Mel Campbell over at The Enthusiast has a good post about the whole controversy, which you should read here. Make sure to read the comments too, particularly if you're a fan of the phrase "hairy-legged lesbian" - I know I am.
Aside from anything else, this issue got me thinking about that old chestnut of postmodern studies of the arts: the concept of genius as a gendered idea.
What male popular musicians do we think of as being geniuses (if any)? What about female musicians? I'm not going to make a list or anything, but it's always worth thinking about.
Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai was asked for his take on the state of music journalism, in this piece in Drowned in Sound. He says some interesting things, but I'm not sure what his point is.
It would appear that he's trying to suggest that, despite the ways in which the internet has changed the music industry, people still seem to follow arbiters of taste such as Pitchfork, rather than finding their music through some other means. He finishes by saying: "isn’t it a little bit sad that with all the music now at our fingertips we still need someone else to tell us what to like?"
So it seems that we should be discovering our music some other way. Which is a fine point to make I guess, though not one I would agree with.
Earlier in his piece, though, he says: "When I was younger I used to think that the only reason that Labradford sold a fraction of the amount of record Robbie Williams did was because people hadn’t had the chance to hear them. I was wrong. So. Fucking. Wrong."
I liked this bit, not because I love Robbie Williams, but because I haven't heard of Labradford. Is he saying that they aren't selling now because Pitchfork doesn't like them, so the music listening public isn't going to buy their stuff? I honestly don't know, but it seems to imply that we need something to direct us to new music, even if we take their advice with a grain of salt.
Anyway, Drowned in Sound has a number of articles about music journalism at the moment, and they're worth a read. No doubt I'll bring some of them up here at some point in the future.
At least according to this article by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic (via A.V. Club). Apparently everyone's on Pandora these days – except those crazy people who don't live in the States.
This is obviously going to be seen as some sort of good thing by music labels, but I wonder what it says about people's listening habits in general. I know that my own are different from the typical music listener as they are described in the press: I listen to whole albums more than 90% of the time I play music for one thing; I don't own many singles relative to the size of my music library; I rarely even listen to that much music when I'm not at work or at a gig (so maybe I'm more typical of someone who isn't a music listener). So it's not a great surprise to discover that I'm behind the curve once again. I even bought a few CDs the other week.
I wonder about what benefit this trend – if it's real – has for musicians. Percentages are different for digital releases and I could only guess about what kind of deals artists have for streaming content. And I wonder if the drop of 60% in illegal downloading has been matched by a similarly large uptake in streaming services. A 60% drop in downloading seems to suggest that if you're a slightly obscure band you have less chance of being heard. Or stolen from, however you want to put it.
I used to have a blog that was crap. I got my sister to make me a good one and here it is. Aside from anything else, my old blog had issues with content, being that I wasn't really sure what I wanted to focus on. Now I have a better idea. I'm not going to share what this new focus will be, as then I'd just feel bad when I – inevitably – go off track.
Instead, I'm just going to start posting as if I always have been. If you want to contact me, you can send me an email by following the link on the top right of this page. While comments will be disabled as a general rule, I would love to read anything you have to say about any of my posts. Let me know if you don't want me to quote you though, as if you have anything interesting to say I'll probably put it up here, for the whole internet to see.