Like all art in capitalism music and creativity are commodities. The best that you can hope for is that some shred of self respect stops the artist from debasing themselves, their work and cultural significance too much for the sake of making a few quid.  Should time travel ever be invented let’s keep our fingers crossed that the younger James Osterberg makes the journey back with a pistol in his hand just in time to stop the car insurance adverts.

The big music story of the month, second only to Stornoway’s London show, was that the Beatles’ back catalogue is now available for download. It probably always was but now you can pay for it. They’ve never floated my boat to the extent of wanting to buy anything they’ve recorded. It’s the marketing behemoth that has swung into action to produce that makes the event noteworthy. It generated full page adverts in national papers and was even considered an event of such cultural moment that it made the news.

All that actually happened is that a lot of music that was already available on vinyl and cd is now available in a different format. In fact if you had the cd you could easily transfer the songs onto your MP3 player.

So well done the marketing people, practitioners of the second most parasitic and useless profession on the planet. They’ve managed to get lots of old songs back in the charts making life that little bit harder for new musicians trying to get some commercial success. Worse than  that is the suffocating adulation offered to a group which once was perceived as innovative and musically radical and is now a symbol of conformism and lack of imagination as well as making people pay three times for the same commodity.

Here’s my Christmas wish. All those seventeen year olds who’ve started trashing buildings and taking to the streets start making dangerous exciting music and pay a visit to their nearest Apple store. Maybe they’ll find an appropriate way to express their disgust at the commodification of art under capitalism.