jeff@dciem.UUCP (Jeff Richardson) (05/17/85)
> Funny thing, though...an awful lot of people are > exchanging something of value, namely money, to buy records that > you would call bad. In fact, more people place value on 'bad' > music than music that is 'good' by your standards. There must be > something in that music that all these people find valuable, eh? This brings up an interesting thought: If all records were about 4 times more expensive than they are now, would the same music be on the best seller list? My guess is that most of it wouldn't be. Records are very cheap now for the amount of entertainment they provide, but if they were a lot more expensive, people would be much more selective about which ones they buy. We'd have to avoid buying music that sounds very similar to records that we already have, which is what about 80-90% of the best sellers are, and go for the more original sounding material. Also, for people like me who buy a lot of records, including some on the top 40, the records we like best are, in general, not the ones on the top 40. So, if we could buy only those which we like best, a much smaller percentage of the records we'd buy would be those that are on the top 40 now. I'd like to see some CD best-seller lists to see if they show anything to support my theory, though there are several other factors involved with CD's, such as: I may think that sound quality is more important for album A than for album B, even though I like album B better, because they're different types of music. -- Jeff Richardson, DCIEM, Toronto (416) 635-2073 {linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd}!utcsrgv!dciem!jeff {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!dciem!jeff