Ban all music!

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011414.html

[Essentially this idea is explored as alternative to democracy in PK Dick's first novel A World of Chance a.k.a. The Solar Lottery.]

* and a fine album it is too

It seems like an open goal for the BBC to me. also more people spending more money on music seems like an industry winner. Isn’t it only a matter of time before they decide to bring it back? Frank and Tom should be hired to sort out the logistics. Everybody wins!

British singles charts have always had a different meaning from the American, since a small number of purchasers can make a difference in Britain, hence can affect the outcome, hence purchasers will care more about a purchase’s effect on the charts – paradoxically making a song’s chart rank not all that representative of a song’s actual popularity or ability to move albums, which was what the biz’s financial game was about from 1968 until the crazy last few years; now, no one’s sure what the game is. The U.S. singles charts have never been limited to counting sales, but rather have always made radio play (and now video plays and whatnot) a main factor in the formula – though the mp3 has recently made sales larger and more significant than they’ve been in a while. Billboard has long assumed that singles sales don’t indicate a song’s popularity, given that most people’s singles-driven purchases aren’t for singles and that relying on sales would give one set of consumers (singles buyers) a disproportionate impact on the rankings – again, the next few years could be another shift, but it’s not yet clear to what.

Where the issue is buying versus stealing, I’d think that for most purchasers the psychosocial-economic behavioral motive isn’t what sort of blip heavy sales will make on the national singles charts (only a tiny percentage of records or mp3s have a chance to do this), but more what sort of effect a purchase will have on the artist’s ability to create and market more music. This is the Radiohead model more than the Reality TV model, and I’ve read that indie labels are doing a better job than the majors of getting fans to commit money to the artist, though I don’t know if that’s true. My guess is that mainstream biz efforts will be to try to figure out how to generate money through streams – either through ads connected to the streams or through subscription to a service that then awards royalties to producers and artists, though neither model has worked yet, as far as I know.

A poptimists polls-type format might be a way of generating streams!