quoted 2 lines That new Nike commercial with all the basketball dudes doing tricks is
> That new Nike commercial with all the basketball dudes doing tricks is
> totally IDM, man.
Stop me if I'm horribly off-topic, but is that a good thing? It's not that
I'm against IDM becoming more popular, or musicians making a living from
selling a soundtrack to an ad. But when music gets commercialised, it
usually seems to wind up getting sanitised as well as bigger labels try to
find some easy formula for making big bucks in a consistent way.
On the one hand, it may seem petty that people who've got into some
'underground' music like IDM or techno or whatever don't want to be overrun
by hordes of weenies who just had it handed to them on a plate by MegaCorp.
And it's true that many artists who loudly proclaim that they would never
sell out have never been asked to :-)
But when an artist (or a genre) gets plucked out of obscurity by some large
corporate concern and turned into the new 'big thing', there often follows a
brief feeding frenzy as the competition tries to carve up the little market
that has just been discovered and stake out their niches in it. For example
there are a lot of small hip-hop labels that are just subsidiaries of large
media companies, and they don't really contribute much. With that sort of
sponsorship, a lot of bland, safe music gets released, and genuinely
independent companies have to compete with the much larger promotion and
distribution operations that the big-media labels can draw on.
I hope this doesn't sound paranoid or reactionary, and I certainly don't
want to discourage anyone from buying a good record, whoever releases it. It
just seems to me that fashion is a very hungry beast, and after it has moved
on there is often less for the small players/labels to get by on.
Anig Browl
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