For most of the population, good little consumers as they are, there’s a fairly straightforward path for their musical tastes to follow, and the music industry’s happy for things to stay that way.
Rant: Hughesy's Music Classifications
There are a thousand one variations on the old there are two types of people - those who do something or other, and those who don’t routine.
Mine involves people who like to sort things into categories and classifications and those who don’t.
Me?
I’m a classifier. I like to be able to sort things and figure out where a particular item fits into the larger picture. I’ve already had a couple of goes at sorting out the broad range of music on offer at the moment into categories, but, having completed one very large writing project I’m ready to have another go at it.
Trying to sort music into categories based on sound or style is, however, a lot like trying to herd cats. That’s why I tend to sort music according to the way consumers approach it.
And once you’ve done that, arguably, you can examine the way consumers interact with the categories. It’s all generalisation, of course, but as I went around the morning walk this morning, I was reasonably happy that I can file most stuff I hear into one of these categories.
And the categories?
In more or less chronological order:
Kid Stuff.
Teenage Noise.
Girlie Stuff and Mating Rituals.
Mass Market and Mainstream.
Niche Markets, which breaks down into Genres, Regional Specialities and My Thing.
Kid Stuff is, more or less, self explanatory. It’s a specialised subset of Mass Market and Mainstream that sets kids up to develop into avid consumers of what the Music and Entertainment Industry churns out further on down the track.
That’s not knocking The Wiggles and their ilk, but having watched with interest the interaction between a very small Wo Wo Boy next door and Dorothy The Dinosaur and Friends, I reckon I can see what’s going on.
You grow out of Kid Stuff, of course, and there’s a point where Kid Stuff gets cast aside to be replaced by something far less embarrassing to an emerging consciousness.
Which brings us to Teenage Noise and Mating Rituals.
Teenage Noise plays an important part in an emerging identity, given the fact that it’s almost guaranteed to provoke extreme reactions. After all, the whole point of Teenage Noise is to get right up the noses of Older Generations.
From my memories of my own attempts to morph into Cro-Magnon Man As Personified By The Rolling Stones Circa 1966 statements like Teenagers are not scary would have been greeted with Not scary? Then I’m not trying hard enough.
Girlie Stuff and Mating Rituals form a sort of continuum, starting off from whatever the Music Industry is throwing at the pre-teens and gradually moving into more sophisticated stuff. The Mating Rituals part slots in at the point where a young bloke’s hormones start to kick in. The girls want to dance so the guys, more or less, have to follow along.
That category morphs pretty comfortably into Mass Market and Mainstream as couples pair off, settle down and are happy to accept what the Music and Entertainment Industry keeps churning out for them as they gradually grow older.
Unless, of course, they’re into something that falls into one or more Niche Markets. They may, for example, develop a liking for some genre like, say, Country, and that’s as far as their taste goes. Alternatively, scattered around the globe there are areas where some particular Regional Specialty comes into play.
Finally, there are people who’ve worked out their own mix of personal favourites that come under the heading of My Thing, which may cover a mix of genres and styles or be drawn from a specific subset of a given genre.
Further exploration of those categories to follow as my thoughts return to such themes, but first an examination of consumers and the way they approach what’s on offer.