Great post, Lee, especially the paragraph about mainstream music buyers not
wanting to be saved from their tastes. Over the years I've occasionally
detected on Audities a certain amount of impatience with, if not outright
derision towards, the casual music buyer/listener. It's an attitude with
which I can identify, since I also find myself looking down my nose every
now and then at people who are content to restrict their music spending to
maybe one or two CDs of predigested major-label pap per year, who only take
in an occasional hockey-barn megashow if they ever see any live music at
all, and who generally go through life thinking of music as nothing more
than a peripheral pleasure. It's good to remember to take a step back and
observe that personal passions are not universal sentiments -- even when the
passion in question is something as ubiquitous as music. Your comments about
fashion are an apt analogy, but they could just as equally apply to such
alternate passions as religion, politics, gardening, sports -- anything that
qualifies as a pervasive obsession held in common by a large group of
people. The fact that I devote so much of my time, money, and energy to
music instead of fashion doesn't make me superior to someone whose interests
are the reverse of mine. And it's good to be reminded of that. So thanks,
Lee.


Gregory Sager