Replace ‘mp3 blogs’ with ‘the internet’ and it still sounds daft.
The Hype Machine‘s Anthony Volodkin did a bit of judicious editing on the ‘MP3 blogs are killing music‘ article in the Guardian blogs that I mentioned the other day. He replaced the words ‘mp3 blogs’ with ‘the internet’, and found that it pretty much continued to make just as much sense as a piece of writing — and just as little sense as a coherent, informed argument.
It makes for entertaining reading and really shows up the whole, laughable, ‘sky is falling’ reactionary tone.
When will people learn that insisting things be the way they used to be is not a survival strategy? Adapting and overcoming, as one friend puts it, is the only way forward.
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2 Comments
Whoa Andrew! I’ve only been gone a week and come back to all this new awesomeness! Good job, keep it up…
As for mp3 blogs killing indie labels yada yada yada, when I read the Guardian blog mentioned upon posting it rang hollow for all the reasons you regularly trumpet.
The Hype Machine (along with similar service elbo.ws) is indeed an addiction, and whilst I’m sure several people actively searching out new music download tunes from the bloggers, there are (at least) three further reasons from my own experience why this particular genie out the bottle is not the end of the music world:
1 – you can listen via streaming to pretty much every tune first & you soon realise 99% is not what you wanna listen to twice
2 – if you do find yourself having clicked through to the download hoster, then you typically see how many times that file has been downloaded, the stark reality is only a handful of people have done so, and
3 – the best way I’ve discovered of using hypem is to tap in a band, song, or specific blog and let it stream all their posts, so it becomes just like a web radio station (admittedly this suits me as I can be tied to my laptop for very long periods and there’s no royalty to the artist but rather than ‘problems’ think ‘solutions’ :-)
Here’s a bizarre expansion of the latter point. Being a closet “durannie†I’d heard a couple of tracks from their imminent new album as produced/written with Timberlake & Timbaland. They were both average; a let down. Then some blogger posted a remix of one. Not to my knowledge from the CDS, it was terrific. This got me thinking maybe I should buy the album after all. Then on a flight I sifted through the (Virgin Atlantic) on-demand jukebox. Whaddaya know, their new material is album of the month. Excitedly, I listened. Twice in fact. Yet I felt the disappointment that surely only a teenager can feel. I won’t be buying. What does the band get from such a license arrangement? How is it arranged, by number of plays of length of availability? Where else do such opportunities exist for them to raise cash? Which coffee shop chain will let me paste a plasma to the wall and play my DVD all day? I could go on….
Indeed. Adapt Overcome. There is no other way.
The options are like the fish that can’t adapt fast enough when their pool starts to dry up….so they die. If people who run businesses in the music world can’t adapt fast enough to the changes going on around them, they’ll die too.