I used to be a songwriter. Actually, I’m still a songwriter, but I’m a songwriter who’s not trying to sell my songs anymore. It’s not as if a song I’ve written has ever paid a bill over the last 4 decades, but in the definition of what I spent years working to achieve, I was a songwriter. I still keep in touch with the old gang of other failed songwriters, and we have our places where we check in to see what’s what and who we all hate now for being a success. I stopped by one of my favorite Internet hangouts this morning, and found this little notice posted in a thread on their Midwest rock forum.
“Comes with Music is a recognition that music has to be given away for free, or close to free, on the Internet,”
I guess music is worthless now.
:~(
Go ahead and click the link above for whole depressing story, but I’ll see if I can encapsulate it all for you here. Apparently, the music industry is tanking to the point where they’ll be bundling thousands of songs into “Comes With Music” loss-leader offerings featured by Nokia and Motorola, and other giants of isolated hyper-connectivity battling it out for the shrinking dollars of our entitled youth culture. In essence, CDs will begin to fade out – along with “deep cuts” and “B-side” releases – and new singles will earn a living by being lumped in with Classic Hits and other formulaic dreck, as bulk offerings to kids who just want to be able to text all day long to other little fidgets tapping obsessively into tiny keypads as the real world flows by.
I guess Ryan Seacrest will have to find other work to fill that two hour lull on Sunday mornings now.
Y’know, to be honest, I’m okay with it. I mean, I already came to terms with the fact that the world doesn’t need my music. In fact, I came to the conclusion that I don’t want the world to have my music. To hell with letting the sons and daughters of American sloth absentmindedly slobber on with their flaccid lives to the soundtrack of my sweat and devotion. I’ll give my songs to my daughter, and she can keep them to show her kids and their kids so on. At least they’ll know who I was. The rest of the world can live without them.
I sure as hell don’t feel like some Birkenstock pseudo-hippy having the ability to download anything I took my time with, so that he can add it to the 60,000 other worthless songs he’s got crammed in that telephone he stares at all friggin’ day. Screw him and all his other 25 yr old buds that still live in those little “apartments” in the basements of their mom’s houses in the chalk-white subdivisions of Middleclass America.
I’d suggest that all songwriters and musicians go on strike and let the selfish, entitled pricks listen to the dull drone in their heads until it drives them insane, but I know that there’d be plenty of little wannabe whores out there who’d jump on the opportunity to give their mundane crap away when the rest of us pulled back on the me-my-mine slugs and their i-pods. Most musicians are just cheap encyclopedia salesmen who figured out how to mimic artists in search of an easier job anyway.
It’s not like there’s ever been any integrity associated with any of this since rock spun off the blues snake-oil circuits back in the day. In fact, given the history of rock and pop music, with all its shadiness and its legendary back stabbing business tradition, I guess I’m not surprised that it would have such an embarrassing collapse in the end. It’s like a drunk who refuses to stop drinking behind the wheel. No one is surprised when he is found wrapped around a pole, finally done in by his own idiocy.
Still, it’s not like creativity is flourishing anywhere else in this society – well, beyond Wall Street and the high rent district of Washington DC. Writers have stooped to accepting pay-per-click on Google Ads posted on the web pages of their articles – but only the ads contained within the borders of their articles, and not the 20 ads on the same page but outside the borders of the article itself. Apparently, they realize that their writing has no value if it doesn’t force someone to click on an small banner ad for car insurance or mortgage refinancing.
Did you know that if the sister-in-law of the immortal suicide, Vincent Van Gogh, hadn’t been offered a couple francs for one of the artist’s paintings by a neighbor, she would have finished burning all of his 400 or so paintings to free up the storage space her recently deceased husband, Theo, had allowed his genius brother? Imagine the treasures the old hag destroyed before learning that she could make a buck off the brother-in-law that she despised so deeply. Kind of makes you wonder what other brilliance has been destroyed over the centuries due to the reign of free-market businessmen, and their ignorance concerning that which constitutes value. It can make you physically ill just letting it all have a moment of your busy and important day.
If the writhing mass that animates this garbage dump survives another 400 years, maybe Geico commercials will be their version of classical music and art. Frankly, it’s only that kind of junk that will be considered valuable enough to keep from tossing into the incinerator. Preserved mainly as legacy data in some marketing super vault, to ensure collateral process integrity and responsible workflow efficiency – per senior management directive. The chorus in this pop song is that
If it don’t make money,
then it ain’t worth crap,
’cause if I get it for free,
then I’m the one
who won this one
and you’re the clown
and that’s all that counts.
I was wondering why so many newly released pop songs are being launched through TV commercials lately. Now I know why. They aren’t being launched this way with the intent of giving them a leg up on retail sale. They’re being introduced to us in this way to gradually soften up our resistance to the idea of all new music as worthless ad jingles. Garnish to make the entree of commercial mainstream business less offensive to our collective cultural tastes. These i-pod, Scion and Target commercials, popping off our surround sound speakers with their fresh new soundtracks, are the new Top Ten chart, and these pathetic bits of sonic wallpaper are the hits.
It won’t be long before the only way you can get one of these songs as a stand-alone offering is by paying to download the TV commercial you heard it in. Think that’s ridiculous? Forty years ago, they’d have thought that people paying for the privilege to advertise companies on their clothing would have been ridiculous too. Now, you can’t find clothes that don’t turn you into a human billboard for one corporation or another.
Yep, we worried about invading Russians for decades, and now we’re all worked up over a relative handful of shoddy desert madmen with scraggly beards taking away our freedoms, and forcing us to capitulate to their insane religious and societal demands. Stripping us of what it means to be American. Free and self-determining. Meanwhile, huge corporations are quietly herding all of us into a cultural slaughterhouse as we pay for the train ride ourselves. They even have us driving the trains, operating the meat grinders and selling the vision of it all to our friends and neighbors. George Orwell could never have dreamed up this fantasy, and if he did, no one in their right mind would have published it. They would have deemed it too implausible to ever be accepted by the reading public. And yet, here we are.
Welcome to the real New World Order. It couldn’t happened to a nicer bunch of folks
Nor’Easter
