Longing for the day ...

Post-Arias discussion

Well, the Aria Awards have been handed out for another year. It's good to see the majors get together and congratulate themselves as an industry. Well done to the winners - that's a reward for all the hard work you've put in over the years. Speaking of which , John Harley Weston got in the top 5 volcalists at Singer Universe.

There's an interesting discussion of the Aria Award prospects (it started before the ceremony and has continued after it) on the Sydney Morning Herald entertainment blog. It started out on the rather trite subject of "independents vs mainstream" but has ranged over some quite interesting territory. I'm not interested in discussing anything to dowith independent vs mainstream because I realised when REM started having hits that the difference was one of marketing. I find it's much more useful to think of the industry in terms of a contiuum from totally independent to totally owned by the major labels.

Some very interesting comments thrown in there (the oldest ones are, rather annoyingly, at the bottom of the thread) including ones that "Aussie music stinks". This is quite to the contrary of the views of Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby.com, who sang the praises of Aussie music in an interview on Appletalk. It's not a view I'm going to dignify with a response ...

I find it amazing that people can claim to "hate" certain artists. There are a lot of artists whose music I don't find particularly rewarding or interesting - I've already nominated Pete Murray (Baaad choice for the NRL grand final, BTW) and you can add most of Delta Goodrem's stuff - but I tend to just ignore them. They work hard at what they do and a lot of people like it, apparently, so there's no point "hating" them. What a waste of energy! Focus on what you like and ignore the rest ...

There's a good point about what might have happened had Bob Dylan or Nick Cave tried out for Idol. They would almost certainly have been ignored. Ditto plenty of other acts that have changed the industry they entered the hard way. But, then, Idol is about the dream factory for mass-appeal music. It's not about good art or even good entertainment - I've not even watched this series.

Speaking of which, I didn't watch much of the Arias - mainly because I got fascinated by switching back to the 50-year celebration of the Eurovision Song Contest, which was on SBS. What a contrast! I can't believe Sir Cliff Richard got beaten by people who didn't have a fraction of his career. So much for the views of judges.

I can't think of any hugely successful music act that won competitions to get where it got - ABBA excepted ...