casual fans to another medium, not the downloading of music. And instead of fucking with us music fans, they should recognise that we are actually the only people left in the world who are in any way interested in giving them any money at all, and therefore perhaps it might be sensible to stop treating us like the enemy and make some sort of an effort to please us because the swollen udders on which you once so gluttonously suckled have long since moved on to feed the new baby.
Jens Lekman – The Opposite of Hallelujah
*This is an assumption – I don’t actually know this for a fact, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Well they care about music, but only in the abstract way they care about television. The precise nature of the programmes is pretty irrelevant, as long as there’s something on that they can gab about to their mates later in the week. So it’s important that it’s there, but not that many people give much of a shit what it is.
we’re great aren’t we…….?
That’s not quite the point, Tom.
i know…..but i was just putting the breaks on before it became that….irony doesn’t really come across in the written form
Brakes.
cheers….i have issues with spelling
You know i gave my brothers a USB flashdrive each, that contained a collection (20) of my tracks of the year for xmas…..fuckers haven’t even listened to it yet!!!!
and these are guys that i would, in the past, call music lovers.
Things aren’t what they used to be!!!
What fucking ungrateful bastards.
Mind you, I give my folks CDs every six months or so, depending when I see them. They keep professing to love them and to be really grateful and so on, but deep down I feel the paranoia of obssessively inflicting my rotten bands on them with the sort of wide-eyed fervour that makes them feel just slightly nervous to tell me that they think it’s all shit and they wish I’d just stop.
i love em….got 3 mix cd over xmas…..all awesome all played at least twice each….some stuff i already knew, some stuff was new.
I just like the idea someone took the time to do something like this….
I think the reason they don’t have a problem with it is that they are all owned by the same people. And they are paid for by the same sponsors. The same soft drink manufacturer that makes a bundle off Pop Idol (or as it’s called over her God Bless American Idol) also makes a bundle hawking their drink in the advert breaks of pixie/kiss/magic/galaxy 108 (or whatever radio station) so sponsors and labels are kept happy.
The amazing thing is that the creativity of the marketing/publicity departments when it comes to integration between television, radio and CD is sensational when it comes to this lot. You get to watch meteoric rise, career and glory days, artisitic missstep and tragic downfall into drugs and alcohol all within 4 months and, by the time you’re bored another one comes along. They aren’t bothered because it’s brilliant, and the sort of seismic shift in the way the entire industry is run that is required to keep the record industry alive.
It just amazes me that they couldn’t apply that sore of thought to, you know, MP3 downloads.
I used to make them for my brother regularly too but between the blog and the ability to ftp whole albums over as easily as you can nowadays it started to seem a little pointless. Shame though, because they’re nice things to make, and nice things to have.
Incidentally, there’s a really nice Best of 2008 from Colin at And Before the First Kiss that you can download for a while. It’s a cracking mix, but won’t be available for all that long.
Ben – excellent point. If they can be as clever as all that with this sort of telly bollocks, why the fuck is genuine online integration eluding them. Maybe because this innovation was actually dropped into their laps by reality TV types, and didn’t actually originate with the music companies at all, who are still shit.
I assumed co-ownership was the real reason no-one whinged, but in terms of destroying the recorded music market I think it’s been pretty damaging. And I don’t know which of the major labels are under the same roof as all this lot anyway? Warner’s, presumably, but Sony aren’t really involved, are they? Nor EMI. Which label actually pimps the X-Factor effluvium anyway?
This could also work in the opposite. Some fans have moved onto the likes of the X Factor, whereas some fans feel cheated by the likes of the X Factor. They see artists who made a living out of reality talent shows grouped together with popular bands who might be more respected. For example, if people see Oasis grouped together with Alexandra Burke, they might feel a hatred towards the music industry (for promoting X Factor music) and channel this hatred through all medians of the industry, not just the reality one. They’ll then start paying less for bands like Oasis and Glasvegas, because they see them as a part of the problem because they’re under the same cloud as the X Factor. If ye get me.
Sorry, that wasn’t really an answer, just a comment.
2009 is already shaping up to be a great year.
Well, I think I agree with ya Matthew, the reason millions of people tune into those shows is NOT about the music. (Maybe that’s me being Captain Obvious, sorry), here in the US, we just want to see how skinny Paula Abdul has gotten, how many withering looks Simon will give her and what sleazy look will they give some wholesome kid from Arkansas who can do an awful cover of a horrible song we hated the first time around. It’s all about image, hype, the “dream” of showbiz, and product placement. Not music in any sense – even in the MTV sense as it was was foisted upon us back in the 80s.
C&B, I honestly can’t look at your avatar and read the words “shaping up”.
Well said, my amphibian friend. I hadn’t really made the logical jump that you did in this post. I mean, I knew that X Factor and American Idol were destroying music, but I couldn’t quite elucidate just how.
Not sure if I agree with you amigo….
I mentioned over at TVV the other day (via an article I had read in ‘The Times’) that while the spend on music in the UK fell by 32%, the number of albums and singles that were purchased fellby just 2.2%.
This leads to the conclusion that the ‘casual fans’ are buying just about as much as past years, but are doing so at Asda/Tesco etc where pish by Take That and so on are sold at ridiculously low prices.
Casual fans have always been the bread and butter of the music industry and always will be. It now concentrates on X Factor etc as the rest of the media (In particular newspapers) will give the acts all sorts of free publicity….thus saving on expensive promo/ad campaigns.
Hey, I posted a link earlier to some pictures of a guy’s pants falling off on a ski lift, and now that post and link are gone. Have I been bowdlerized by the Toad, or is this pigdog of a website gone all barmy again?
Now it’s back. Good Christ. This is starting to get eerie.
And now it’s there twice! I honestly think this website is haunted.
In other news. Apple are removing rights protection in iTunes! Yay.
THis is a great thing. Although, you have to pay $0.30 to remove it from any song you own. So you are in fact buying your own files back of iTunes! Boo.
If anyone is starting a pool, I have two weeks after this service is released as the date that someone has a freeware hack that does it for you. Yay.
P.S. Just for the record, you brother does miss mixes…
Buying back your own music: classic. I buy, say, Boy by U2, which is a great album before anyone says anything, on vinyl. Then a couple of years later I buy it on CD because I’ve left home and can’t take all my vinyl with me. Then the CD gets lost and I download it via torrent and get sued because I haven’t paid for the right to listen to the digital files. Thanks, chaps. How often, exactly?
C&B, stop whinging like a big girl’s blouse. It’s a new server, hence new approvals, so if you post something with a link in it then it’ll be held up by spam filters. Deal with it. It will go away, promise.
It just amuses me that in a boardroom this conversation happened:
Someone pointed out that Apple need to get on board withe the 21st century or start to loose relevance. A meeting happened and someone pointed out to him that the only way to realise his ideals was to have people buy music that they’d already bought… From Apple!!!
Hahaha!!! Hilarious.
Yes, yes, but first it was there, then it went away, then it came back twice, and now it’s back to just once again.
“Whinging like a big girl’s blouse”? What in the Sam Hill does that mean?
Simon Cowell doing something detrimental to the music industry? Perish the thought! It’s the iPod gnomes who’re really to blame. Horrid little creatures, sneaking into record company offices at night, mucking about with executive’s expense accounts, signing crap bands from the A&R discard files, validating artist’s parking without charging it to their marketing budget, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The very idea that the music industry could be in any way to blame for the current predicament is anathema to me.
See Dave, it’s just that kind of attitude…
(Puddles, strap in your man-boobs and pull yourself together.)
Ben – I think it’s purely punitive. Going DRM-free is something not one of these executives wanted, and something that was forced upon them by their customers, so I think the charge is purely out of sour grapes. They’re just having a big fucking girly sulk about it basically. Especially silly, given most people who really care about this can crack their iTunes libraries for free anyway.
The out of step department here.
I’ve got two daughters and both are still huge fans of the TV vote for this weeks fall guy/girl shows. Ones now 15 and the other 13 and despite having a Girls Aloud issue to deal with, they are now exploring music through the internet and making there own mix CD’s.
I’m pretty sure that back in the bad old days when TOTP was slated by all and sundry, it was one of the main channels for introducing kids to music. Perhaps the major difference now is that most kids understand exactly what the limitations of the contestants are and therefore the limitations of many other ‘pop artists’. In the past I’m sure it took me a few viewings/listenings to work out that David Bowie and The Sweet were from a different planet.
No issue here with the whole XF concept particularly now I’ve got 2 more music maniacs in the house, although the whole Lethal Bizzle thing is a bit odd.
You know what, toad, I suspect you’re right. Was thinking about this this very morning – the vast wealth of the music industry has, for a very long time, been based on people who care about music as much as your average boozer cares about wine.