After the usual slow couple of months, the new releases are kicking into gear. The winter in Toronto was interminably long this year, as was the wait for the upsurge in new releases. Good weather/new music : that's a nice correlation. I've got the new Autechre at home just begging to be listened to (although the hockey playoffs may take precedent tonight), and the new Tim Hecker is obviously quite lovely. When's Fennesz's newest coming out already?

Not By Choice came up with a brilliant idea for a video: a parody of MTV's "Becoming". Guess what, bratty teens, you're going to Hollywood to Become Not By Choice! But by the end of the video, the whole concept falls apart with the Becoming Band jumping around on stage along with the Real Band. The Real Band obviously missed the whole point of doing the video -- a parody means you're supposed to make fun of an easy target and expose the silliness within. Hopping up and down like goons just makes fun of yourself, which makes the video a parody of a self parody. Better luck next time. Clearly, the way to go was to shoot the entire video using the Becoming Band and use the Real Band in bit parts such as makeup artists and limo drivers. But who cares, really. It's not like the video is a poor career move or anything since nobody will remember this band in 18 months anyhow.

Now let's fry some bigger fish. The Star published an outstanding article this past Saturday about Saving the Music Industry. Sales down, downloading up, what to do, blah blah blah. Five writers chimed in with sharp and clever suggestions, and a large dose of sharp and clever humour. Peter Howell's "Jukebox Jihad" is probably the best download deterrent I've ever heard. He suggests that the record companies collude and flood the internet with virus-laden music files. I could never support such a thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it would certainly work (until somebody came up with software to sniff out the infected files). It's convoluted, it's sick, it's maniacally diabolical. It would make for a great novel. A "1984" for the 21st century.

Radio columnist Peter Goddard made the most valuable insights of the bunch. He traced the problem way back to the early 80's, with the introduction of new formats (i.e. the dreaded CD) aimed at the pop market and the casual fan. Once the industry realized how much money could be made by convincing consumers to re-purchase their entire music collection, they alienated the classical and jazz fans, who were the most loyal and dedicated music collectors around. They focused on coaxing money from fair-weather yuppies and kids, but now it's twenty years later and nobody is loyal anymore.

And it's even simpler than that. The industry has bled a sequence of Next Big Pop Things onto the radio and has been spectacularly successful in convincing everyone of two things. Intentionally, they convinced people to buy music by a NBPT. Unintentionally (and simultaneously), they convinced people not to buy music from *this* NBPT, because in a couple of months, there's going to be an even BETTER NBPT that will be the coolest thing on two legs and you'll want to buy it even more. Hence, no loyalty. Nobody truly cares about anybody. It's simple. My friends are tired of hearing me say it.

People will buy music if they care about it. Plain and simple. The Beatles "1" and Elvis' "30 #1 Hits" both sold bucketloads, and they could have been compiled by anybody with a computer and a CD burner. Hell, they could have been compiled with just a CD burner, because all those songs were already on CD a hundred times over, often in the purchasers very own collection. It didn't matter. Beatles and Elvis fans are staunch loyalists, proselytizing everyone else with word-of-mouth and TV specials dedicated to trumpeting their greatness boosts the sales figures even more.

Kazaa is a fantastic program because it lets me preview just about any album I choose. I have no need or interest in previewing the new Autechre album because I love Autechre and I buy all their music. I only download music I'm not so sure about, or songs by individual artists whose albums I have no intention of buying. The latter will likely never make money off me, while the former are just might, because they're getting a direct route to my ears that can't happen via the radio because every station just plays 50 Cent and Avril Lavigne.

Now there's bound to be some bean counter making claims such as "we lost an estimated 10-20 % in sales of the last U2 album because of the internet". Here's a hypothetical sports analogy to demonstrate why this "statistic" is a load of garbage. Suppose there's a baseball team, call them the Titans, playing in an ordinary city near you. There's 10 000 diehard baseball fans who attend all the games religiously. They live and breathe baseball. The stadium never sells out, but those who do come are loyal and knowledgeable about the game.

One year, the Titans' play dramatically improves and they're headed for the playoffs for the first time in years. Suddenly, Titans tickets are hot items and all the games are selling out, with 50 000 people at each game. At season's end, the Titans get a big TV contract renewal for an insane amount of money. They'll now be shown in many more markets, with a potential viewership that is several times greater than what they had before.

Next season, the Titans get off to a rough start and hover around the middle of the division all year. They're not going to make the playoffs. Attendance starts dwindling. Tickets are easier to come by. Attendance is still good, 40 000 per game, but the team doesn't look to be getting any better this year so that number is expected to continue falling. Then, one day during a routine press conference, the Titans' general manager says "attendance has fallen off by 20 % because of the new TV contract. People are staying home to watch the games for free instead of coming to the ballpark".

If this situation were real, the city's fans would go sixteen different flavours of mental in their anger, all the sports call-in shows would be flooded with irate fans wanting to verbally crucify him, and there's a strong possibility that GM would be fired by the ownership. When music industry bigwigs say such things, they think they're crime fighting crusaders.

So let's look at the obvious flaws in the GM's argument. 1) Attendance is still a hell of a lot higher than it had been before. 2) The rise and fall of attendance is likely to be correlated with the quality of the team, not the TV deal. 3) The attendance increase brought a lot of casual fans to the park, i.e. general sports fans, school groups, and companies buying seasons tickets. When the team's popularity subsides, these people will find something else to with their time and money, leaving only the diehard 10 000 fans plus any new fans who fell in love with the game due to the Titans' success and can now be counted among the diehard faithful. It seems reasonable that the Titans management and ownership, in the interest of the long term health of the Titans franchise, should be more concerned with keeping the diehard faithful happy as well as courting new fans, rather than insulting their entire fan base and further alienating the casual fans who they were probably going to lose anyway once the team became mediocre again.

This is not a dig at U2. However, they have gained many a devoted fan over their 20-year career, and those fans will follow them through thick and thin. More recently, their sales have spiked due to a Live-Aid-esque 9/11 career boost, and many of those extra sales will not translate into money when they release their next album. They will not match the sales of "All That You Can't Leave Behind" just by feeding off the trickle-down popularity of their 2000-2 success. That album was a phenomenon, but it was an entirely new phenomenon, just as "The Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby" were, and just as "Pop" was not. "Pop" relied on the same tricks (forays into electronica, mega-high-tech global tour) as their other 1990's albums and they banked it's success on making people believe that U2 were the biggest band in the world -- not based on "Pop"'s merit, but on past glories.

U2 are smart enough and talented enough to reinvent themselves multiple times, but 99 % of musical artists are not. In these days of short attention spans and nonexistent loyalty, they will get shoved onto pop's back-burner again and again, and the music industry will cry poor. Don't feel too sorry for them.