Lolol, I'm willing to bet that our chum the dronemeister-narcissist doesn't waste a second of his valuable time listening to stuff by unknown hopefuls. Perhaps he listens to a little of his rivals' stuff; or maybe not; who knows?
It reminds me – many years ago a friend showed me a big rubbish skip in the alley behind Sony Music's offices in London's West End. The skip was full of thousands of brand new music CDs, all different and each with elaborate artwork, titles, performers' names, etc. After sifting through them for a while we concluded they were all demo albums by unknown hopefuls. I was curious so I took a bunch home to listen to them. Jeeeez what dreadful crap it was.
That weird discovery left me somewhat depressed - thinking of the thousands upon thousands of hours of intense work that ended up in the bin; also thinking of those poor buggers in Sony Music who had to deal with these demos that kept flooding in.
But I drew a lesson. In my listening it wasn't long before I just couldn't take more than a few seconds of a few tracks for each CD, because my curiosity had gone into hiding behind the sofa. All I could tolerate was a very quick first impression here and there. And I couldn't imagine the Sony people doing it much differently - cuz they're mere mortals too.
So a strategy for writing music demos popped into my head:– don't do long intros; grab the listener's attention firmly in bar 1 and immediately build up the interest from there. Easy peasy, right? Lol. Oh I forgot the important bit:- don't think you can develop your talent (if you have any) at listeners' expense, cuz they ain't your doting mum and you sure as hell ain't the only unknown hopeful in the world; listeners who find themselves being abused in this way will drop you like a hot brick and shun you forever.
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Of course my lone voice in the wilderness won't make a jot of difference. The 'Narcissism-Industrial Complex' (NIC) will no doubt continue to dictate what we, the cattle, are to consume as popular and media music. Your point, Errikos, about today's ever more sophisticated "production values" is, IMO, a valid dipiction of the increasingly irresistible cues used by the NIC to convince us that we're consuming the best-produced consumables - regardless of whether or not those end-products in themselves are garbage. And once that sickness catches on, no decent maker of digital means of music production can afford to fall behind (hence I'm not blaming VSL).
Also, today's tiresome emphasis on "workflow" can, arguably, be seen as the latest cryptic invocation of "Scientific Management" and "Fordism"; doctrines that have long ensured the NIC's 'artillery fire' is so rapid and relentless that consumers are left in no doubt about their lack of choice or voice in what's being shoved down their throats. Today and forever, the NIC insists, music production must fall into line and accept the doctrine that individual and original craft (and let nobody dare mention art) is for losers.
I suggest we study the oozlum's antics, which are pretty much a representative example of what narcissism brings to the table in this business. For instance, technical depth:- shallow, incoherent, inconsistent and shoddy; artistic depth:- zero; integrity and morality:- zero; originality:- at best a scruffy jumble of ideas stolen from others. What passes for the narcissist's 'soul' is an abysmal, dysfunctional mess, yet they're absolutely convinced they're entitled to call the shots in what we the consumers are to accept as good music and good practice in producing music. Well we've suffered decades of that dire, vapid, stinking BS; radical change for the better is long overdue.