Hipster consumerism online

Written by Tommi on 23.04.2009 21:41:25

Finding music is too easy these days. With services like Spotify, We Are Hunted, Sixty One popping up around every corner, being a hipster is easier than ever. Just let the music rain down on ya, with the sweet sense of being the first to find this and that band.

But what's the fucking point?! No, this is not (just) Tommi the greedy record dealer speaking, this is Tommi the music lover. This shit is simply off the chain. Music has been turned into a disposable commodity and not even in a literal sense as disposable in the literal sense means something you use and throw away, but you don't even have to do the latter anymore as the music never really even existed.

Sure I love Spotify and Last.fm as much as the next dude, but the culture this stuff breeds just ain't healthy. Or maybe I'm just a tired old fart complaining that "kids these days" have it all wrong.

I'm not tired. They're all wrong, I tells ya.

Whatever happened to fans? What happened to building a relationship with the music you listen to?

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24.04.2009 02:15:36 Lassi wrote

Music nowadays is krap anyway. It's disposable. Old Metallica wasn't!
You are krap.
You never had the chance!

Krap!

Edit: I'd like to add this: back in the good old days when people actually bought records, I guess people bonded with the bands because buying a record actually meant losing your hard-earned week money (what's the term in English?). The people had to stick with what they had. Nowadays you can listen to all the music ever recorder by just clicking a mouse button; really, you can consume all the music that has ever been recorded but you hardly make any connection with it because you're able to listen to everything and "just one artist" just ain't enough for your needs and your time.

You have a shitload of music out there but you never "connect" with a artist even though you like their music because there are lots of artists and you want to hear them all. You can't concentrate on what to really like.

26.04.2009 10:13:37 opinion wrote

Don't know if I represent the general crowd, but I tend to taste a little bit of everything, and when something relevant occasionally comes around, I do support the music in one way or another (attending gigs, purchasing records etc). But yeah, maybe this kinda behaviour is dying out due to the fast food ethics that apply to these specific music providers.

29.04.2009 13:02:12 rc-lungen wrote

Generally music has been treated as a disposable commodity by the general populace for ages. You don't have to have witnessed the birth of the cassette-tape to understand that the phenomenon quite probably started taking it's first steps into the current direction along with that certain format. In an 80's issue of a swedish pre-teen magazine, that focused on the contributions and interests of their target audience, one reader complained about a friend taping every album he/she bought on the open-letters page.

Having grown up with taping records from the Joensuu city library during otherwise crushingly boring and depressing summer holidays, I still feel a bit uneasy with the current technology (still listens to self-recorded mix-tapes on a cassette-walkman, instead of buying an ipod), but having used the tape-format for several years, including the majority of childhood and adolescence, I can safely say that the other formats are quite disposable as well. The CD is amazingly annoying, but tapes and vinyl will accumulate wear and tear, which makes them only more appealing to music nerds and impressionable youngsters, but not to a mainstream audience. Of course it's cool that you can press a button and play a pavement song at will on spotify, but when you're a complete music GEEK, that sort of thing is never the same as finding a battered copy of come on pilgrim or crooked rain at your local library. This was meant to focus on getting music for "free". I'm not even getting into the hopeless addiction that is pulling out that twenty or more for some vinyl, or even pulling out that ten for a used CD of something you've been wanting to hear for ages.

21.05.2009 22:54:53 Arttu wrote : "disposable, true, but then..."

... it always was. Deeper meaning in music probably always was a minority proposition, I imagine. The fact that momentary attention to certain artists was paid by a larger mass may have created an illusion of import or passion.