Cultural stuff

A few thoughts on music, inspired by this post over at Throwing Music:

I think we're seeing a divergence between two movements here. On the one hand you have the Music is Big Business types, represented largely by the RIAA, for whom music is a saleable commodity. Record industries these days tend to go for safe bets, acts they know will sell - to the extent that they will manufacture a band themselves by auditioning talented but malleable young people, making them over to fit the brand image they've had created by image consultants, getting them trained to do their little dance created by a 3rd party choreographer, and sing a song written either by a band that was once popular in its own right, or by a 3rd party songwriter who rarely if ever records their own work. They have them surrounded by minders, record company people & so on, and nothing they ever say or do is anything other than a product made to sell by a large corporation. The people who sing & dance in these boy and girl bands believe at first that they are a star, but actually they're just a cog - "welcome, my son: welcome to the machine. What did you dream? It's alright, we told you what to dream." - that kind of thing. Small wonder when such stars, like Britney Spears, set up so high on a pedestal of the global media's making, fall down & shatter into a thousand drugged up pieces.

Then you have the other side of things - the often exceptionally talented, sometimes visionary, musicians who will never be a big seller, and thus will never be picked up by the machine. Previously, these people would hardly have figured at all, they'd maybe have played a few pub gigs, gone on tour possibly, been written about in fanzines and maybe appear at niche events like Meera Luna, Convergence or Whitby Goth Weekend (yeah, I'm an aging goth, so these are the events I know best), but now anyone can burn a CD. Anyone can publish a website. Anyone can publish music. All the grassroots people need is enough publicity to get the hits on their websites, and they're there.

Now, if such people were to compete on a one on one basis with the big record labels, I suspect the record labels would win out. Why? Because they're experts at PR & publicity. They have access to broadcast media & can confect wants for this lowest common denominator crap they peddle. It's what they do all day every day anyway. What they can't do is do it for the love of the thing & rely on goodwill to make their money. The small guys can do that because they can keep a day job going, but when it's a matter of pleasing shareholders, big business does better when it can make predictions of profit & reach or exceed those targets.

So, if we want confected crap as our main diet, fine, relax - nothing to see or do here. But if we want original, talented artists to do their art *as* art, we as consumers of art need to become patrons of art. Seek out the little guys, go the extra mile to find them, then subscribe to their stuff, buy their mp3s, CDs etc. Go to the gig, buy the T-shirt. Seek out Creative Commons media, add to it, riff with it. This is music as culture. Culture belongs to everyone.