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DR said...

I just listened to the Wavves record out of morbid curiousity and yeah you may have a point, you can say what you like about music taste being subjective but when someone comes along and (maybe) starts playing fast and loose with something you really care about it all bets are off, for me it’s Post Rock: a very steep decline from the second Slint record if you ask me, and where’s the God damn vocal?

Anyway...I read an article earlier about the long tail theory of music consumption on the web – the idea that having access to work by more obscure artists would mean that more obscure artists were consumed: not so apparently;

‘For example, eMusic CEO David Pakman again pointed out last week that Apple's iTunes Music increases the importance of the hit: 90 per cent of revenues come from 10 per cent of the catalog.’ [1]

But why is this you ask yourself;

‘"An obvious answer is that it’s through people chatting to each other and seeing the music talked about in the media. That’s what culture is. So the fact we’re seeing the log normal distribution here may point to the power of culture on people’s choices. Chris Anderson’s hypothesis of a Pareto power law would be much more about random, individual choices – people alone with their computers. So perhaps, this debate of 'thick versus fat' is really about the power of culture in determining demand".’ [2]

This definition of “what culture is’ is so depressing I’m going to go and listen to some early Nickleback just to prove them wrong.

So I guess the above applies to all music cultcha circles, and the indie(?!) version is just a mirror of the more mainstream stuff hence Wavves’ hype but did the really ask for it? What we have now is people desperately trying to upload something ultra new, ultra awsome and ultra fast, not much of an alternative to the cultural conflaguration of NME-esque hype which really did eat itself in the end but at least you can listen to it for free now, and discard it at your leisure.


1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/27/debunking_long_tail_maths/
2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/13/long_tail_p2p/

May 13, 2009 at 6:45 PM

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