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The "death" of the music industry

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Tom:

--- Quote from: imagist42 on 22 Feb 2011, 15:27 ---the fact that they have to make every song on their album worth purchasing?

--- End quote ---

This is actually an interesting point in regards to "filler" content.

scarred:
Yeah I know that was said as a joke but I kind of agree with it. Filler content, or "that song everyone skips," bugs the living fuck off of me. If I'm paying upwards of $15 for a record I'd like to enjoy it in its entirety, or close to it.

est:
That is one thing I was taking as a given.  There are some albums I can listen to time and again from start to finish, but they are rarities and appreciated for that fact.

imagist42:
Yeah that is basically Okkervil River's The Stand Ins for me. And guess what, kiddos? I actually bought that one even after listening to it for a whole month prior to its release!

Johnny C:
you've all also hit another weird side-effect of the contemporary moment which is the idea of like spending time getting to know those records. and to like really, really think about them. i mean – are you even going to buy a record like joan of arc's the gap, if your attitude towards music is "well i'm not spending money on filler"? or i mean imagist since you brought this record up, what if you itunes preview the stage names trio of ambient tracks and decide they're filler rather than important breaks in the record-length experience?

i try to drag the conversation onto these topics all the time but i'm going to try to explicate the questions i'm actually trying to ask here since i think that might speed the process up a little, and because it's also a dfw trick and i've read like a hundred pages worth of his essays in about two days so it's rubbed off on me considerably.

QUESTIONS I AM ACTUALLY TRYING TO ASK:
why is it, when we have conversations about the ways that purchasing of music has shifted in the early days of this millennium, we always term ourselves "consumers" and try to reduce things into pure baseline capitalistic transactions? is it that necessary to point out that major labels are beginning to, in fact, eat shit, and why when we do do we not consider whether smaller labels are affected by the changes in purchasing habits that have afflicted major labels as well, the same purchasing habits that have caused said majors to eat said shit? and why – here is the question that perpetually stymies me – are we still so fascinated, in an age where the concept of music as a set of ideas rather than a product has in fact exploded across the globe and been refracted by a heartening and staggering number of people, with whether or not we are getting our "money's worth" in what we inexplicably choose to call a product? what does "getting our money's worth" mean, here? how does it affect the way we think about the things we consume? is it entirely possible that in framing things this way we are developing rather entitled attitudes towards texts, attitudes we can see in wondering "well why didn't they do x in this book/movie" or "why don't all the songs sound like x on this record" which are rather decidedly not what the texts have set out to do? is it entirely possible that maybe barthes had it backwards and that it is ultimately the reader who is tyrannical in nature?

i'm not trying to be a pessimist because i see cool things going on all the time online and because arcade fire sold enough records to win a freakin' grammy. but the epistemological perspective people bring to "death of the music industry"-type stuff makes me fret the more i read it, and all those questions above start buzzing around in my head. i'm not clear on what the answers are to several of them. i'm not sure there are answers to a couple. but i think they're all fairly worth considering, you know?

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