Before I begin, I should acknowledge that “Whither the Music Video” is not a complete sentence, yet has come to gain legitimacy through years of misuse in cool titles for articles about the sorry state of [insert dying/in-transition art form].
Branching off of Dan’s recent entry re: Coldplay’s videos, it seems to me that this has been the sad standard for some time now. The more artists that leave record labels to galvanize their own fan bases however they see fit, the more that the task of the music video falls into the hands of a friend or assistant who records some blandly candid backstage footage, which more often than not winds up buried in the band’s MySpace page. And even when the suits do throw a little Thanks-For-Not-Doing-Heroin-This-Era money at their bands, the videos just look like the same low-budjy turds, only polished. Shake the camera a lot to cover up the lack of a set, overexpose to cover up the lack of a set, pack the thing with tight close-up shots of the singer’s face to cover up the…well, you get it.
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Posted by Daniel on October 20th, 2008 in Music | No Comments »
Holy cow, it has been forever since I updated. My apologies…I will try my best to change that.
Anyways, the guys from Coldplay are holding a fan-music music video contest. This makes me rather happy, because not only is it an example of one of the biggest bands in the world jumping into social media, but perhaps it’s also an acknowledgment that their music videos for “Violet Hill” and “Viva La Vida” were not very good. Or at least that’s what I thought. These days, it takes a lot to get me to enjoy a music video, and for whatever reason, Coldplay’s have definitely not come through for me. I love their music, but I just don’t feel their music videos have been good lately.
Regardless, I’m glad to see them giving their fans a shot.
I was perusing MySpace last week for new music, when I stumbled across a catchy electropop group called Ultraviolet Sound. After deciding I wanted to buy their album, I was surprised to discover it wasn’t on iTunes or Amazon, nor was it available on CD. Instead, the band had a widget on their MySpace page powered by a company called TrueAnthem that allowed me to download their entire album for free. But like all things free, there is a catch. Or several.
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Amazon currently has over 3,000 songs available for download totally for free at their MP3 store. Most of the stuff is either old or independent, but there’s definitely a lot of good stuff to be had. The thing that interests me the most about this is how poor the advertising on this is. Finding that “free” page is kind of difficult, when Amazon should be plugging it left and right to try to attract customers. There are a few other bizarre things about these tracks, but for now just go grab yourself some free music.
Last October, Radiohead gained a good amount of fame when they decided to release their album, In Rainbows, online for whatever price you felt it was worth — including $0.00 if that’s what you decided to put in. So effectively, you could download the entire new album in MP3 format, immediately, for free. So then, why in the world did millions of people opt to download it illegally via BitTorrent anyway?
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Posted by Daniel on August 12th, 2008 in Music | 2 Comments »
I love the iTunes Store. Well, most of the time.
The easiest way to buy music online can also be a massive headache if you’re one of the people out there who care about DRM. We already know that music purchased through iTunes is riddled with it, but what many people don’t know is that iTunes Plus — Apple’s pricier alternative to their DRM’d music — has a dirty little secret: Your personal information.
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Here in Hollywood, you can’t walk to any of the major shopping or entertainment areas without being bombarded by a handful of musicians attempting to sell you their burned CD’s. It has been this way for a while, but in this day and age, I have to wonder why they still exist… and why they haven’t figured out that spending an hour putting their stuff on the internet will reap more rewards than standing out on the street corner for a solid month.
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Everyone loves to talk about the death and the demise of record companies, as if they’re all going to curl up and die today, returning the power back to the artist. Personally, I think this is a load of crap. While certainly the record industry is in decline and huge changes to be made, none of those changes will involve the death of all the major record labels. There are, however, some interesting possibilities for the future of the industry, and I will present one of my theories for you now.
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In a totally predictable but vague article, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. says that the music video is dead, and that while he is not entirely certain what the future of music marketing is, he’s putting a lot of stock into the internet. This is hardly a surprise, given that Ethan (who is very close with the band) and the gang over at WBR have been working very hard over the past few years to increasingly market their artists on the internet, with R.E.M. often being the first out of the gate. But are music videos really dead?
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Despite my relatively positive opinion on eMusic, I have cancelled my membership. It’s not that the service wasn’t good, but rather, it is unnecessary. The biggest problem is that it is not a strong enough store on its own to replace iTunes or Amazon, and at the same time, it does not really complement either of them very well, either.
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