Needles and plastic
COVER STORY
From E17 announcing a further $1.6 million for an upcoming X Factor NZ series, all in the same year public service channel TVNZ 7 was canned for lack of cash.
They may revolve around overwrought regurgitations of tired old pop songs, but really, these foreign franchise ‘‘light ent’’ shows have very little to do with music. It’s the combination of celebrity judges, manufactured tension and saturation bombing multi-media promotional campaigns that turns such shows into ratings juggernauts. Who cares about the songs? These shows are about the power of television to facilitate that magical transformation from small-town nobody to short-term star.
But the real pop star TV transformation this year didn’t take place on the stage. Home viewers were offered a ringside seat as new X Factor USA judge Britney Spears fought her way back into the public’s good books after the wilderness years spent shaving her head, forgetting her knickers, driving drunk and engaging in a string of very public meltdowns.
Tabloid tales of mental illness, addiction and poor parenting had turned Spears into a pop pariah, but here she was, post-rehab: clear-eyed and relatively coherent. A star was reborn.
In the meantime, Spears provided a robust metaphor for music reality shows in general, in that her career is a triumph of marketing over music. Like her musical idol Madonna, Spears’ vocals are mediocre at best, often little more than ‘‘overprocessed babytalk and coital panting’’, as one critic put it, but by choosing the right producers and working the media like a pro, she has become a significant cultural force. And why not? Pop music has always been about image, artifice and drama. Real talent, sometimes, is incidental.
2012 was also the year that many people decided that actually owning music was incidental. Global music streaming service Spotify launched in New Zealand in May, allowing free, legal access to more than 20 million songs to subscribers prepared to stream these songs on demand rather than buying and storing copies of them.
Many rejoiced that they could finally just get on with listening to
Spears provided a robust metaphor for music reality shows in general, in that her career is a triumph of marketing over music.
free music without being encumbered by the complex political, moral and legal issues surrounding music piracy. Musicians, however, were less enthusiastic, as Spotify’s ‘‘per play’’ rebates were laughably small for any but the most highprofile artists. To earn decent cash, many musicians were forced to relentlessly tour the globe. The last few years have seen tours by everyone from underground darlings Radiohead, The Fall, Morrissey and The Pretty Things to cuddly mainstream moneyspinners Coldplay and their colourful young proteges, The Wiggles.
The axing of Auckland’s Big Day Out in January after 18 years in operation signalled the end of huge ‘‘one size fits all’’ festival events in favour of an increased number of individual artist tours and boutique ‘‘subculture specific’’ musical offerings such as Laneways, Splore-City and Womad.
Gig-goers were spoilt for choice and almost sent to the poorhouse by ticket prices, and this is set to continue for the foreseeable future, with The Stone Roses, Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Wilco, Robert Plant, Santana, Black Sabbath, and the Michael-free Jacksons playing early in the New Year. Oh, and Gerry and The Pacemakers, which may by now be more a statement of fact than a snappy 60’s band name.
The band reunion trend also continued apace, with a succession of long-defunct bands burying multiple hatchets and getting back together to turn nostalgia into cash. Alongside lucrative reunions by Blur, the Beach Boys, Black Sabbath, Fleetwood Mac and The Stone Roses, the cobwebs were also blown off a host of tragic bands we’d have quite happily never seen again, among them Bow Wow Wow, Blue, Take That, The Darkness, Steps, and Blink 182.
Most alarming of all this year was the NKOTBSB reunion tour by surviving members of two ageing man-bands, a gruesome phenomenon one reviewer called ‘‘a horrifying boyband conglomerate; a kind of Alien Vs
version of New Kids on the Block and Back Street Boys, whose acronym presumably means New Kids on the Back Street Boys, which sounds highly illegal’’.
In order to avoid great hairy throngs of touring musicians clogging our streets, many of us chose to stay home listening to music instead. Combining digital and traditional revenue, record sales actually increased this year, although the lion’s share of that money went to a teensy pool of major artists.
A whopping 95 per cent of all new album releases last year sold fewer than 1000 copies, and 80 per cent sold fewer than 100 copies. As for singles, the year’s