Being a money-making business does not have to ruin or corrupt
art.
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “The Muppet
Babies” have all helped to prove great works of art can be
commercially mainstream. And despite big business having a virtual
stranglehold on advertising money and putting the word out on their
mostly worthless artistic ventures, it’s not difficult for
intelligent and wily kids to go out and find meaningful music to
listen to. But subject any art, good or bad, to bad consumption
conditions, and the potential audience is either wrongfully
abused or shrinks.
And the saddest part is those alternate routes of music
consumption is often like lawn gnomes in the greater Los Angeles
area: They don’t exist.
Take, for instance, two entities from which I have had to do a
significant amount of consuming: Best Buy and Ticketmaster.
Granted, these are two of the worst perpetrators of soullessness in
any business, let alone music consumption. Even minor evil-doers
like Tower Records or Wherehouse Music aren’t quite as
bad.Â
My most recent (and final) interaction with Best Buy took place
when my best friend got me “Emergency and I” by the
Dismemberment Plan for my birthday. It’s great that he was
able to buy an album put out by DeSoto at a major chain like Best
Buy, right? Wrong. Despite the fact that the CD was in an
“Emergency and I” case and had the right liner notes
and art, the music on the CD was, strangely, The Dismemberment
Plan’s latest album, “Change.” I already have
“Change.” Naturally, I get my friend and we attempt to
go back to Best Buy and exchange the album.
We work our way through the customer service line and begin our
talk with the friendly Best Buy employee. We explain the situation.
It isn’t the right CD. She goes and talks to her manager,
blah blah blah. She comes back and tells us we have no options.
They have no more copies of the CD at their store, so we
can’t exchange it. It’s been opened so they can’t
give us store credit. Apparently, it was my fault upon opening the
CD they put on their shelves that it contained the wrong
product.
On the bright side, I have a strange collector’s item, and
I have decided never to shop at Best Buy again. Unfortunately, I
still don’t have “Emergency and I.”
We shop at Best Buy in the first place, not because of the
quality of the store, but because it is a dollar or two cheaper
than anywhere else, and we’re poor college students. The
truth is, though, that the minuses far outweigh the extra 10 packs
of ramen you can buy. Music is supposed to be a bastion of beauty,
escapism, intellectual thought and, yes, soulfulness. To get your
music at a place that is the antithesis of all this can sully the
experience, and taking that chance is idiotic.
Ticketmaster is even worse.
For nearly every concert you go to, the tickets must be bought
or are most feasibly purchased through Ticketmaster. It has a
virtual monopoly on ticket distribution. This may even have made
sense in the pre-Internet saturation days, but now tickets could
easily be doled out to concerts in any number of ways. But
there’s some bad voodoo going on in the concert business, and
Ticketmaster is at the heart of it.
I am going to at least five concerts in the next couple of
months, and I’ve given Ticketmaster at least $50. You may say
this doesn’t have any direct effect on my experience of the
music, but think about it. For the $50, $60 or $70 I’ve spent
on those special service charges I could easily have gotten tickets
to at least a couple more actual concerts. How do we avoid
Ticketmaster? I don’t know, but let’s raise a little
hell about it anyway.
Step back and think about your music consumption experience
sometime and make it as pure as you can, or the gnomes will begin
their invasion and it’s all over.
Bromberg’s column runs Thursdays.