5.24.2011

NPR Music is full of label shills. Seriously. It surprised me too.

Jacob Ganz and Frannie Kelley of NPR music were on Friday's Planet Money podcast. They were talking about Jonathan Coulton, a geek rocker who has no label deals at all and makes several hundred K a year selling his stuff online. The question was simple: Is Coulton's success a signal that the label system is going away?

Jacob Ganz and Frannie Kelley said Coulton was lucky, but his model was not repeatable. Their argument: Labels make artists. They take over all the backend stuff - marketing, booking, advertising, getting you on the radio, and on and on. The poster-child: Biebber. Coulton, working online, can't become Biebber.

Just listen to the podcast. It's 25 minutes of hipster music lovers defending labels that churn through, eat up, and spit out the indie-esque bands that NPR loves to feature in their tiny desk concerts. (Also recommended) Seriously?!

And to make you feel better, perhaps the best kinetic typography on the internet:




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That is the coolest video I've seen in a long time.

I've been mulling over an essay about how Coulton's Shop Vac is to modern suburban ennui what the Police's Synchronicity II was to the ennui of the 80s - rather than being about the isolation of family life in an industrial setting, it's about the isolation of the individual even from family life.

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