The Internet: Doom for the Music MSM?

Guardian music hack Alexis Petridis looks at the world of Internet promotion. As expected, he can’t help but fall into hipper-than-thou elitism and lazy clichés.

The Internet has been touted as the future of the music business ever since file-sharing became big news: bands, it was mooted, would cut record companies out of the equation by posting their music on their websites and building up a virtual fanbase. But nothing of the sort happened. Selling music via a website became the province not of hip new bands, but old stagers considered defunct by their labels: Simply Red, Level 42, legions of wizened prog rockers. They were making a living, but the whole business still carried a slight taint, the modern equivalent of flogging your records from a car boot.

Of course, as The Ministry of Information reminds us, he makes no mention of Marillion, who started the whole the whole Internet self-promotion thing off. Except, of course, to sneer at ‘wizened prog rockers’. I would hardly call Mostly Autumn wizened old-stagers. Even if they play a style of music a cloth-eared idiot like Alexis Petridis considered deeply unfashionable.

The real danger to the likes of Alexis Petridis is that Internet promotion bypasses people like himself. It gives the opportunity for genres of music not endorsed by the cynical London-based clique of music journalists to find an audience and thrive. Thanks to the power of the Internet, there will be room for music genres other than the currently fashionable four chord poseurs whose simplistic and banal music is touted as “deeply symbolic of mans struggle against his socio-political environment”. Everything will no longer sound like Coldplay now.

As “wizened prog rocker” Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree said in the song “Four Chords That Made a Million”

You belong there on the cover
You are the Emperor in new clothes
A man who thinks he owns the future
Will sell your vacuum with his prose

Alexis Petridis makes a living selling vacuum with his prose. Anything which reduces the malign influence of the likes of him will be a good thing.