Bribes and Lies

So did you hear the one about the DJ who was paid $100 every time he played a JLo song on the air? Maybe Econo-Girl should start calling radio stations and asking about it.

It seem Elliot Spitzer, like Elliot Ness, is fighting crime and the issue is our bad taste. You ever wonder what some of these pop stars are made of? Now we know. Payoffs. Elliot Spitzer has just announced some settlement on the issue of bribes with Sony, and other ones are soon to follow. So maybe our taste isn't in our mouths after all.

The music industry has long seen demand for its product decline. Would that be because its product was bad? Would that be because it doesn't listen to its consumer and instead tries to tell the consumer what to like? In some dark corner of the dark world of recording artist management, a man needlessly wearing shades is saying, "We drive demand, baby. We create it."

What they are really creating is the appearance of demand. For the younger among us, that may spiral into some follow-up demand for the Simpson girls' albumns. But what a poweful tool propaganda is. Do you dare to admit, even to yourself, that some idea or creation that seems to be loved by everyone is despised by you? Beliefs are powerful. In law school, everyone was studying six hours a day. So my frame of reference was a six hour study time. That affected my internal sense of 'how much studying was enough.'

So in the music realm, our sense of what is popular music is actually a cleverly scripted propaganda campaign of which we are the target.

How to counter this artificial demand? Maybe calling these DJs and telling them that these songs stink. Maybe an e-mail campaign. Econo-Girl thinks that all music sold should be labeled as to whether or not the singer's voice had to be digitally mastered to get the pitch right. Otherwise it could be false advertising because they aren't really singing. Picket lines would be good, too.