2010年 Jun 22日 Tuesday, 15:27

PS:I made the original text (portuguese language, this version was not translated by me)

I will prove to you in a very simple way, why most people(and you're most likely one of them) don't listen to what they'd really like to and why it's not their fault. I will do it by using an analogy.

Imagine that in your city there's only one clothing store, but it's huge and has 100000 that would fit you and acquires 1000 new clothes that would fit you every month. Now imagine that, since the day you were born, your mom takes you to that store every month and tells you to wait outside while she goes inside the store to get some clothes for you to try on. She then comes back with 35 clothes and says "I didn't get everything, but most of it, now pick which ones you like and I'll buy them for you". You then proceed to choose and she buys them for you.

Let's analyze this case:

Did you pick what you wanted to? Technically yes, however, in truth you didn't, because since the day you were born you were neglected 999965 clothes. Between all those clothes, you would surely like something much more than the ones your mom offered to you. What did happen, in fact, is that you picked among what you were offered to pick. If your mom had let you in the store, you would most likely not even pick the same clothes.

Did you pick something good? Maybe, but between the 999965 other clothes you would most likely find clothes that made the ones you had previously chosen to look like shit.
And that's what happens in the music world, most people pick between what they're offered to chooose from, which is MTV, radio and TV stations, since they've never looked elsewhere, for example here in the internets. This system where the radio only gives them a tiny fraction of all the music they could choose from, has existed since before they were born, in fact, before their parents had been born this system already existed which makes it look like that the radio and TV bands are all bands that exists in the music world.

Since "practically all that exists" is shown on MTV, radio stations and tv stations, it's like they were living in an alternative music world, where some of what exists is shown on MTV. And your music taste is based on that world.

For example, picture these guys who really like metal. And now imagine an alternative world where metal has never been created. What would these guys listen to? Most likely hard rock and heavy electronic music. Would that be what they would really want to listen to? No, but since there's no metal they have to conform themselves with that. The same thing happens to most people.

Since what happens in the music world is even worse than the analogy with the clothes, only a single enitity(MTV, radio and open TV) chooses what's going to be offered to the whole population, most people only have access to the same things, unlike the analogy where each mother chooses what her son is going to wear. This fact makes it so that everything shown on tv makes it look like people have listened to it because it's trendy, since each thing that TV and the radio show is closer to what each person would truly like to listen to.

That's also due to the fact that, since a huge amount of people only have the access to the same bands, and therefore even the least popular bands on tv will have a huge amount of listeners, thus making it look like they're "trendy". And it's not very hard for it to become a popular band since there's a lack of competitors in the "band which I enjoy" market which only exists in each person's mind.

That doesn't mean that "trends" don't exist; for example, there's the"emo" trend: simple plan, my chemical romance… they don't play "emo", they play an entirely different kind of music, as this website ( www.youdontknowemo.tk ) shows.

When tv stations and radio stations showed those bands and said they were emo bands, they were making it look trendy. But not everything in the music world is just a trend.