I watched the Channel 4 music news/chat show, Popworld, this morning. I really like the show (it is possibly the one stand-out music show on UK television) but I haven't seen it much since it was switched to Saturday mornings.
Anyway, it was announced a few months back that the show was going to come to an end as the presenters wanted to move on - which is fair enough.
Today's show was the penultimate one and it began with Simon Amstell lambasting Dangermouse/Cee-lo's outfit Gnarls Barkley for getting to number one in the charts a) by mp3 downloads alone and b) not coming on their show! (see Antony Mayfield's Open post about the whole GB affair)
In the sardonic way only Amstell can address viewers/guests, he criticised Barkley for abandoning the "centuries old" tradition of coming on their show to plug their new records to the listeners.... to paraphrase: "Barls Gnarkley [sic] thinks he's so smart using the internet/bluetooth/ipod to sell records. Well he won't be so smart when he has a follow-up to sell!"
I am fairly certain Amstell was well aware of the major changes taking place in the way (young) people buy records and was quite probably mocking the record labels for only just cottoning on to effective marketing to youth markets.
In fact, later on they played the new video for the Arctic Monkeys who, as any fule kno', shot to stardom via MySpace. Cue more "internet... it'll never work" comments from Amstell.
It is really exciting that not only young (and older) people are buying and sharing music via the internet, and that businesses are now successfully marketing and selling products through the internet; we could now even argue that this is having an impact on television programming as why go through the trouble of appearing on Popworld when you can reach your target audience directly via the web?
Recent Comments