cheers, Encrust.

CL!

is pop music - the most popular type of music and the type of music that is on We7 and other ad supported sites - art? is Britney Spears, Leona Lewis, Justin Timberlake art? are you seriously arguing this?

90% of the pop music that kids buy is very very manufactuared, marketed and corporate - and that goes for a lot of your so called alternative and non mainstream music (have you bought the John Lennon trainers??? Have you seen the amount of Nirvana merchandise you can buyt these days?)

The fact is that advertising touches all areas of life. Music doesnt operate in a vacuum, cut of from the rest of a market economey driven society.

you may not like it, but advertsing is playing a greater part in music

C

Mel, first of all, thank you for writing in. I always appreciate direct communication with the people who run these websites and companies. And while I also appreciate your pitch, it suffers from one small string of skewed perspective.

Yes, the music industry would be ruined by your theory. But what is becoming clearer and clearer lately is that musicians aren’t exactly suffering. I talked about this on my show this week–Read this post from the Financial Times that states that songwriters and musicians are actually raking in record royalty payments and tell me that these people are suffering.

The reason I criticized We7 is primarily to do with the attachment of corporate advertising to what should be a pure art form. I realize that the marriage of advertising and art has been long established in all sorts of art forms, but that doesn’t make attaching an ad to a free song any less weird. I guess personally I find it off putting that whenever I hear the song, I’ll probably also be thinking of the ad. I’m sure ad companies are counting on this kind of subliminal action, and it weirds me out a little.

As for alternative ways to save the music industry, it is a) not my job, since I’m at best an amateur video blogger, and b) a moot point, since it doesn’t appear to need saving. The internet broke open the dam, creating a great equalizer, where both monster pop sensations and small garage bands compete on the same stage. In the last five years, we’ve seen the rise of the indie artist, the establishment of $9.99 as the standard price for a record (which, evidently, hundreds of millions of people have accepted), the large-scale abandonment from big-box CD stores (who never had the public good in mind anyway), and, perhaps most impressively, the resurgence of vinyl.

If you want my opinion on what the music industry should “look like”, then I guess my personal view is that we should accept the death of the CD as a viable medium and go the route many indie record labels are heading–selling vinyl with MP3 codes. That way, you get the best of both worlds.