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Northerns do it faster
The good people at Uncut have commissioned a spot of research into the musical tastes of the nation, which has produced a diverting - if somewhat dubious - finding that suggests Scottish music fans prefer tracks 110 beats per minute faster than Southern English music fans. As you head north, they claim, the favoured type of music gets faster.
That's another reason for the flopping of Atomic Kitten, then - they should have done something a bit more upbeat. Now it makes sense.
John Lewis, who's done the research, does offer a surprising statistic:
"Half the classical music in the country is sold from two HMV branches in the capital. It's a staggering figure."
We presume he means half of HMV's classical music sales, rather than 50% of all classical music sold in the UK; that really would be an extraordinary claim.
But music slowing down as you head south? Hmm. That sounds even less likely.
[A larger version of the map is available on the BBC News website]
3 comments:
"We presume he means half of HMV's classical music sales, rather than 50% of all classical music sold in the UK; that really would be an extraordinary claim."
That would probably be why he says it's a "staggering claim". it wouldn't be "staggering" were the statistic to fit your view, would it?
I've worked in CD shops (and record shops in older times!) up and down the country, and in my experience Classical music is (on a shop-by-shop basis) a consistantly low seller, a true niche, so really it's not that hard to believe a couple of London megastores could provide half the national sales.
But its staggeringness depends on what he means - if it's half all classical sales, then, yes, it is staggering; if it's only half HMV's sales then it's not staggering, given that most HMV stores stock such a weak collection of classical music you'd expect their flagship stores to represent a large chunk of its total.
HMV's "specialist" collection (meaning classical, folk, world, blues etc. Basically all the stuff that the popular music has ripped off, but it's not "cool" to like) tends to be either one rack hidden by the porn vids, or in a separate room with glass walls. Almost as if they were deliberately creating a "them and us" section. Showing people in there off as if it were some kind of freak show.
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