February 24, 2005

How much do the good people of Island Records despise their cash cows and themselves?

It all started with the discovery that a post of mine about the poetry of Bon Jovi had been Metafiltered. That necessitated further research on the poetry of Jo(h)n Bon Jovi, during which something quite interesting occurred to me. First up, if you try to get to the Bon Jovi page on Island Records using their website, you are directed to a Yahoomail page. Nice. Once you get there, by hook or crook, and go to the discography, it transpires that you have to download a three megabyte Flash file before you can navigate the discography - a discography that further appears not to give you the date of any of the records Jo(h)n Bon Jovi and his equally talented and successful bandmates have released. This strikes me as a very long wait to get a very poor service. Which got me thinking. Surely no record label could be so perverse actually to make its customers suffer for their liking of music on that label? Or could it? Or could it? Island Records was founded in 1962 to license Jamaican music internationally. It was instrumental in the creation of Trojan Records. It was responsible, before its ultimate sale to Polygram, of launching or massively boosting the careers of artists like Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bob Marley, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Crime and the City Solution, Julian Cope and (all right, anyone can make a mistake) U2. Is it that Island Records, in some corner of its corporately-owned soul, hates itself and what it has become, and seeks to express its loathing of Bon Jovi and the fans who fund them through unnecessary and unhelpful use of Flash? Are there other institutions suffering from deep self-loathing whose antipathy can only be determined through technical claymore mines left for the unwary?

posted by tannhauser 19 years ago
  • Maybe it never occured to them that Bon Jovi might have fans.
  • Or perhaps they hire inept web designers. But that doesn't require tinfoil hats, so that's no fun.
  • I think I'd challenge the assumption that inept web design does not require tin foil hats. All web design goes better with tin foil hats. You may look at an inept web designer and think he will always create overfussy layouts with unnecessary interactive elements, but maybe if the CIA wasn't distracting him by beaming messages into his brain telling him to DESTROY ALL LADIES he might go for something more dial-up friendly.
  • Either Island listens to Monkeyfilter, or your navigation skills aren't firing on all cylinders... I tried clicking Bon Jovi from the "artists" menu and from the drop-down menu and from the link at the bottom of the page; All three methods dumped me on the islandrecords.com Bon Jovi main page, not a Yahoo site. Anyway, don't tell people I voluntarily tried to find Bon Jovi on a website. After all, I have my reputation to maintain... As Ned Beatty put it, "I don't want this getting around, see?"
  • Three times, yet. That's what I call keeping the faith. I feel suddenly like the man who returns with the police to the scene of the bloody crime he has just witnessed to discover the room spotless, the furniture undisturbed and the victim looking up quizzically from her desk. There is a horrifying possibility that I may be nothing more than a viral marketing ploy to promote "100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can't Be Wrong", the (oh my God)4-disc collection of Bon Jovi songs judged at the time of their creation not good enough to be singles, album tracks or any one of up to 7 B-sides accompanying each single release thanks to the magic of multiple CD releases but now ripped from the life-giving Earth that covered them once. How does one explain that, actually, 100,000,000 Bon Jovi fans _can_ be wrong? How hard a sell can that idea be? I mean, 50,000,000 voters or so in the US believe that the other 50,000,000 were utterly stone bonking wrong...
  • There are good people at Island Records? When did that happen?
  • Maybe the real reason the American music business is in trouble is that nobody in it knows what the heck they're doing. They don't really know what makes one record sell where another does not, so their publicity and public-relations efforts are basically all guesses and experiments. I was able to navigate to the discography without the troubles you describe, but the site does generally make my broadband connection feel like a dialup again. And all that pointless Flash... yuck. There doesn't seem to be a version of the discography that can be simply printed or saved. Some of the other Island artist pages actually require Flash just to navigate the page! How many dialup users are going to sit through that sort of load time? How many partially-sighted or blind users are going to bother getting a sighted friend to help navigate this mess? Why do so many web designers still act like glitz and gee-whiz special effects are the sine qua non of their profession? Why don't they aspire to make something that is simple to use, fast to load, independent of plugins, but still posessing visual appeal? If these people were designing toasters or alarm clocks, they'd be out of a job.
  • A real Bon Jovi fan knows all albums, singles, bootlegs and dates off the top of their head, so actually looking these up is only necessary for the ignorant masses. Flash is evil and unnecessary, even on a good day.
  • Oh-oh. We're halfway there.
  • this travesty has all the hallmarks of Carl Rove.
  • In light of TP's recent comment, I'd like to point out that I have quietly sat by and refrained from making any kind of funny comment using deapan Bon Jovi lyrics, even though the effort necessary to do so caused me to rupture a testicle. As a reward, everyone send me ten dollars US.
  • deadpan, even.
  • * furiously begins a new mix for MoFiCDX III *
  • the effort necessary to do so caused me to rupture a testicle No one can save him, The damage is done.
  • the effort necessary to do so caused me to rupture a testicle It'll take more than a doctor to prescribe a remedy.
  • "Humped a Shar Pei, Pulled out too late, Now the bitch Has a litter of eight. They eat all the Alpo, right off my plate, why the hell didn't, I just masturbate? I'm a loaded gun Here comes Bon Jovi, the pooping's begun! Look at you guys, have you no shame? You give poop a bad name Crawl back in the butt from whence you came You give poop a bad name"
  • Isn't 'bon jovi' pidgin Italian for 'wimp rock'?
  • The Commission for Rock Sneering have asked me to emphasise that Bon Jovi fans are sneered down upon by U2 fans and not vice versa. Bon Jovi fans are requested cease and desist from this behaviour and to henceforth restrict their sneering in the appropriate downward direction, for example, at remaining fans of the 80's rock group 'Heart'.