Archive for 4 February 2004
If you were looking for a concise and erudite explanation of why conventional notions of copyright aren’t keeping up with technology, and what can done about it, you could do a lot worse than read the comments on this posting on Cory Doctorow’s site. The book’s pretty good,as well…
Alex Petridis in the Guardian has an article suggesting that artists who demand freedom from record labels go on to produce rubbish – the starting point of the argument being Peter Gabriel and his Mudda. His argument is that it’s the record labels that act as a filter against the more willfully self-indulgent outpourings of crap from the more (ahem) artistic of artistes amongst us.
Assuming that record labels are somehow responsible for steering their stable of artists away from concept album disaster, it does leave the question of whether what actually gets produced is up to much. I’ve lost count of how many Dido and Coldplay and Radiohead clones are out there, not to mention this week’s hottest interchangeable boy band. If someone gets creative freedom and produces an album of self-indulgent navel gazing, I ignore it – but their navel-gazing might actually be just the thing I was looking for. If the alternative was a finely-focussed commercial effort, I’d probably ignore that as well – because the chances are it’s going to sound like Dido or Coldplay or Radiohead.
I’m not sure quality and quantity are necessarily related here – sure, if the absolute quantity of new releases increase as a result of new distribution channels, a larger absolute number of those releases are going to be total crap. But I don’t see how the overall proportion of crap-to-creative-genius can do anything other than improve, given the distinctly-variable quality of what gets churned out of the major labels currently.
And all of this supposes that my judgement of what’s good and bad is the right one – I might not like Dido and Radiohead and Coldplay (or rather, I might not like them that much that I want every new band to sound like them), but they sell by the truckload. So who am I to judge the market?
