Seedy fiction/CD non-fiction?
(first published at Observation Post on nzmusician.co.nz)
"Say hi to Sandi Thom and Lily Allen, this week's internet superstars. Now say bye, writes Michael Dwyer, as they drown in a pop bitstream in full flood."
The Sunday Star Times carried an article on August 13 that was taken from the Melbourne Age ("One-week wonders" written by Michael Dwyer, Aug 4 - in the Age it was titled "Bit pop overload"). Some subeditor at the SST had done a sloppy job of altering the copy to fit the New Zealand market.
The original story has this snippet...
"... You can't blame the old bosses for tapping a new cash cow. The old one does appear to have strayed perilously close to the butcher's.
Last week, a digital music forum at the Victorian State Library heard that Australia's current number-one album, Black Fingernails Red Wine, by Eskimo Joe, had sold a meagre 7200 copies to pip the pack. Hardly surprising, then, that major label releases have dropped 40 per cent in Australia since 2001. Local signings have dropped 50 per cent."
The SST's version had replaced the sales figures for Eskimo Joe with the following quote
"New Zealand's current No 1 album, the Black Seed's Into The Dojo, has sold just under 10,000 copies." Now, there's a myriad of things wrong with this spurious claim...
One - claiming that selling only 10,000 copies of a CD here by a NZ band is a bad showing is incorrect. Many local indie bands manage to sell only a few thousand copies of their album, so doing sales of 10,000 is a very healthy result.
EXCEPT the Black Seeds album has only been out for three weeks and has not been certified by the official RIANZ Music Charts as having gone gold (industry-speak for achieving sales of over 7,500), in spite of having been at number one since its release. At the time of printing the article, the claim is inaccurate, and the numbers are wrong.
First week sales for the Black Seeds were less than 1,500, which suggests that the rest of the albums on the top 40 charts are selling even less - has the worldwide music industry downturn hit even harder here?
Industry pundit Simon Grigg wrote on this topic recently, quoting an industry friend who said that "... sales of NZ music are in, and I quote, “complete freefall” and unlikely to improve in the near future. That, coupled with other informed comments on National Radio recently mentioning drops of some twenty percent or so this year, raises one big question. At least from where I’m sitting, several thousand miles from the action.
Namely, what in gods name happened? Of course I’m absolutely aware of the on-going global downturn in sales of compact discs and the inevitable flattening out of digital sales. Especially from acts represented by the major industry organisations such as the RIAA, or their equivalents. But the percentage drop in sales, from labels represented by RIANZ (and that is a major qualifier) of NZ music, far exceeds the global trend and the word why flashes in neon rather brutally."
Simon's full comments are here, with a follow up post here. Well worth reading.
But back to the SST debacle, for all the excitement NZ music generates in the media these days, the quality of the reporting is consistently lame. Why?
6 comments:
Why is music reporting so lame ???
...cos reviewers who get free shit to review need to amp it like it's the dogs bollocks or they won't get any more
I reckon many are too scared to say anything for fear of offending "the powers that be" or their mates in the band...
...no one wants to come of as a playahater or the wielder of the scyth chopping down the tall poppies
maybe it's a case of if you got nothing nice to say, say nothing...
...or maybe cos they don't know what or where to say it and if it is of any relevence anyway
Since the digital revolution of free access to music outside the mainstream avenues of distribution and with the rise of blogging and genre specific forums it might be that many have lost the tenuous foothold they had in the established press...
It's change the guard time but more than that it's tear down the walls, drag the boorjwah out to the wall and metaphorically pop some caps in they asses then scream from the battlements the catchcry of...
ummm...let me think about that one and I'll get back to ya cos I'm fast running out of things to rebel against...heh
A year or two ago i was asked by NZ Musician mag to review electronic CDs & after being sent the first three I decided not to do it simply because I didnt like any of those first three & it takes a LOT more effort to say why you dont like something in a constructive way... and in the end I suspected it may just come down to personal taste but the gravity of writing a bad review weighed on my conscience - a bad review can kill some of the chances of it being considered with an open mind - I have seen nz films killed by a bad review that they really didnt deserve & it often had more to do with personal agendas... So i think dubmugga you are on to something with:
"if you got nothing nice to say, say nothing..."
but who knows maybe there just isnt very much really great nz music being released at the moment? its been a while since i bought a local artists work & its not through a lack of wanting to....
i also have to say i rarely support local record stores now... i just got so fcked off with reading about an album that i would happily buy immediately, go down to Real Groovy or wherever to be told some lame reason why it would 4-6 weeks before i would be able to buy it.... sod that, I want it now & I simply now buy/locate most music online that i want & dont bother waiting.... sorry record shops but if u go out of business it really wont have much impact on me.... secondhand records, yes but 95% of new music, nope, sorry
Frank Zappa nicely summed up music journalism being people who can't write, interviewing people who can't speak for people who can't read.
But I daresay it's not restricted to music journalism. You'll find a good proportion of cut-and-paste from the press release across all topics of journalism these days.
But having dabbled in the craft, I can confirm that the free stuff is something of an incentive, and its steady influx is a management process.
Simply write faint praise about the merely mediocre and disappointing until something truly damn-worthy comes along, and then unleash hell. It's tremendous fun.
That said, I have a real issue with reviews that criticise a work for failing to do something it wasn't even attempting. My approach was always 'what was it trying? how close did it get?'...
Problem has always been Andrew, that the deadline usually prevents any real understanding of a record. I need to live with a record for weeks or months to truly get it. God knows how many times John Russell or Murray Cammick said to me, can you review this...I need it tomorrow.
Good Simon Reynold piece on the death of the music critic here..go to columns.
cheers for the comments, Dubmugga, anon, Andrew, Simon. I spent about 5 years as local music reviewer for Pavement magazine, and had to review things that I wasn't partiicularly fond of, but were none the less, good for their genre.
It seems too often that I read reviews of local product, then go into real groovy and have a listen, and am unable to find any connection between what I read and what i'm hearing. Gary Steel had a go at Flying Nun a few years back in the Listener, which caused all sorts of folk to get their noses outta joint, cause you can't criticise the holy canon of The Nun. He is probably one of the few music writers who is'nt afraid to slag local product if it isn't up to scratch
Yeah, I quite like Gary's fresh ability to tell unpleasant truths. Lets face it, there was a lot of stuff on the FN catalogue that perhaps would've been better left in the can...
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