Charles on… anything that comes along

Popjustice rather neatly puts its finger on the problem with Zavvi going bust (as a result of Woolworth’s EUK, its distribution arm, demanding money sooner in order to cover its own problems):

You can complain about Zavvi as much as you like - and we have done - but its disappearance from high streets is terrible for music. With Woolworths also going, it means that supermarkets will overnight become even more powerful not just at dictating what music people buy but also - this is the important bit - which artists record labels sign and what music they produce.

Supermarkets running the British music industry is good news if you’re in Il Divo, or if you’re Duffy, or if it’s your job to keep repackaging the same 400 songs in an endless cycle of Valentine’s Day / Mothering Sunday / Love At The Movies compilations, or if your idea of alternative music is the new Razorlight album. But if you like anything else, or if you’re a current or future popstar making anything else, you are in for a difficult few years as major label A&R departments aim for the lowest, blandest, risk-freeiest common denominator options, and a generation of future music fans grows up listening to the results.

Tower, Fopp, Our Price, Woolworths, all the other independent places you used to buy music in a few years ago, now Zavvi: gone. What a load of old shit.

Which means we’re going to get more things like the dire version of Hallelujah that was our Xmas X-Factor No.1 - which, as Chris Edwards points out, indicates how folks like Simon C don’t really care for music, do ya?:

the X-Factor has not let us down by spraying both cheese and saccharine over a song that does a whole lot better with just a slice of lemon.

…

At first, Burke’s version seemed OK. Strip it of the baggage that goes with the X-Factor and you have a cover that isn’t all bad. Whoops, thought that thought too soon. Suddenly, the producer found the Dion-a-Tron and cranked it up to 11.

It’s crap. Utter Simon-inspired crap. Thinks that the title means it’s a song of celebration. Tell me, please, any music-biz readers of this blog, what edgy, inspired, unusual music has Simon Cowell ever nurtured into being?

Update: ah, here’s Simon Cowell’s Desert Island Discs. Well, that doesn’t tell you a lot; after all, a person’s DIDs are more about the things that they grew up with than the things they create (or nurture) now. Although I have to say that when I get invited on (you can laugh now) there’ll be some King Crimson, Queens of the Stone Age and Alanis Morrisette in there, as well as T.Rex and Slade. (Wow, that’s five already out of the permitted eight.) So yeah, perhaps it does tell you something.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The X-Factor: the new frontier in misleading reality TV (12 September 2007; score: 52.2%)
• Ooh yeah, feel that X-Factor magic at work (15 October 2006; score: 42.91%)
• It's amazing they managed to produce a magazine each week (19 December 2004; score: 40.73%)