Comments on: salieri in blue jeans

By: hugh macleod

hugh macleod — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 01:08:12 +0000

Not just microbranding, Brian, but “global microsbranding”! Heh.

By: brian moffatt

brian moffatt — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:56:40 +0000

Listening to Clear Channel — the beacon of monoculture — is what I imagine Soviet era radio might have sounded like, where property is now standing in for the proletariat.
You can wrap up the monoculturists in one bag and call it Hollywood, and you can make all the tedious legal, moral and enterprise arguments against the DRM cult, but wouldn’t Dolly Parton make a great poster babe for the new way workarounds, the brand for microbranding.

By: sirshannon

sirshannon — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:49:17 +0000

I was a music industry student in the early 90’s and this was the way things worked even then. It was amazing, sad, and funny how much of a machine the country music business is.
Have you seen This Is Spinal Tap? One of the gags is how the guitarist has come up with a music notation system so you don’t actually need to be able to read music, just numbers. That system has actually existed for decades; it is called the Nashville Numbers System and works exactly the way he said it. That makes it easier for the handful of session musicians that play on the majority of country records. They walk in, look at the numbers, are told a key, and run through a few times. Maybe do it in another key. The leave. Once the music is finished, the singer is brought in.
We should also note that this is by no means foreign to rock/pop music. Those labels just don’t have it down to a science like Nashville does.

By: AcouSvnt

AcouSvnt — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 23:12:43 +0000

I’m not a country person, but this still resonates with me. Most of my rock heroes … hell, I doubt if even John Lennon would be touched with a ten foot pole by the industry had he been born 40 (or even 20) years later.