Idol Worship
My kids have, for better or worse, inherited my love of music. For worse, it seems, from what they’re listening to. The other week I was on a road trip with one of my kids, who insisted on playing one of their homemade CDs in the car (made out of 99 cent downloads from the iTunes Store). Ugh! One song was worse than the next!
The songs were, in fact, the same type of crap that makes me change the station when they come on the radio. Not that these songs are necessarily scatological in nature (although there seem to be a lot of those around); they were just bad! In my opinion, record companies should be forced to get approval for every song and singer from the American Idol crew. That should put most of these clowns out of business!
American Idol, as you may know, is one of the biggest hits on TV, and purports to promote a real "people's choice" method for selecting new musical stars. The show starts off with a large group of singers who are gradually eliminated by getting voted off the show by the viewing audience in America. Eventually the list gets whittled down until the best singer, it is assumed, is the winner. And while the final winner is determined by popular vote, the show's judges wield a great deal of influence, commenting on the singer's performance, professionalism and showmanship, and directing them with constructive criticism to become the ultimate pop singer. But somehow these Idols seem unworthy of worship; they all seem to be cut from the same mold, with feet of clay. It's the same old pop style over and over, each one looking and sounding the last one and the next one. Blah!
Now if I were a judge on American Idol, believe me that the music industry would sound – and look – a lot different than it does now. Under my tutelage, music would go back to having melody, intelligible lyrics, and be something you wouldn't be embarrassed to listen to in front of your mother. Simon Cowell might seem like a tough guy, but he's nowhere tough enough. I, on the other hand, would set the record industry right. But alas, I was born a music consumer, not a tastemaker. Other than turning the station when something I don't like comes on, what leverage do I have? Who's going to listen to little ol' me when it comes to setting musical taste? Let's face it – it's the mindless teeny-boppers who the record companies listen to, and they're the ones the rest of us have to kowtow to.
Well, I for one have had enough; I want to start a movement to take the airwaves back. True, I and other lovers of quality music can listen to streaming Internet radio and hear what we want, when we want. That's an option people like us didn't have a few years ago, so we really shouldn't complain too much. Nowadays, it should be "live and let live" when it comes to musical taste. But turning on the computer it not like turning on the radio. It's a lot more work, and what am I supposed to do in the car for a computer? No, a computer is not enough; I need radio, too. But radio has gone to ruin for me and my kind. If a certain genre of music is popular, then that's what the record companies are going to produce more of, because it sells. And if the music is inherently bad, like the stuff that gets airtime today, it becomes self-perpetuating; if one song or artist is popular, then most of the new popular music that gets produced is going to sound similar. It's like a never ending treadmill of audio misery that just gets more established as time goes on. Meanwhile, the good stuff gets relegated more and more to the "oldies" bin, which means that fewer artists, all of whom are trying to make it commercially, will be willing to take a chance on a style that is not going to pay off for them.
Well, I say it's time for lovers of real music to rise up and smash the Idols! No longer shall we be forced to worship those of little talent singing songs with no taste! Finally there's a way for lovers of real music to have their say – and maybe, just maybe, stem the tide of mediocrity in the music business. The situation is enough to make lovers of real music angry - even irate. But don't get mad – get even, with iRATE, your own personal rating system that will help you promote the music you really like.
Everyone, of course, has their own taste. But lots of people can enjoy music of varying styles, from different eras – from classical through jazz and rock and beyond. If you could program your own ultimate radio station, what would it sound like? That's the challenge and opportunity iRATE presents you with; you rate the music iRATE sends over from its server, and the program "learns" what you like and sends you more music similar to what you've selected. The songs are sent to your hard drive in MP3 format when you open the program, which means you get to keep them in your collection and listen to them as often as you want.
While you're listening to your music you’re supposed to rate each song. That information is sent back to the iRATE server and logged in your account. The ratings go from "blechh" to "fantastic", and there is also a button supplied with each song that sends iRATE to find similar music, if you really liked what you heard. When the server is ready to send you another bunch of songs, it checks your preferences, and sends you the music it believes you are more likely to enjoy. The initial batch of music has a little bit of everything, so you'll initially hear songs that you can do without; but because this is not a streaming service, but a downloaded song that you are listening too, you can just move on to the next selection when you've had enough. Eventually, the idea is that you will build yourself a tailor-made "radio station" that has only "the hits" that you want to spend time listening to. So not only do you get to hear music, it's likely to be, after you've used iRATE for awhile, exactly the kind of thing you're interested in hearing – and you don't have to list a finger to go and search for your songs, because they all come to you automatically!
But, unless you frequent sites like http://www.unsigned.com/, you probably will not have heard the music iRATE sends you. All the songs iRATE downloads are free, legal MP3s put out either by the artists themselves or an independent record company. Most of us don't have the hours necessary to search for music that matches our tastes. iRATE does the hard part for you by ferreting out music according to your tastes, so you get to hear new music that is interesting – to YOU!
How does a musician or group get to become stars? Even the Beatles were unknown bar singers once upon a time – until they were "discovered" by a perceptive talent agent. merican Idol is the 21st century equivalent of a blues bar where record company producers would look for "the next big thing." But like I said, you have to be a certain "type" to make it on American Idol - and it's a type a lot of us are not enamored of. How can someone outside the pop music mainstream get the same kind of publicity? iRATE could supply an answer; if lots of people give consistently high ratings to a particular song, the iRATE server is going to notice and distribute that song to the iRATE user base, some of whom we can assume operate streaming music services on their computers (like Shoutcasts, http://yp.shoutcast.com). If they really like the song, they'll give it frequent airplay on their playlists, which means their listeners will be exposed to it, search it out and download it as well.
Meanwhile, the page hits at the artists's Web site will keep mounting up, and Google will notice and move that site further up on its page rankings. At which point the people whose job it is to translate Web hits into moneymaking projects will alert the people in the record industry, who pay them to do this, that something's going on with this artist – and the next thing you know, the guy we all liked has a new contract, a big hit song and commercial radio airplay – and the next generation of cloners try to imitate our guy's style, forcing the more offensive crap off the radio waves and thereby saving the music business for the rest of us! Enough of this Idol worship – make your musical stand and get some nifty free music with iRate!
del.icio.us
Furl
digg this!
the Newzgeek files
