Disclaimer: Before any one sues this blog for voicing a different opinion than the masses, please remember this:
"What goes up, has to come down..."
"Oh by the way, which one's Pink?" is a line from Pink Floyd's song "Have a Cigar". Already back in 1975 (and probably much earlier) artists expressed their frustration about the big record companies arrogance...
They wern't happy about the C-cassettes, and tried to protect their sales of records by launching the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign. Then they got help! Technology had managed to developed the Compact Disc and that was the start for the nastiest (and probably the cleverest) sales trick in the book - lets force all that have LP's to buy their records one more time, but now on CD's...
After a period where people had CD's in the freezer and antistatic rubber around their CD players, to try to get the same warm sound as they were used to - the LP's were gone. All music was now available only on CD's.
Ok, CD's are handier than LP's, they take less space and you could play them in a car! But they in fact opened a whole new market - compilations! This is the start of the period where the inflated sales of CD's started. And how the music industry have milked that! How easy isn't it just to buy an artists back-catlouge and then start to pump out new compilations from this? A quick search on Discogs for Elvis Presley show us that he is represented on a handsome 400 compilations!!! And that is money - simply pure gold!
Update: Started to write this blog post 2 weeks ago (yes, Im slow...), and in that time there has been released 6 new compilations of Elvis!!
Common sense tells us that this cant last, the sales of CD's has to go down after over a decade by pumping out old music to the people. Do the music industry think this way? NO, of course it's someone else fault that their cash cow is in decline. How handy wasn't it that technology once again had leapt forward so they could blame the mp3/downloading/piracy (or whatever they call it)...
But that we will look into in the next instalment!
Rounding off this post with how I started it, with a Cigar (lyrics in the end of post)...
enjoy! <3
pink floyd "have a cigar"
from the vault
"home taping is killing music" - the c-cassette...
sampling take 2 - smack my prejudice up...
pink floyd "have a cigar" lyrics
Come in here, Dear boy, have a cigar.
You're gonna go far,
You're gonna fly high,
You're never gonna die,
You're gonna make it, if you try;
They're gonna love you.
Well I've always had a deep respect,
And I mean that most tensely.
The band is just fantastic,
that is really what I think.
Oh by the way, which one's Pink?
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.
We're just knocked out.
We heard about the sell-out.
You gotta get an album out.
You owe it to the people.
We're so happy we can hardly count.
Everybody else is just green,
Have you seen the chart?
It's a hell of a start,
It could be made into a monster
If we all pull together as a team.
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.