(He doesn’t, at least in this quote, make much analysis as to whether it’s a bad thing or not.)

what a nob

“Sentimentalism is the working-off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got. We all want to have certain feelings: feelings of love, of passionate sex, of kindliness, and so forth. Very few people really feel love, or sex passion, or kindliness, or anything that goes at all deep. So the mass just fake these feelings inside themselves. Faked feelings! The world is all gummy with them. They are better than real feelings, because you can spit them out when you brush your teeth; and them tomorrow you can fake them afresh.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLsP5SUvd54

I still like to think the Tyne mollocks.

Possibly.

Why the TV execs choose it, well, it snowballs, I guess.

(Whereas long eighties singles chart runs like “Blue Monday” and “Don’t You Forget About Me” lasted so long mainly because the artists never included them on any of their albums apart from later compilations)

What are SP’s album sales like? My hunch is a lot of people are buying this and nothing else by them, so as I said upthread the sales curve for the single turns out album-shaped.

What I’m concerned about is why this song? Why this, of all songs? Especially when it seems to me an utterly standard AoR drone bereft of any discernible melodic top line. What am I missing here? What’s the appeal? “Umbrella,” even “Rockstar” and “Valerie” - these are all understandable. But this colourless, characterless dirge?

(definition of a “song” in my world = I can remember how the tune goes, including while the record is still playing)

Music also moves from media to media and that take time to drift across. My daughter and I saw Snow Patrol ” on TV on ” Live from Abbey Road ” and bought the CD.

Also the number of songs that pop into films these days will sustain a top ten run. I don’t know of aexample, but it’s got happen.

And also ad’s. 1234 by Fiest.

a. be less aware of release dates
b. make record buying less of priority
c. be less likely to listen to chart radio

…than people in their teens and twenties.

Which suggests that there are long slow chains of record purchases: someone hears a track a year later on Radio 2, spots it three months later in Zavvi; plays it to friends at a dinner party six months later; those friends then buy it another couple of months later.

Whereas, a teen listener will often buy a single or album on first day of release; will download a song immediately after hearing it on a chart radio show; hear about a song from schoolfriends; check regularly on band websites; etc etc. All of which compresses the time greatly.

So I’d imagine the long tail of a record’s purchasing pattern to also be an ageing demographic. I wonder if there’s any way of proving or disproving this?

My guess is that the removal of physical stocking limits represented by the singles chart going download means that the diffusion curve of a hit single is now much more like that of a big hit album, i.e. a very very long ‘afterlife’ as the late majority and laggards buy it: previously these people simply wouldn’t have registered in singles sales, or would have gone and bought the album instead eventually.