Friday Bears: This is good

Every Friday, Stereogum runs its week's top and lowest-rated comments in a section called "Shut Up, Dude." For the continually bored internet user looking for ways to up the ante in their commenting approach (because that's important now), this is a good measure to stand against.

Usually it's just for laughs, but posted this week may be the best synopsis by anyone that I've ever heard of the MTV VMA's. It comes from TheWastelander. Seriously, it's worth your time:

"I think it fundamentally gets down to two contradictory forces that rose in natural opposition to each other: the corporatization of entertainment and the hegemony of the internet. You have democratic forces against undemocratic ones, and that’s inevitably going to lead to conflit

When you all are talking about what you think of as a “Golden Age” of MTV somewhere in the early to mid 90s (I assume), this took place during a fundamentally different music world. The key moment that ended this was the signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Gone were the locally-curated DJ playlists and the regional media outlets in their place were a hegemonic Viacom and corporately-centered Clear Channel. The power of the non-corporate tastemaker was severely diminished, and the huge media conglomerates grew arrogant in these boom years. This ushered in an area of $18.99 CDs and indistinguishable boy bands. Complacent with the unfathomable sales of Backstreet Boys records, MTV and the like turned to reality shows convinced they no longer needed to worry about the music front since they were so dominant.

Then Napster steps in and allows people the freedom to choose what they want to listen to without going through a monopolistic middle-man first. This leads to more individualized music approaches culminating in what we have now with things like Pandora and Spotify that specifically cater to what you want to listen to. In an instant, people became listeners and not consumers.

This did not sit well with the major labels and media companies. In response to this, they scrambled to go for the lowest common denominator approach and put forth increasingly mindless trash. Labels no longer significantly invested in new artists that had potential to grow if they didn’t make a blockbuster first record. As a consequence, the indiesphere becomes more niche-oriented, and the mainstream gets dumber by always seeking to appeal to the largest possible audience in a shrinking market.

What does that all lead to? A world in which getting a Moonman doesn’t matter anymore. But that’s just me."