Quote:
Originally posted by Ramona_A_Stone
I just thought this was a funny little article. In one sense, it paints the human wheels of the music industry as the frighteningly unhip and arbitrary locomotive it's always been, fueled largely by soul-less wannabees and nerdish club denizens who hand out A&R business cards to the accessible blonde groupies and who can only perceive music and musicians by equating their weight in predictable coolness against fashionable district loft rents, swimming pools, Porsches and cocaine, arriving at dumbed-down translations of the safari experience to be barked into a collective bourgeois pang of emptiness at those who have to work in the morning. And from the commentary about college radio, which seems to indicate that flourishing underground means that you'll flounder like blind cave fish in the mainstream, one might surmise that the next REM will be destined to remain a local pagan cult, which, I guess, isn't that surprising, given that it's basically a mysterious anomaly akin to the formation of crop circles anytime a decent band achieves airplay. On the other hand, I have to wonder if what many of us used to preach in the early days of Napster isn't coming, grudgingly and almost in spite of itself, to pass: broadly, that music with substance can only become more important in a world of "worthless" mass objects. Unfortunately, "substance" is still apparently synonymous with "the potential to cause traffic jams" and the chasm between "talent" and "liquid viability" remains seperated by planets so many light years apart that a dialogue through radio signals is prohibitive.
Thus, the answer to the age old question "what are talent scouts looking for" remains the same: anyone who can earn them bigger purple hats.
And this is why the dinosaurs are extinct.
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A good post and a
great commentary, Ramona!
That mysterious
substance... I gotta smile to the expression
'a little more substance'...
This Miss/Mrs Fitzgerald talks about it like a junk food chain owner might talk about a slightly exotic spice... "should we introduce a curry hamburger to address better the consuming needs of this weird new generation that seems to be into ethnic food?"
These A&R people with their 'star-maker' egos will probably be one group of professionals that will find it very hard to recognize the paradigm shift that is happening in the music distribution and in the related businesses. They are the very middleman that P2P threatens to make unnecessary with its new, emerging mechanisms for collecting the attention of the masses and the blessings of it. How can such an arrogant mindset be turned to
serve the artists on a much more equal basis and under a much more direct artist-audience interaction?
Well, as you said, that's why the dinosaurs are extinct...
- tg
