After starting and restarting the project over and over for about 5 years while in search for a sponsor who would or could take on the enormous task of providing a band like U2 with the humongous promotion it thinks it deserves, the charismatic Irish men have finally released the follow-up to 2009's bland No Line on the Horizon hand in hand with the almighty(?) Apple - their long-time corporate spouse.
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| *never forget* |
Of course, we are living in the digital age, and there's no way an album release (especially a U2 album) could possibly generate any interest among the audience unless it was accompanied by some sort of super spectacular media stunt. In this case, that stunt came in the shape of Apple's brilliant idea of giving the album away for free to every iTunes subscriber (independently of whether they actually wanted it or not) coinciding with the release of their brand new iPhone 6 (damn, I used iTunes once, so I probably have a copy waiting for me somewhere. What a horrifying prospect. I won't even take the chance to find out :S LOL).
This move, once again, spurred the inevitable debate about whether it's morally acceptable to give music away for free and about what a self-important cunt Bono is (that's one very necessary issue to debate, if you ask me). I won't even bother to comment on the subject of music for free, because it's old as Hell, and debating it is extremely pointless, since the consolidated music industry has skillfully developed all the mechanisms to prevent musicians from seeing any money at all anyway.
Just keep in mind the idea that, if you come across a guy busking in the street and decide to give him two dollars, he'll be making a much larger profit per minute of work than he would with a major lablel release. Not bad, heh? That thought popped in my head once after I tipped a guitar guy who was playing Roadhouse Blues in the subway.
Nobody robs musicians as much as record labels do. But, hey... who said U2 were musicians anyway?
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| Jimmy Iovine - saving the music since 1990 |
And, then again, you can't really say you're giving music away for free when Apple is playing you $100 million for it, can you? Of course, this is Apple telling the world how big their corporate dick is, so I have absolutely no reason to believe they really paid 100 million dollars for this album, just like I have absolutely no reason to believe that they actually did pay $3 billion for Beats by Dre and their joke of a streaming service.
The whole thing looks like a page pulled from the book of Jay-Z's infamous Samsung deal - another disturbing (and not too successful) attempt at marrying album releases and totalitarian technology. In his case, Samsung offered a million copies of his Corte de Manga, Holy Shit Magna Carta, Holy Grail album for free to Samsung users through and app that, they would later find out, didn't really work - a malfunction that turned the album's glorious release into a hilarious fiasco.
Nevertheless, Jay-Z claimed that the million free copies Samsung was giving away should be counted as album sales (and, therefore, grant the album platinum status before its actual release), since they weren't really given away for free - just bought in advance by the tech giant. Billboard, however, didn't agree... and, a few months later, Bill Werde's head was comfortably sitting on top of a pike. Not a great loss, if you ask me.
I'm not sure about how this aspect will work out in U2's case, but I bet I'll have a great time finding out.
I have to add that the idea of a mega-corporation paying for an album's creation sounds like something so horrifyingly unreal it could only happen in the dystopic OCP-controlled society of Robocop.
That, of course, doesn't seem to be a problem for Bono, who, just like Jay-Z, knows that somewhere out there there's a megacorporation so loaded with money, it won't even mind paying him a ridiculous amount of it for whatever reason (or, preferrably, for no reason at all). His job as a *cough* "musician" is to find that corporation and suck from its money tit till it runs dry... and then find another. It doesn't matter if it's a record label, a tech company, a fashion conglomerate or a drug cartel - who gives a shit, as long as it means more money in Bono's off-shore accounts?
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| #NewRules, y'all |
But Bono doesn't have enough with a succcessful(?) Nazi-marketing campaign - he has to save the world (after all, he's the Rock & Roll Messiah), and, apparently, so does Apple.
And, so, it turns out that the two goodwill giants aren't just selling an iPhone - they're working on a 'secret project' to save the music industry, y'all. At least, so says this article from Spin:
"The longtime partnership between the Irish band and the tech giant has more in store for the world in the form of a "secret project" that could revolutionize the music industry and help artists get compensated for their work.
The details of the plan are relatively vague, coming to us from a preview of Time magazine's upcoming cover story on the band. "Bono tells Time he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music — whole albums as well as individual tracks."
A new digital music format?! REALLY?! That's it?! LMAO
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| *Illuminati bitch* |
To me, this whole talk about 'revolutionizing' the music industry sounds a lot like the promo campaign for Troy Carter's Backplane. Remember The Backplane, kiddies? Oh, well, in case you don't know, it was the social media platform that was going to "gather content and interaction into one hub",
"completely alter the economics of Hollywood" and make "revenue
that once flowed to corporations" "flow to artists", and in the end turned out to be a cheap-looking fansite for Lady Gaga... like I had always said it would be.
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Oh, but this is not some shitty social network - it's 'a format so exciting that it will tempt music fans into buying music again', no less.
Well, excuse my sincerity, but there's no format in the world that could possibly force people into buying the substandard crap you and the rest of the music industry are manufacturing these days... unless it's one that somehow magically replaces shitty records with better music LOL
Like Sharon Osbourne said:
"No wonder you have to give your mediocre music away for free 'cause no one wants to buy it."
I'm
not sure if there are some obscure interests behind her statement or if she was just being honest (this modern world makes me
paranoid), but thanks for saying it anyway.
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| BONOOOOOOOOO |
Thirty years later, the corporations are still refusing to accept that people don't buy formats - they buy CONTENTS, and, even if you can disguise a not-so-great product behind a clever and/or aggresive marketing campaign and a nice packaging, it's a trick that only works for a limited amount of time (the rise and fall of Lady Gaga is probably the clearest example of that).
People don't buy books - they buy Harry Potter... or 50 Shades of Grey, if you like (probably because there are tons of sexually frustrated housewives out there, and because, honestly... who doesn't love a guy from Seattle? LOL). People didn't buy vinyl records in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s because they were so despearte to have a piece of black plastic in a cardboard sleeve with a picture on top; they bought them because they contained good music (or, at least, they did in a notably bigger proportion than they do nowadays), and also because music and the musicians who made it had cultural relevance and a certain ideological value - things they have completely lost now, thanks to the totalitarian practices of the corporations Bono loves so much.
The problem is not that people don't want to buy music anymore; the problem is that they don't even want to hear it for free.
Try to fix that, Apple.
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| BONOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
This approach of putting the format on top of the content was basically what killed the music industry in the first place.
The record labels spent a good chunk of the 90s selling ridiculously overpriced CDs with free music in them, while buying each other into the monopolistic nonsense the music industry is today, and, when the idiotized Millennial teenagers (I know them well - I had to share a classroom with them and wonder why I couldn't have been born in the 1940s or the 1960s) decided they had already bought enough Eminem and Britney Spears CDs, the execs (who, by then, had already managed to steal tons of unwatched corporate money) got all excited thinking that they would finally be able to kill the CD for good and replace it for much less costly digital downloads.
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| 'Sugar, Free Donuts' |
After all, CDs are quite an investment: they'remade of plastic and come with a booklet you have to design and then print. You have to make the whole thing at the factory, which is quite a pain in the ass, and then you have to physically transport tons of those things to the stores (thank God we have less and less of those now), where they will just sit on a shelf gathering dust... and they won't even start making money for you until someone actually buys them. So risky.
With digital downloads, however, all you have to do is design a cheap cover artwork (judging by the album covers we've been seeing in the last couple of years, the industry is already cutting costs in that department), upload the track and there you go. There is no factory, no transport, no unsold stock - just a tiny fee you pay to iTunes or whatever provider you're using. Compare the cost of both operations and you might get a clue on why the music industry has been trying so hard to kill the CD for the last 15 years... to little, success, I have to say, since even the most ridiculously industry-driven acts are still releasing albums (despite the many times the death of the album has been announced) on outdated CDs.
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| 'Who said cover art was dead?' |
Despite their non-existent production costs, digital downloads failed to generate a consumeristic fever that could be remotely compared to that of the early stages of the CD bubble, probably because people didn't need to re-buy their catalog as digital downloads (they could just rip them from the CDs anyway) and because there was no Black Album and no Nevermind to make them feel they wanted music to be a part of their lives - just Usher and 50 Cent advertising headphones in da club.
And yet here they are in 2014 - still looking for that magical format that will make them swim in money all over again - only the record labels don't care anymore, because there isn't really anyone left in the building. It's all down to the tyrants of tech now, and the former music moguls who have been clever enough to jump from one ship to the other.
Bono definitely wants to be in that category. But, of course, he'll never tell. After all, he's not into this to make money, remember?
"The point isn't just to help U2 but less well known artists and others in the industry who can't make money, as U2 does, from live performance. 'Songwriters aren't touring people,' says Bono. 'Cole Porter wouldn't have sold T-shirts. Cole Porter wasn't coming to a stadium near you.'"
Can you believe that?! The Irish man doesn't just care about making money for himself - he wants other musicians to make money as well! That's SO SWEET of you, dear. You must definitely be a saint.
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| 'Hey, leave me out of this, bro' |
It's really funny to hear a corporate whore like Bono talking about saving the music. It's funny to the degree it's not funny at all; just sickening beyond belief.
It's also funny how tech companies and major labels always end up sounding like they're the biggest defenders of small bands and unknown artists you could possibly encounter... because nuturing talent is all they ever care about. They are not looking for a way of getting rich without doing shit (no way!); they are trying to save ART, y'all. How fucking BEAUTIFUL is that?
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| "Hey! I'm a pretty lousy president!" |
Anyway, Bonovox, I wouldn't worry much about professional songwriters, if that's your biggest concern, since they already
have all the criminal performing rights organizations working for them,
making sure they get paid and re-paid for all sorts of absurd things -
like radio airplay -, so I think they've got that pretty covered. I'm much more concerned about what this corporate
nightmare of a society we live in is doing to culture and the irreparable (?) damage it's causing to people's
brains.
Thankfully, not even Spin seems to be too confident in the success of U2's (and Apple's) ambitious plans:
"We'll have to wait and see if U2 can really save the music industry, though the fact that they couldn't even save Spider-Man on Broadway doesn't give us too much hope. "
I rarely agree with Spin Magazine, but I have to take my hat off for this. You've got a point, guys. You've got a point LOL
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| BONOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
I wouldn't be too sorry about their failure, though. The music industry doesn't need saving. It just needs to completely lose its mainstream appeal so that, hopefully, all the greedy bastards parasitizing on it will lose interest and move onto something else. Only then will REAL musicians be able to gain control over their business again.
After all, this is what happened to the rock music ghetto, so maybe there's still a tiny bit of hope left somewhere.
Hopefully.
Until then, we'll just have to sit in a corner and let Google steal our Big Data... because what else is there to do in the digital age?
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| *yup* |
PS. No, I don't get a dollar for every time I use the word 'corporate', but if I did... boy, that'd be good.
