What's wrong with silly love songs?

I like Paul McCartney. I once listed my favorite Beatles songs, and they were more likely Paul's songs than John Lennon's.

I also like his attitude (or philosophy) towards music. In the 1970's, John Lennon and other music experts criticized Paul's songs. They said Paul make light and silly love songs.

Paul seems to have considered changing his style. "I listened to him for a few years," said Paul, "and used to think, 'I can't write another of those soppy love songs. We've got to get hard and rocky now.'"

But then he said, "In the end, though, I realized that I just had to be myself. It's bolder, you know, to say, 'What's the difference? I like it.'" (source: http://www.superseventies.com/1976_6singles.html)

His ultimate answer was his song in 1976, 'Silly love songs.' See the lyric below.


[Paul McCartney & Wings - Silly Love Songs - Del album de 1976; Wings at the Speed of Sound.]

You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.

But I look around me and I see it isn't so.

Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs.

And what's wrong with that?

I'd like to know, 'cause here I go again

I love you, I love you,

I love you, I love you,

I can't explain the feeling's plain to me, say can't you see?

Ah, she gave me more, she gave it all to me

Now can't you see,

What's wrong with that

I need to know, 'cause here I go again

I love you, I love you

Love doesn't come in a minute,

sometimes it doesn't come at all

I only know that when I'm in it

It isn't silly, no, it isn't silly, 

love isn't silly at all.

How can I tell you about my loved one?

How can I tell you about my loved one?

How can I tell you about my loved one?

(I love you)

How can I tell you about my loved one?

(I love you)

Yes, Paul! I agree with you. The same can be told about the visual art. If I like a piece of art, I don't need a deep meaning. I may like one because of the meaning or the historical importance, but not always. If I don't like a work of Andy Warhol, I don't like it however high the work is viewed by experts. It is not that someone has better eyes for appreciation and others don't. We just have different eyes.

What's wrong with silly love songs?

Music labels and division of labor

(This is another comment on Techcrunch post about labels' trying to charge a flat fee for accessing music. I wonder if it is my mistake or Cocomment's problem...
I may write about Soribada, Korean P2P file sharing company, which could be a helpful benchmark for the US music industry.)

I agree with #1 bs. It is easy (and perhaps popular) to say music is only created by musicians. But it is not. There are instruments, road crew, concert halls, marketers, music retailers, reviewers, etc. No one seems to say road crew do not create value, but what’s so different about road crew vs. labels? Neither writes or performs music. I guess one looks cool and the other greedy and big? My business is tiny, but I don’t think being big is a sin.

Having said that, I predict that more and more of what music labels do will be crowdsourced. Thanks to technology, division of labor can be done outside of organizational boundaries more easily than before.

Michale Arrington hates music labels and paid music...

(I normally track and save my comments at other blogs using cocomment. But cocomment did not seem to have worked this time and I am copying my comments here. This is my comment to Michael Arrington's post about music label's new business model, which had a scary title originally.)

I take a minority opinion. Let the creators (artists and their helpers) decide whether to release their music as paid or free. It is always better to have choices and currently what is lacking is the ‘paid’ choice.

One thing I found very interesting at the end of the portfolio.com article: “Apple is reportedly negotiating with the major record labels to offer consumers free access to the entire iTunes library in exchange for paying a premium for Apple hardware.”

If Apple pays labels (that is, ultimately to musicians) based on downloads, that is close to my idea of alternative free model, even though I did not expect the hardware manufactures to increase the hardware price.
http://slowblogger.com/2008/02.....-free.html

We should understand that whether you are charged by Apple or the label is economically not very different. All of them need to make money to exist. There is no particular reason why you should prefer paying $110 to apple and zero to labels than paying $100 to apple and $10 to labels. If you don’t think labels worth existing, that’s a different topic. But as long as they add value, they should get paid, too. Personally, I think many musicians will look for help of others who will take care of non-music works so that they can focus on creating and performing music. I don’t know whether the they will look like current labels or different (smaller?), but they will be there. It is called division of labor, which I also wrote about most recently.

By the way, I don’t like the term ‘tax’. Someone made a mistake by calling it tax rather than paid subscription. That sounds terrible.

Don't know the name of a song? Call!

You know what it feels like when you know a song (and can sing a phrase) but you cannot name it. You go to a Karaoke and you cannot remember a song that was your favorite a few years ago. It is even more frustrating when you hear a music that you really like and you don’t know the title or the artist.

I have been expecting that there should be a solution for this, and it seems that there are some now. Companies like Shazam and Gracenote are providing the solutions. Some telcos, especially mobile carriers, seem to have launched services using the solutions. In Korea, KTF is providing Search Music. How does it work? When there is a music playing, you call the service number, put your handset close to the speaker from which the music is playing, and in 15-30 seconds the service will find the music and send information as SMS. Basically, it seems based on some kind of music recognition technologies.

One problem is that it does not work for a live music. Only prerecorded music. I guess it is probably easier to search pre-recorded music in a library of pre-recorded music. It clearly means that you cannot hum to the phone and expect that an answer will pop up. You will have to encounter your mysterious music again! So, it is not perfect, but still is a major development forward.