It’s that time of year now when we walk into a shop, turn on the radio or watch music channels that every other song is a Christmas song. These songs that we hear are not from the noughties, they all tend to be from the 70/80s but why is this? There have been Christmas songs made by more recent artists but for some reason they just do not seem the stand up against the older, classic Christmas songs.
Christmas songs are meant to be cheesy and can never be cool, as this Guardian article states. Christmas songs made by more recent artists such as Destinys Child or The Killers are played around the Christmas period but they do not get the amount of play that the classics receive and if someone asks you to name a Christmas they probably will not be the first songs that pop in to your head.
Maybe these songs are trying to be too different, the 8 Days of Christmas by Destiny’s Child tried to make Christmas rnb and Goldfrapp tried to give Winter Wonderland a slightly electronic twist. I think that for Christmas songs the classics are the best – Christmas is the one time of year where cheesiness is acceptable!
Here is a classic Christmas song for you to enjoy:
Is album artwork as important now as it was 40+ years ago? I want to share with you some iconic album covers from the last 40 years and look at why covers from recent years do seem as important.
The Beatles Abbey Road released in 1969. This has iconic cover has been copied many times and causes disruption to the road with people trying to recreate the cover.
It seems rather strange that none of these album covers come from recent years – is this because the album cover is becoming less important to artists now?
When Hard Fi released their second album ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ they had no cover art.
Their single Suburban Nights featured an album cover again with just words stating ‘Expensive black and white photo of the band not available’ They are mocking other album covers and the importance of album covers. Their thinking may have been that if people like thier music they will buy the song or album no matter what the cover or band looks like.
One way that many people listen to music is on a radio. With over 250 different radio stations in the UK, listeners are spoilt for choice and this is not even including internet radio.
Radio is usually overshadowed by television, but has the same amount of variety, if not more and there are different stations to cater for many different audience needs. If you want to listen to live sport you may listen to 5live but if you want to listen to British bands/ rock music you may listen to Absolute Radio.
Like television, radio is becoming more user friendly with great improvements in the digital age. We do not even need to own a radio to listen to its content as we can listen online to a show that went out 5 days ago, we can download podcasts, we can listen on our mobile phones and we can even listen through our televisions (although the screen isn’t very exciting!) With the launch of digital radio the quality of our stations has improved too.
Radio can allow the audience more freedom than watching music on television as it is imageless. The audience can listen to the lyrics of the song and relate them to a personal situation which they may not be able to do when watching a music video as their mind would be concentrating more on the movement of the video and not the lyrics. Radio can require less concentration than television which is why so many have a radio is background noise while they are doing other things.
The radio station is still important to the musicians as this is another platform for them to sell their music to the masses. When artists release a new song or album they can often be heard on a variety of different radio stations giving interviews, singing live or offering ‘exclusive’ plays of new songs.
Click here for Richards view on radio in Eyes vs Ears....
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