ruminations on the machinations of the music industry
the music dope
I have been asking AT&T literally for three years for this feature.
The Microcell that AT&T sells works 80% of the time. Which, of course, is not good enough.
In our house, cellular coverage is a big problem.
Basically I can only get coverage if I’m in a few rooms at best. The vast majority of my inbound calls go to voicemail. (Maybe that’s a feature not a bug - especially on weekends!) My primary mobile phone is an iPhone on Verizon’s network.
I’m a…
This was the third straight year I didn’t go. And it’s the third straight year I’m glad I didn’t.
A friend of mine went to my favorite store (as my proctor!) to try to pick up several interesting items. He was sorely disappointed, just as I was four years ago.
He got to the store at 8:30am for the 10am opening. There were already 300 people in line ahead of him. He got into the store at 10:30, shopped for 15 minutes, and left. Of course, several of the items he wanted were already sold out. So much for being “supportive of the band” or “supporting your local record store.” You can’t ask much more from a fan who drives 20 miles, 90 minutes early, and it’s still not nearly good enough. And the store is so crowded that it actually destroys the kind of curation that a local record store claims to provide. Does anyone actually think that creating a Black Friday is good for the business? Breaking your arm patting yourself on the back for supporting the local store just isn’t worth it anymore.
And of course I knew this kind of thing would happen and it’s why I didn’t bother to go. I’ve supported that particular local record store since 1993. I know the owner. He’s a great guy. But stunts like this only serves to piss off the core audience.
I buy now from the Internet because it’s so much easier and the fickle curation of the past (insert record store employee stereotype here) doesn’t draw out enough ironic inspiration either. I don’t have time to waste like that, and I’m certainly not going to reward this kind of retail behavior. Waiting two hours to not get what I want? Sorry, but I don’t have to do that…on Amazon et al.
And here’s a shot out to the bands who go along with it: artificial scarcity is a drag and the scalpers make more money than the artists. We all know it’s true. Because the volume of “RSD Only” items is intentionally small, the speculators buy all the copies and then the fans either have to pay 5x on eBay or give up and “steal” an mp3 of the recording. Is this really how you want to treat your true fans? Wow, I just hope a lot of the participating bands are selling these same releases to their fan club members.
But the biggest point of all is the way this kind of marketing—that’s what it is, kids—is a relic of yesteryear when distribution is tightly limited to oligopoly. This kind of stunt marketing worked twenty years ago but it’s a feeble response to how people collect and consume music in 2012. I sit there and wonder how many fans waited in line specifically for that Jack White single but couldn’t get it. You wanna treat your fans that way? On a first come first serve basis? A grim marketing tactic of limiting something is goodwill and positive for the people who are paying your bills? Don’t kid yourself.
Prince American Bandstand Debut (1980) by AbzPunkPhoto
Prince sings “I Wanna Be Your Lover” & “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad”, Dick Clark interviews Prince between the songs.
RIP Dick, you will be missed.
(via natepatrin)
Long but not forgotten. Dan Wilson (ex-Trip Shakespeare) has had an amazing, well deserved career. Really, really nice people.
Trip Shakespeare were a band from Minneapolis and this is the title track to their 1991 album Lulu. They are mostly forgotten at this point but I like this record a lot. This song is a weird one, it’s like Queen and Three Dog Night meet REM, or something, plus the singing is just completely over the top. Easy to see how it could sound ridiculous and I love it.
I have spent most of my life with the distinct sense that our minds and experiences are mysterious, ridiculously complex, and vastly different from one another’s, to a degree that makes everyday communication almost miraculous. There are times when this feeling is terrifying, and times when it’s reassuring, magical, or inspiring. I suppose I’ll have to take it up with a therapist someday. But I’m a believer in a world where you can spend 60 years married to someone and die in bed beside them without ever having gleaned more than a partial, sidelong understanding of what it’s like inside their head— leave alone just checking out their shoes, iPod, or Twitter feed and figuring you know something about them.
This is why I like music, and why I like thinking through the politics of style, or all the various culture-navigation choices of other music-lovers down in Austin: It offers surprising glimpses into how people see themselves, how they see the world, and how they’ve decided to present the former to the latter.
It’s also what makes me suspicious of paying too much attention to those things, especially when it’s done in a cold, dismissive way, as an attempt to skewer people’s habits on the end of a long pin and let them die there. It rapidly becomes inhuman. Instead of using art and style as a window through which to glimpse the interiors of other people, it uses them as a way of drawing down the shades. It misses all the profound differences that may exist in people’s inner lives, because it can’t get past the way they all turn out to like the same band.
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