Music Is The Food Of Google

When will the music industry learn that my generation will never pay for music? Rightly or wrongly, we would rather watch smug marketing minions carry out the dirty work of capitalism's economic powerhouses, spewing their toxic though thoroughly transparent 'deals' at us like parrots as we benignly gawp at our screen of choice before each video, turning Dawn Of The Dead from a satirical 'nothing-this-ridiculous-could-ever-happen' joke into a prophecy. 

Incredibly, it works. Someone out there is falling for the "Just £49 per month" spiel from various MDF laminate sawdust specialists chasing our unborn grandchildren's life savings. From contract phones to payday loans, we really will buy anything a self-satisfied advertising parasite spouts through an SM58.

Except music. That's the line. Nevertheless, Spotify was forced to resort to pitiful grovelling this week when Taylor Swift mysteriously removed her entire musical catalogue from the service - a rather miscalculated move, given the amount of new material she is releasing which (did I mention?) young people will not pay for.

Today we found out why. Not deterred by the 'Good riddance' backlash from her Spotify antics, Taylor has announced she wants us to pay £9.99 a month to listen to her music on youtube without adverts. If this takes off when AdBlock is free, I will give up on my generation. But while Swift is in the firing line, this is in fact the result of some distasteful dealings between Google and this scumbag on the right. Scott Borchetta has made Taylor the face of Google's latest desperate attempt to become musically cosmopolitan. With any luck it will follow enterprises like Google Buzz and Google Wave into oblivion. As for Spotify, CEO Danial Ek fired back at claims he only paid Swift half a million dollars in royalties last year, retorting,

The lesson here? Scott is in a remarkable position. For all the mini-fandom communities on youtube, everyone watches music videos of which he is the puppetmaster. Before him is a consumer base hundreds of millions strong, ready to soak in any consumerist message of his choosing. All he has to do is to take advantage. But =invincibility has got the better of him. By choosing to ride the Google gravy train, Borchetta has returned leverage to the masses. The onus is on us to use it by ensuring as few of us as possible partake in this mugging. May Google Music Key crumble like a £49 per month bedroom.