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quote:Originally posted by count adam:
In Australia, at least, the entire music media exists solely to sell advertising to major labels, which means they do whatever the major labels want.
Really? In that case, the street press must've completely died since I moved over here to London. I remember, in Sydney, reading Drum Media, for example, which - while still exhibiting the talent the music press has for best-buddy pocket-pissing - at least pointed out stuff that was local, new, and not mainstream. Fuck, I only read major music publications that came through work, or that I got for free - I never bought it, and never bought into it.
What Timberlake has to say about the music industry is nothing new, really; and for a particular, mainstream, pop-audience, it's got a ring of truth to it. Big Corporate Productions are over-inflated now, and keep getting so. But doesn't the amount of small, bedroom-recorded, low-fi, cheap-release stuff increase, too? Aren't more artists putting their stuff on the net, for free? If someone gets interested in something that's not pop, there's more avenues than ever before to go down and check them out, a lot of them accessible from a computer in a bedroom. Agarchy's right; music is fluid, and there's a multitude of influences you can explore from any given artist. If someone's interested in music in any way - certainly if they're interested enough to write about it - then surely they'll explore some of these, and perhaps be led away from the Big Corp. fold?
As I mentioned earlier: my tastes aren't goverened by Rick Astley, or T'Pau, or the James Last and Neil Diamond and Dolly Parton discs that my parents listened to on long car-trips. I don't only listen to that stuff; admittedly, my love of classical music stems from then, but I've carved out my own tastes, off my own bat. Why give anyone yet to be born any less credit? If anything, I think the critics of tomorrow will probably be used to listening to a much wider range of music than ever before. They'll initially be raised on pop - as most people in their 20s now were, to a certain extent, certainly in the UK, where the pop scene seems to be bigger in music than elsewhere - but if they care enough about music to want to write about it, I'm sure they'll be digging around to find whatever they like; and being of a generation that's used to information bombardment, presumably they'll be used to sifting through more dross to find the gold? Maybe the critics of tomorrow will rebel against the bombast and ceremony of the pop of their youth, and you'll see a rebirth of critical support for clean, economic punklike pop? Maybe, instead of getting larger and larger, bloatpop (and blokepop) are crafting their own doom? |
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