TOBY
Group: Members
Posts: 1562
Joined: May 2002 |
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Posted: May 05 2003, 14:58 |
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I suppose peoples problems with WEA depend on how well they percieve WEA have handled things generaly and how much of Mike's downturn in profile is his fault, musically speaking, and how much is the record companys for not marketing him right. It has to be said that my argument against WEA is purely from a UK point of view because obviously things are different in other countries especially Spain where he has a reletively high profile.
Certainly in recent years WEA seem to have put less and less effort into marketing him here in the UK, Tres Lunas was handled unbelievably badly and it looks as if TB2003 is being handled the same way, put it this way I won't believe TB2003 is released on the 26th of this month untill I've got it in my hand. For such an important release for Mike I've yet to see a single advert, article or even mention of the album in the music press. It's here the finger of blame splits up because is this WEA's fault, Mike's and his management's fault or quite simply because everyone is so bored with Mike releasing TB albums that they've long since lost interest? Who knows? But the latter is fairly likely I would say.
The other area up for question is WEA's sheer lack of imagination regarding that TB box set. Quite frankly I think its a badly put together rip off, almost all the people who will buy it, us fans, already own TB2 and TB3 and that extra DVD intended to lure us in is shockingly lacking in anything interesting to make it worthwhile. We all know how much you can be creative with DVD content, so why not here??????????? Interestingly enough just today I read an interview with Dave Gilmour who said he regularly rejects record company proposals to put out Pink Floyd DVD's on the grounds that they aren't being put together with enough care and generly speaking are thought buy him to be pretty crap. Now I'm not insinuating Mike doesn't care, I just don't think he's interested sometimes at all about these things.
The last issue is whether or not WEA is in anyway at all an influencing factor in the quality, or lack of, in Mike's music. Personaly I do think a lot of Mike's output in the last ten years has become hamoganized and reletively soulless to varying degrees somewhat befitting of the huge multinational record company he now belongs to.The truth is we just don't know for certain just how much the general direction of Mike's music in recent years is record company inflenced.
My own view is that he would do better on a slightly smaller more personable record label producing honest sounding music, put it this way it couldn't get much worse for him to change. Of course all of this is purely academic if Mike is going to continue producing less than inspiring music, so ultimately a certain amount of blame can be directed back to bad decision making on his part, certainly on a creative level.
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