Animal Collective Shoes and Charity to USB sticks and Capitalism
From a despairing unadulterated audio experience seeker to you
I have a lot of ideas about music, but it’s refreshing to see Animal Collective’s latest gimmicky plan to attract the money of their fans. It’s not that the band plans to make money from their next scheduled release, but surely it’s not a good thing when a band’s next big creative project looks like this.
Yes. It’s a shoe. Fine, you get two of them should you buy a pair...but for $75? $75? We have been told by the manufacturers of the shoe-Keep-that proceeds will be donated to the
Socorro Island Conservation Fund, but in all honesty, if people want to donate $75 to charity, can’t they just do so?
I can list a whole host of things I would happily buy with $75. Here are just some of them:
01. I could buy Metallica’s good albums. Y’know, Load, Reload, and St. Anger. And I’d still have enough dough left to pick up Master Of Puppets or something, or even that forthcoming EP with no real unheard music on it.
02. Fine, so Metallica’s very best albums aren’t to your liking... You could also buy a rubber duck x 75 for your nightly bath. The possibilities are endless.
03. Concert tickets to see Slayer. And Megadeth. And Anthrax. You’d still have money to buy some sort of merchandise.
The redeeming feature of the shoe deal is that the advance orders will be receiving unreleased Animal Collective music in the medium of...
A cassette tape.
In a digital world. It’s a bold statement, but also a spiteful one; the fans are at least initially unlikely to be able to listen to the cassette recordings. Surely a more practical medium would be a specially crafted Animal Collective USB stick. In fact, I’d pay for a USB stick with music loaded on it as long as it could be developed as a viable alternative to the CD. I don’t think it’s particularly viable, but it’s a nice combination of both digital and traditional music platforms. In any case, it would have been a better alternative to the cassette tape, which, although vintage, just doesn’t cut it for $75.
So does a pair of shoes warrant $75? Should musician be able to take advantage of their existing fan bases in order to sell other commodities? Surely that is why so many musicians’ fashion companies have been short-lived, or have been largely restricted to existing fan bases. I think it’s the easy way to making quick sales, and surely not the way for music to go.
What would be the best item to give away with a music album?
Best comments to be featured next time.
By Sam Agini
I gave both tickets to a friend as a birthday present.