So I'll admit that I've been slacking off. I'm sure there is a TON of music industry news I could be commenting on, but I've been busy and work and busy with life so I haven't kept up. I will though comment on one of the most hilarious pieces of genius to ever stumble onto the MTV screen. If you really want to call it any of those things.
I don't know if anyone else has caught this show, but yesterday during a pretty crappy snowstorm I was working from my bed and casually left MTV on because surprisingly enough they had music videos on in the morning. I was preoccupied with my work and while digilently copy and pasting away I failed to notice that the music had stopped and my TV was now bombarded with a bunch of "toolbags".
Side-note - quite some time ago I was having a conversation with my mom about who knows what and casually in conversation mentioned that some dude or other was a total "tool bag". My mom proceeded to ask me what I meant by a "tool bag" and I moved to the metaphor "dumb as a bag of hammers". She had a sort of moment of realization but then mentioned that she thinks a tool bag would be quite handy. That's my mom for you folks.
Anyway, as I was saying about the music being gone and tool bags and such. So I info-ed this show that had sneaked up upon me and it just so happened to be titled "Tool Academy". A pretty fitting name for the bunch of drones I was faced with. I clicked the "guide" button on my remote to search for something a bit less ... well... awful, and came up empty handed. It was a battle between a disasterous bunch of daytime television programming. I contemplated turning off the TV altogether and just hitting play on my CD Player, but then some ridiculous comment was made and I was basically hooked. So I thought to myself, what's a couple minutes, at least it will provide me with some seriously humorous entertainment and maybe even an ironically deep look into our twisted culture.
So I watched, feeling a little guilty and embarrassed, but I watched. I dug to find the purpose and the objective of the mindless banter and somehow came up with this. I am pretty sure that the show was about a group of guys, in a house along with their girlfriends, and they were "learning" t0 be respectful, mature adults. basically. So what I saw, was a group of guys bad mouthing their women behind their backs and then in some therapy session having to reveal their fears and confessions to their beloveds. pretty funny to see these big muscle dudes with horrible MTV haircuts and fake vintage t-shirts try to "reveal" their feelings. One of them, I couldn't even tell if he was speaking english, but I do know that he kept referring to his bleach blonde overly tanned girlfriend as "dude" and looked like he was about to punch a wall.
So I know this is not good to do but I started kind of comparing myself to these people. Mostly because, minus the details, their confessions were pertinent to my own personal life and I've been doing a bit of soul searching concerning our human obsession with companionship. I actually started this internal debate while sitting in the Orthopedic Surgery waiting room. I was probably the only one there under 40 and also the only one that did not have a signficant other sitting by, hand on the knee or rubbing my back for comfort. How did all these relationships come to be? How did they find one another and how did they decide that they were both right for each other? Was it a compromise, was it a battle of wits or simply love at first sight? But I digress, per usual. In essence I find it contradictory that we all stive to be blossoming, strong, and independent individuals, but yet still crave the comfort of others and the validation of our thoughts and opinions. How does it all work, I have no idea. So I kept watching.
As I watched and thought about individuality in part with relationships I remembered how feverishly we depend on other people to define ourselves, which truthfully is obvious and redundant. But in furthering this thought, it's not just that we rely on others for our comfort and validation, but the experiences we share with these people and what these experiences mean to us. I think what I mean is that we take the experiences we have with people, whether it be good or bad - going to the movies, getting a beer, fighting and yelling, laying on the beach - doesn't matter. We take these experiences and we determine our opinions and reactions to them and thus use those ideals in other aspects of our lives. It goes past feeling validated, it's just .... you.
I'm not sure that makes sense, even to me who just wrote it.
I'm going to try and think up an example, mostly for my own clarification. So say you go to the movies with your boyfriend or girlfriend, or sisters, could be anyone. I went to the movies with a long time friend of mine recently and he's a bit cynical. Me, I'm a bit indifferent with movies. So we go, we eat dinner, see the movie and get some hot chocolate and talk about what we think as we've done maybe a million times before. Now I liked the movie, he didn't - what a surprise, but what's a good conversation without a conflict. So instead of letting him and his opinions and criticisms determine how I felt about my own, I simply thought about the joy of a good conversation and how being in that moment made me feel, regardless of the difference of opinion. I took that experience and when having a conversation with other people, refer back to it and remember the curiosity, the emotions, and the relevance to my own life. I let the feelings associated with the experience define my reactions moving forward. And it's ever changing.
I think this is becoming much more involved then I ever intended it to be. All this from a bunch of tool-bags.
So to try and loop this into my music theme and it's association with our culture. I don't know if anyone is a fan, but I am a huge fan of Kris Delmhorst. In my opinion she writes the most beautiful love songs and the difference that I find between her ballads and others is that she does not write the song as though without them she could not survive. There are a lot of artists who have love songs that I aboslutely love. Great example: "Hope For Me Yet" by Marc Broussard, one of my all time favorite songs. But in listening to his words, he relies on his recepient for validation. Don't get me wrong, this is an awesome song, I don't care who you are, where you're from, Marc Broussard rocks, but it's a good example of how pretty much all love songs are based. The singer always feels lost, lonely, sad, suicidal or something without the other person in their life. And it feeds our culture a great deal.
Going back to the tool-bags and why they still matter to this one - sided debate. These guys were clearly consumed with themselves, concerned with appearance, money and status. And from a woman's perspective, I'm sure their girlfriends felt the same way about most things, or they probably wouldn't be together. Not only does the culture breed lonely love-sick swooners, but to make the situation worse, we now have to worry about how we look, how much money we make and if our job is cool enough so that we can be moved out of the lonely pool and into the "validated by a fake relationship" pool.
With all this stuff to worry about it's no wonder we're an overmedicated culture of fear, insecurity, anxiety and depression. And this all affects how we respond to our music. We listen to what those musicians are telling us. We are their shoulder, because they are musicians and they are, by nature, typically sad, so we let them lean on us for a little while. We feel like we've connected and we feel like what this famous person has to say has got to be the right way to feel about the same situation in my life. I think a lot of musicians use this relationship to sell music and write songs that reach out into their market and not only touch their audience, but basically show them a "bathroom wall" kind of good time. The next issue is, did the listener pay for that good time? Our musicians have welcomed us into their lives, not just with the sad songs but with the happy ones too. We celebrate their success with them, their love and their good times. So even if we feel lonely we can invite ourselves into their world and find comfort in them.
Now I'm not going to sit here and tell people that this is a horrible way to live life and is totally void of any personal independence. I'm guilty of sitting alone in my apartment and singing along to sad songs and feeling a deeper emotional connection than if I weren't listening to the song at all. Our lack of the our sense of self is very obvious in everyday life. Straight from TV shows to our connection with music and then on to the relationships we rely on with the people in our lives. I'm proud of the relationships I have. As I said, I try and remember that they do not define me, but I would never say that sitting alone and simply being happy with myself is enough. At least for me it's not, I enjoy the outside world and relationships are very important.
When it comes to this subject, I think that people don't even think about it. I honestly believe that people grow up faithfully devout to the thought that they have to find someone that makes them happy enough and only then will they be whole. I watch my best friend do it everyday, and it's kind of wierd and unnerving if you ask me. But you're not asking, at this point you're probably asking me to just shut up. I could just go on and on forever when it comes to our obsessions with relationships, fulfilling or not. Has it all become about validation? About feeling like we're actually apart of this world and that we matter to someone, anyone?
Yes, I think it has. Honestly, I have felt more and more that I am a working gear in this broken down machine, as I am at my job and in my family. I don't need someone to tell me and the beautiful love songs... they are just so beautiful.

iTunes Ebb and Flow

Well how do I seriously avoid writing about the most talked about Music Industry uproar for quite some time. The negotiation of a DRM free iTunes with variable pricing. Labels are expecting to come out ahead with this deal, but is that truthfully a realistic view? Possibly, but I'd like to dig a little deeper into the psyche of this agreement.
The biggest deal here is that some of the pricing on iTunes is going to change. A lot of popular music will undoubtly go up over the $1 mark, making the battle between your favorite song at this moment or the Big Mac that much more difficult. This will make the push for content bundling a little more necesary, because personally, we're already fighting a generation that is used to getting their music for free and if not for free, really cheap. Then you go and raise the price. Will this push more teens to make the extra effort to find a quick torrent to steal the song as opposed to paying more? The unfortunate thing, and this may be totally all made up in my head, is that I don't think that a lot of kids understand the whole point of paying for music and why downloading is considered stealing. They don't understand the copyright law, or that it's not just the artist that loses money, it's also all the people behind that artist that make them a success and bring them to your ear and thus, into your heart. The download generation is also considered, by me at least, to be a "damn the man" generation. And I know I've used this horribly cliche phrase before but it's quite examplory of the type of market so many obsolete label heads are trying to crack. This type of rebelious nature found in the download generation could cause one to think, maybe they won't like this $.30 price hike for their favorite tunes. But! they may also enjoy the $.30 price drop for something less noticed. Which, something the downloading "damn the man" generation also enjoys is finding brand spanking new music that mostly no one has heard before. I think it creates some sort of a feeling of being a trend-setter. Whatever helps you sleep at night kiddies.
Our culture has fueled such a war between the downloading generation and the labels. The more the labels fight to get whatever dollar is owed to them, the less and less young adults are likely to give it up. There is a feeling of trying to screw over the industry simply because it gave you a glimpse of file sharing and now it's out there and easily accessible, but they don't want you to have that. First things first, the labels (obviously) did not give anyone any type of file sharing capability. To be perfectly honest, and because I work for a label and worry about these people all day, I don't think anyone of the heads of a department would know the first thing about staring a file sharing website. And what would be the sense! You'd literally be taking your own money out of your own pocket. But that is all needless to say, we know that these handy file sharing sites are created by bored, jobless teens that are looking to piss someone off, whether it be helping people steal their product or setting the neighbors cat on fire. Or is that a stereotype, oops, sorry.
But I digress, per usual. Back to the subject at hand. Will the variable pricing help or hurt the industry. For a someone that works with a small label which has a good number of artists that feed themselves purely on their tour sales, the discussion that has already somewhat happened is "are we going to get screwed because we don't turn out crazy pop hits". And it's very very likely. Simply because our artists do not generate serious dollar bills like some, they will probably suffer and be placed with the $.69 crowd. Thus, we suffer and the deal is counter-productive. And whether or not I think that kids are going to be just as willing to pay $1.29 as they were at $.99 is arguable. I personally think that it will irritate a lot of kids and they will find other ways of buying/sharing their music. Then there is the up-side that they will think "what's another $.30" and just pay the extra without a question.
The real truth will be seen once the prices start changing and the fluctations in sales numbers is visible. The labels are hopful that this will create some much needed revenue for them, but I can't say that I feel as warm and fuzzy about it. Granted, I am young, and technically considered a part of that "downloading, damn the man" generation. There are others that have the experience of sea tortoises in this industry. But if you look at the past few years, you can see where that experience has gotten them; cowering and scared of a bunch of 16 year olds wearing short skirts and snow boots (I know I don't get it either).
So to keep this entry short and sweet because I have to go home, this is no longer a battle between digital and physical. It's now become a battle between legal dgital and illegal digital. And I think that if iTunes asks for a good deal of titles to raise their prices, the illegal side may not exactly win, but it may gain yet another advantage.
Just pay for your damn music people. Oh sweet irony.