Seemingly Intractable Questions In Pop, No.1 in a Series

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

How do you make pop work on TV?

Comments

Re: ORGAFUN WILL REIGN FOREVER

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think we're at slightly cross purposes - what you describe as the "death of TV" still sounds like TV to me! Death of a SCHEDULE maybe but not "of TV" - shows are still getting made and watched, the qn is - is there a viable way for music shows to be among them.

(I think as with most "deaths of" you exaggerate somewhat but this is a different conversation)

I think my idea DEPENDS on the charts not being taken particularly seriously any more, though I don't think I explained it too well - I don't see "new entries" and "highest climbers" as being purely sales determined, for instance.

Anyway, for the charts to not work as a representative sample you'd need to argue that the tastes of illegal downloaders are significantly different to the tastes of legal downloaders (whose purchases make up something like 70% of the Top 40). Of course his COULD be the case but I don't see why it would be.

As for sample size, let's err on the side of caution and say that a No.1 is 20,000 sales in a week, and that 5% of total buyers buy the No.1 single in that week (I would guess these figures are slightly low and very high, respectively), That gets you a sample size of 400,000, which any panel or poll in the world would kill for!

Re: ORGAFUN WILL REIGN FOREVER

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

Bad choice of words, I accept - when I refer to the death of TV, I really meant the death of the traditional TV format of scheduled shows with ad breaks in the middle and at the end of shows.

Is there a viable way for music shows to continue to be made in the "new world"? Yes, there probably is, but I don't feel that anyone has come up with it yet. As has been said elsewhere on this post, the most successful recent examples (Pop Idol and X-Factor) are really shows about the production of music rather than the music itself.

Audience participation is clearly essential to any successful future shows. As I've said elsewhere, why would I watch a music show of which 90% of the content may not be interesting to me, when instead, I can watch clips (of music shows) of my choosing, that are interesting to me? I think that this is the key problem facing programme makers (and this is no different to the existing model) - how do I make the show that has the widest possible appeal without alienating too big a portion of my potential viewers?