Blog rock vs. indie in: Marketing, distribution & genre!

Under monop­oly all mass cul­ture is iden­ti­cal, and the lines of its arti­fi­cial frame­work begin to show through. The peo­ple at the top are no longer so inter­est­ed in con­ceal­ing monop­oly: as its vio­lence becomes more open, so its pow­er grows. Movies and radio need no longer pre­tend to be art. The truth that they are just busi­ness is made into an ide­ol­o­gy in order to jus­ti­fy the rub­bish they delib­er­ate­ly produce.

T. Adorno, from “The Cul­ture Indus­try: Enlight­en­ment as Mass Deception”

A dis­qui­si­tion on how a busi­ness mod­el that once made beau­ti­ful music became a col­lec­tive of data aggre­ga­tors that formed crit­i­cal mass and shaped taste. Or, how skep­ti­cism met “poptimism”…and lost, foment­ing inter­na­tion­al mar­ket­ing blitzkrieg that results in cul­tur­al amne­sia. As the indus­try strug­gles to remain prof­itable, the recon­sti­tu­tion of val­ue and expec­ta­tions is cru­cial to survival.

Also, how the use of tau­to­log­i­cal mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ences such as SXSW sup­plants any need for A & R, yet main­tains the busi­ness-suit­ed trap­pings of cul­tur­al inter­me­di­aries, while some­how wear­ing a straight-face to talk, Dea­ni­ac-style, about the cur­rent state of the net­roots [via Riff Mar­ket]. Love­ly mys­ti­fi­ca­tions aside: mis­sion accom­plished? [Viz., I half-agree, if imput­ed puri­ty were, say, “tawdry” with cash and prizes.]

In short, you are not only the quar­ry, but also the street team, which was the quar­ry in the first place. This time it’s Thorstein Veblen ver­sus T. Adorno in a streetfight!

[This isn’t meant as a judge­ment on the state of pop music itself, rock­ism, etc. — although that may come into ques­tion — more impor­tant­ly, it’s an attempt to refine a dat­ed argu­ment to suit the needs of a more sophis­ti­cat­ed, and often cyn­i­cal, process.]

Required read­ing: Chris Dahlen’s “Bet­ter Than We Know Our­selves”