The lack of any real comment beyond professional shrill Gennaro Castaldo saying the same thing over and over (we suspect lifted from but a single press release) seems to back up our initial feeling that this is kneejerk history rather than a real watershed moment.
We were delighted to discover, though, from The Sun that Gennaro is not a PR man at all. Oh, no: he's a chart boffin.
And it might be he's the only chart boffin in town. Castaldo's astonishingly empty observation that "This is an exciting development and a watershed in charts history, which show that legal downloads have truly arrived. It is HMV Digital's biggest-ever selling download and we're beginning to see this market really start to take off" appears in one form or another not just in The Sun, but also WebUser ; Chocolate Magazine (unattributed); RTE online; NetImperative; Reuters; the Manchester Evening News; Ulster Television; the Daily Mail; Channel 4 News; YahooMusic Launch Dotmusic thing; Australia's ABC; Daily Telegraph; NineMSN... oh, and you get the drift.
We suspect that even when the Pistols were on Today, there was more than one commentator who had an observation.
Whenever Gennaro Castaldo's name crops up, I always picture Armando Iannucci. And if Armando was saying the banal platitudes that Gennaro's banal-platitude-generating software spews out, they'd be very amusing.
ReplyDeleteTim (love the orang utan, by the way), I think you may have something here. Just as Pete Docherty is now rumoured to be a construct of the KLF (did that story come up on Saturday, incidentally?), I think Gennaro Castaldo is an Armando Ianucci / Chris Morris invention...
ReplyDeleteEleanor G
Either that, or Gennaro has no mates and spends his Sundays by the phone waiting for the media to ring him for a quote, anyway.
ReplyDeleteEleanor G
Or he prepares the press releases on Friday afternoon and then buggers off down the pub. That's what I would do...
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine works for HMV, maybe she'll be able to confirm if he exists.
ReplyDeleteUnless she's in on the scam as well...