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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | DanAbnrml9@aol.com |
| Subject | Re: Food for thought... |
| Date | Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:24:23 EDT |
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In a message dated 10/26/2004 9:04:44 AM Eastern Standard Time,
audities-owner@smoe.org writes:
<<I don't claim to know a lot of teenagers, but the ones I know are far less
sheep-like and uncritical in their tastes than I remember my peers being at
that age. Remember, the current crop of adolescents are far more inured to
commercial trickery and are much more astute consumers than we ever were,
because they're now the third or so generation to have grown up in a world
dominated by advertising agencies and entertainment megacorporations. Irony,
distance, and postmodern aesthetics are part of the very air they breathe.
Plus, they're much more technologically savvy than us geezers. They're born
into a world where they learn how to operate a computer at roughly the age
we were at when we were playing with building blocks. In a computer-driven,
niche-marketed musical universe their abilities to locate new sounds and
incorporate them into their own personal tastes are much more acute than
ours were at that age, especially those of us who weren't lucky enough to
have grown up within range of a good college radio station or a hip record
store. And if most of them develop tastes that don't conform to Audities
specs, we'll just have to learn to deal with it the same way that every
older generation has had to reconcile itself to the fact that it couldn't
transmit its musical taste to their children.>>
Couldn't have said it better myself. My experience working at an actual
honest-to-goodness record store with actual honest-to-goodness teenagers taught
me how woefully out of touch with these people that the audities universe has
become, but (despite my protests before) it seemed to fall on deaf ears quite
often. Plus, at 24 (and I've been on this list since I was 20 or 21, I can't
remember) I'm one of the younger members here and find that *I* am often
offended by those generalizations. Perhaps even more disturbing is how many
don't seem to realize how self-defeating these statements are (Jeff, if a
16-year-old heard those comments and then heard a Spinning Jennies record, how do
you think he'd feel? Do you think he'd become a fan?)
I've seen enough from behind my own counter to offer this: ANYTHING
marketed, packaged, and promoted properly, HAS THE POTENTIAL to sell bundles (an
awful lot of it is just luck and an "emotional response" from the public, which
you can't predict). It does not matter how old the market or the artist is;
look no further than the crassly commercial recent offerings from Rod Stewart
and Michael McDonald and then look at their mightily impressive sales figures.
You think that's the teenagers, the group who takes all their cues from the
mass media, buying that stuff?
Also, it's worthy of noting that an awful lot of so-called "audities-style"
music is being signed, released, and pushed by majors and/or is being
discovered by younger people nowadays (this isn't 2000 anymore), so the us vs. them
mentality is, at least for now, a bit dated and bizarre. Its time will come
again, I'm sure.
--Jason
_http://www.livejournal.com/users/danabnrml9_
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/danabnrml9)
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