where is boys noize and switch?
they’re running record labels and being paid thousands of pounds a night to play to thousands of people all over the world.
dolby anol not being musicians?
one of them sings and plays drums in a respected uk indie rock band and the other is a classically trained piano player. its a sad day when people like them (and soulwax or whoever else) can’t make a remix of a track to make rooms full of kids all around the world go crazy without having people like yourself moan about how it’s ‘ruining’ music. its clear its not the music you hate but the idea that they can do it.. and you can’t.

your entire post sounds like an bitter person who refuses to go with what is healthy musical expansion because he feels he can’t get involved at the level he wants to. go with the flow, you will find no one is ‘ruining’ anything, and you might start enjoying yourself if you listen to the music you love and ignore the music you don’t. more importantly you have ignore the people who who runs blogs who you think are looking for something ‘cool’, they are having fun getting caught up in the glorious expansion that is music and the internet (while reminding you that you hate yourself).

Indie as a genre, had a sorta legit beginning, back in 1999… (While artists like Limp Blink 182 were the rock stars, and pop was seeing a revival with Britney, Aguilera, Lopez, Backstreet, etc. (one with a 8 year hangover), and musicians like Sheryl Crow, Brandy, and Mariah Carey were what musicians aspired to be.) ( sidenote: Lets not overlook the Shitstorm that Outkast set upon Rap music turning ATL into the new hiphop mecca… and ruining it for …well… it’s still primarily shit. )

Musicians, who grew up listening to the Velvet Underground, the Joy Division, and The Kinks were at the bottom of the list to be signed. There was a better chance that you could get a deal being a backpacker emcee from Minnesota or Canada than make some guitar music and get play. (remember: It wasn’t until 2003 that the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s got Maps onto alt-radio (and they were on Interscope…so that hardly even counts.))

Rockers had no choice but to go DIY, or close there to.

IMO the proliferation of the music blog can be seen as one main element of this picture… Music made by me and you can get an audience, with the help of blog aggregates like Elbo.ws and Hypem (even these are fairly new). A musician (I use that term loosly) like Dolby Anol can remix Kings of Leon and have it played all over the world in a few days, and Soulwax can (almost) become a household name.

The reasons are:
1. bloggers do it for free
2. There are no gatekeepers
3. They are fair weather friends…

Bloggers will call almost anything that gets put into their in-box “the next big thing” in hopes that one of them will in fact catch on, and they can feel like the cool trend-setters that they set out to be when they were signing up for their first blogger account.

This matters because everyone can get in on popular music these days, and the underdog is the name of the game.

Being “Next” is more important than being good, and being good isn’t all that hard. There is an endless supply of “new and upcoming”… The Next Big Thing is always coming.

It seems these days, almost everyone is on this same track becasue this track is easy to run, you don’t have to have taste, you have to be first. Its easy.

The hardest part for a musician is keeping your name in sight, which either means churning out song after song, or having it remixed over and over… both water down the product overall. And worst yet, the remix may (read: most likely) become more popular than your song.

Remixers therefore become the stars of the internet, riding the success wave of someone elses music. But even they are here today, gone tomorrow… where is Switch these days? Boys Noize anyone?

So of course the new thing is the new thing, because the old thing already happened… and that is sooo totally last month.