Microsoft Songsmith

Sunday afternoon (or evening, depending on your time zone), America will experience its one remaining tribal rite, the Super Bowl.

The Oscars are toast, the Grammys a laugh, and "American Idol" so 2007.  Used to be you went to the movies so you’d have something to talk about at parties.  Then, collectively, everybody agreed the movies sucked and stopped going.  Leaving people to discuss their kids, or school, or just hook up without saying anything at all.  We did have the benefit of the two year Presidential race.  They said it was too long?  At least it gave everybody something to talk about.  With the last hurrah of the inauguration.  Soon, Obama will make a mistake and we’ll all start squabbling again, retreating to our own respective corners, whether they be MSNBC, Fox or  Still, it is humorous that politics have trumped music.  We’ve come a long way when our President is a bigger rock star, with tons more cred, than anyone on the hit parade.

Is a Tower Of Babel society inevitable?  Are we destined to speak a thousand languages, be into our own bands and hobbies, unable to relate to our brethren?  Mmm…  Interesting question.  I think people want to feel they belong, that they’re part of society.  And this has been demonstrated to me by two recent Web phenomena.

First we had the Vail skier.  I was actually at that lift an hour later, but didn’t know about the dude hanging upside down until the next day, when there was a small black and white photo that failed to highlight the slider’s nudity in the "Vail Daily".  What I found most interesting about the story wasn’t him hanging upside down, but that they could run the lift in reverse.  I’d never seen that!

Fully five days later, my inbox started filling up with links.  From both skiers and non-skiers alike.  The story made the Huffington Post, never mind PerezHilton and Drudge.  And eventually the "Today Show". In other words, this hapless dude got more exposure than U2, whose single is fading down the chart as I write this.  Even more than the performers exercising their pipes on the Lincoln Memorial’s steps.  That was a cable production.  The naked skier was mainstream.

Now comes Microsoft Songsmith.

The word always starts slowly, it’s never an instant supernova.  Some early adopter, someone tuned in, e-mails me the day of, before I’ve even heard of it.  In this case, I viewed the video and laughed. Irrelevant.

But then my inbox starts filling up, and the "New York Times" picks up on it and the denizens who don’t need to be first, who don’t need to be hip, start e-mailing me in droves.

This is a gargantuan story.  It proves that missteps will live on in infamy.  The fact that no one at Microsoft could see the downside of this video illustrates the employees there are just as stupid as those at the record labels who couldn’t fathom that Napster was the future and needed to be embraced, not eradicated.  How do you make a video of a Windows product on a Mac (that’s delineated in every story)?  Where do you find these zombies, straight out of fifties TV?

Then there are the parody videos.  Because the software doesn’t truly work.  It delivers generic music to all lyrics and singing.  YouTube is filling up with laughable clips.  This is the biggest phenomenon online today.  We’re all insiders, laughing at the corporate behemoth.  Wondering how anybody can be that out of it, that stupid.

Utilizing the record industry’s wares to illustrate the point, of course.  Like somehow Doug Morris can truly stop every freaking individual with a computer from synching Universal Music to the images of their choice.

So, think twice, everybody’s watching.  Well, very little.  They’re drawn to the train-wrecks, they illustrate the human condition.  But this wildfire word of mouth demonstrates the power of the Web.  If only you can make something that everybody wants to spread because it’s so damn cool.  That’s how Peter Gabriel broke, via the "Sledgehammer" video.  Marry images with music and you’ve got a phenomenon. If both are beyond good, if both are crazy good.  The public wants to rally around, and experience things together.  The fact that the music industry titans haven’t figured this out, haven’t exploited this, shows that not only are they dumb, they’ve failed to come up with music that can reach the masses. Jonas Brothers?  For kids.  Rihanna?  For mindless twits who want to dance.  The next Beatles? Nowhere on the horizon.

Throw out the beatboxes.  Find people who can sing.  And write good melodies.  How come Lou Pearlman could figure this out, but all the baby boomer honchos in power at the labels cannot (and the indies are no better, they want us all to pay attention to a clothed skier riding the lift wearing a beanie with an indecipherable logo).  Mainstream doesn’t always mean compromised.  Everyone respects limit-testing creativity, if they believe it’s real, that it’s not just a stunt.

Microsoft Songsmith Commercial

Parody videos: just go to YouTube and search on: "Microsoft Songsmith"

Vail skier

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