The opening of a post at the Lefsetz Letter which offers a perfectly reasonable takedown of those who see Beyoncé’s record sales last week as anything but an extreme outlier, just a brief flash when an old paradigm still worked, a singular moment of calm before the sharks again turn the water red:
“It’s a stunt. No different from Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Unrepeatable by mere mortals, never mind wannabes and also-rans.
That’s how desperate Apple is. It lets Beyonce circumvent its rules and release a ‘video album,’ so the record industry can have its bundle and the Cupertino company can delude itself into believing that it’s got a solution to Spotify, when the Swedish streaming company is chasing YouTube, not iTunes.
And the media is so impressed by numbers that it trumpets the story, believing its role is to amplify rather than analyze.
Yes, it was a story. The same way a bomb or SpaceX or anything new gets people’s attention. Only in this case, there was something to buy. Whoo-hoo! We got lemmings and fans to lay down their credit cards to spend money for the work of a superstar, as if this is a new paradigm.
And we’ve got Rob Stringer and the rest of the inane music business slapping its back, declaring victory.
What a bunch of hogwash.
The story of 2013 is cacophony.”
