Planet Revolution: Revolution is the “music magazine for the digital age”, and its site is a joke: not a good start. It’s not a joke because of poor design or navigability, certainly not – even on my pretty slow home machine it loads quickly, looks pretty and flows smoothly. But my dears, the content!
The bulk of what’s up there currently is a very long marketing-schmooze brochure, peppered with wannabe-punchy prose like this: “Music matters. That’s worth repeating. Even in today’s hyper-marketed, demographically-driven, deafeningly competetive world, the music still matters. It matters enough, in fact, to launch REVOLUTION”. This sort of hackneyed waffle would be pretty tedious in a first-time fanzine – from a big magazine launch it’s unforgiveably lazy. And also a bit hypocritical – click on from that a couple of times and you get to a page or two on “Revolution’s target market”, with agegroup and attitudinal segmentation details a-go-go. Cuz, you see, we’re the “Internet Generation” and apparently all look like smooth-boned Diesel models. Hyper-marketed? Demographically-driven? Yeah, baby!
This stuff pisses me off because I spend a couple of days a month writing it, but I can’t believe that any of Revolution’s ‘target market’ would sit through the 12-page shitefest and not feel somehow cheapened. Unfortunately, this kind of vapid biz-speak, where the stripped-down form of the straight-talking no-bullshit zinester disguises the bloated content of the marketing gecko, is pretty much the lingua franca of music and the internet.
Oh yeah, the quotes from the desired demographic on Revolution are also tat: “I want to know what is out and hot, from underground house to progressive.” Now, he might be talking about prog rock, but if he’s not, well, that’s not very much of a gap. Gillet, who’s actually seen a copy, reports that the music featured is as bland as you’d expect, house music for First Tuesday hangers-on. Some revolution.