Image by Man Alive!
The Grammy Awards recognizes indie music in a big way
On February 12, indie music got a big boost when Montreal band Arcade Fire won the Grammy award for Album of the Year. The win was for their their third record, called Suburbs. More than 26 million people tuned into the broadcast, the largest audience in just over a decade.
The other upset of the night was jazz singer Esperanza Spalding’s win for Best New Artist.
Was it an aberration, or a very public sign of the lasting results of the massive change in the recording industry?
I’m hoping it’s the latter.
Image by marcianneliese
Editor’s note: I hadn’t intended to do a two-art post on the Myth of Everybody, but casting your customer net too wide is a common problem and worth discussing.
Once upon a time there was a restaurant that offered a huge menu consisting of three types of ethnic food. The menu was so big you could tie a string to it and fly it in a stiff breeze.
The food was, in my humble opinion, a celebration of staggering culinary mediocrity. It was entirely without character—everything tasted like it either came out of a can or was from the “just add water” supply store.
That may sound harsh, but I take my food very seriously.
You run into trouble when you try to sell to everybody. You are forced to dumb down what you have to offer, even if your fascinating combination of goodies gives you lots to talk about.
Ironically, having lots to talk about doesn’t necessarily make for a compelling story.
This just in—the economy is a construct.
I know. That’s not news. We usually think of the economy in terms of paycheques and employment rates and the price of electricity and groceries. But the “economy” is like a strange fantasy world where we exchange pieces of paper for the work we do. Somebody somewhere put a value on that work, and we more or less agree with that value. The things we buy are also assigned a value. Sometimes that value changes.
It’s pretty weird when you think about it that way.
