Products

Go to the archives

Head Butler’s Grammys

2008

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category: Beyond Classification


 
 

Head Butler Grammys, 2008

For most of this decade, the publishing and music industries have been in a race to see who can commit suicide first.

I would have bet on publishing — is there really a single reader left for the annually-published novel about the family that gets together for a weekend at the ancestral manse, where secrets are revealed?

But then the lords of music started suing customers who downloaded copyrighted songs without paying — that’ll teach them for loving the product!

The score is tied for me these days, but the Grammys invariably represent a golden opportunity for the music industry to hurt itself anew. The CDs that win — I know there’re last year’s models, but doesn’t it feel as if they were released two or three years ago? The categories are invariably archaic (Arcade Fire and The White Stripes are