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WOMEN - THE SAVIOURS OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
Part of the reason why the mainstream music industry is in such confusion is the continuing reliance on marketing people, and the identification every few months of a "segment" which sees the big labels and the commercial music media suddenly scrap their original plans and head off in a whole new direction.
So it is that now fifty-quid bloke is over, and now it's MP-she who will drive music-by-flipchart for the next year or so. [MediaGuardian, requires free registration]
"The freedom afforded by new technology means that women are now confidently downloading music at home and broadening their musical horizons in private," said Sophie Watson Smyth, marketing manager of Q and the music magazine Mojo.
She dubbed the new breed of technology-savvy female music fans the "MP-she generation" and said recent sales increases for the magazines had been driven by more women turning to them for guidance on what to buy.
The idea is, you see, that women are too intimidated to go into record shops and ask about music but are able to confidently download music online - which would almost make sense if, firstly, that was in any way true of any of the women we know and, secondly, if modern "record shops" were really the High Fidelty-style geeky-testosterone pits the report suggests and not, rather, a few rows of CDs in Tesco.
If EMAP is serious about taking female music fans seriously, they might want to think how it helps to depict them as nervous mice unable to ask a man in an overall if this Mariah Carey album is a new one.
4 comments:
thank you for bringing this patronising bollocks to our attention! that phrase 'broadening their musical horizons in private' suggests an image of mp-she, secretly listening to reggaeton and post-rock through her headphones, while flashing up a dido screensaver whenever the boyf walks past.
I was in HMV recently with sprogs. I asked the stoner behind the counter when the Streets new one was out. He had a bit of a think and then said 'Sesame Street?'.
No, dummy. Just because I've got drool on my shoulder doesn't mean I don't want to listen to songs about taking drugs and copping off. In fact more so.
Well, asking about music in a shop has always been difficult. For start, it requires all of those "communications skills" and that "talking" lark, which blokes have always been so much better at while we women just have to rely on our physical strength and spatial relations skills to get by in life. And our feminine pride would be forever dented if people found out that we were out SHOPPING! I mean, a woman shopping, whoever heard of such a thing. God bless the internet for taking away the social bits of buying music, the bits we stereotypically found difficult.
Sorry about the sarkyness, I bet it's my hormones.
You know it's nice to know that it only takes three posts for the response to reductive sexist bullshit to be more reductive sexist bullshit. Huzzah!
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