Online marketing allows everyone to spend more (seemingly less) money, talk to less people in their local community and embrace the same unique identity alone in their room like everyone else. Retailers, unrestricted by the traditional boundaries of supply and demand are selling unique identities to the mass public, one song at a time.
Sitting at home on my computer I can find long lost obscure LP’s and movies that only I liked and that everyone else took off their shelves years ago; live Blue Oyster Cult albums, forgotten films from the eighties such as ‘The Adventures of Barron Munchausen’, the list goes on. The problem is- for reasons of time and money that the list goes on and on and on. Once satisfied with my purchase I will glance to the side or scroll down the screen to be told by savvy marketing retailers that if I liked Blue Oyster Cult than maybe I will also like the Traveling Wilburys, also out of stock at mainstream music stores. The problem is that I love the Traveling Wilburys.
The dilemma that I face, as I sit hunched over my Apple laptop (the latest one) till the wee hours of the morning, is that even though I am not being forced to drive to the store and wander the aisles until I locate an album by the band ‘In a Big Country’, a band once only familiar to those who had drivers licenses in the 80’s, and even though I will not have to lie in bed and get up to skip every song until the song I bought the album for comes on, I am still going to purchase that song online, only to spend another hour going through the 80’s ‘basic hits’ until I get to the complete collection followed by the ‘deep cuts’ that have not been on the radio in 20 years.
If you equate the time that I would have spent driving to and wandering the store versus the time I would have to spend and will spend holing up in my apartment with my I-Tunes, the equation may initially seem the same. But in the long run, my I-Tunes will be my only companion and the people that I had once exchanged the “ Hey, do you know where I can find the Electric Light Orchestra’s Time album – oh you love them too” type conversations, have now been reduced to power searches and sifting through a faceless strangers favorite songs from their Saturday night spent on My Space compilation.
Now lets talk finances. So I didn’t buy a few mistaken bad Tom Petty albums until I found the Traveling Wilburys, I still spent 30 bucks on other people’s collections of obscure, once marginalized hits.
Online mass marketing allows people, many of them, to feel unique and composed of their own special needs separate from television and radio. I-Tunes and Amazon love their bohemian hopefuls and embrace every single person’s unique identity by aiding them in their search for once obscure products which will lead them to newfound perspectives. Companies indulge consumer’s fresh identities by telling everyone who liked Peter Reich’s novel ‘Book of Dreams’, that they may also like Michael Creighton’s latest ‘unheard of’ bestseller. The consumer may then end up being led to purchase ‘Cloud busting’ a song by Kate Bush based on Reich’s novel. These links have no end.
In the end I am faced with the question of whether or not to drown in my capitalist woes, or indulge in my (expensive) bohemian outlets?
( For the record I would like to note that when running spell check through my Microsoft Word, amazon was changed to Amazon and my misspelling of Michael Creighton’s last name was also corrected for.)
