Saturday, December 31, 2022

Various Artists - ApocalyXmas Now [Camembert Electrique]

It is not a secret that we basically don't care about the digital download x streaming market at all but there's a few words to be said about the utter abomination of a compilation release that is "ApocalyXmas Now" which marks the end of the year for the French label Camembert Electrique, yet even more importantly makes a perfect example of what an abhorrent absurdity the so-called digital music market has become and how little some digital label owners seem to care about their artists, their audience and most importantly: the music. So what's the deal here? "ApocalyXmas Now" accumulates a total of 101 (sic!!!) tracks by artists like El Zombie Espacial, The D3VI7, Schallbehörde, N. Zckrmann, Fourthousandblackbirds and many many more as singular compilation album - or better: a mess - with individual track lengths ranging from a little over three minutes to a whopping 20 minutes per single track. Guesstimating an average track length of 6 minutes this totals as a minimum of 600 minutes - a.k.a. 10 hours! - of whatever is in here musically throughout a time of rapidly declining attention spans resulting in average daytime radio Pop song more often than not not exceeding the 02:30 minutes mark anymore, 29 minutes 10 track releases being considered to be full album projects instead of being referred to as interim mixtapes, mini-albums or EPs (remember those formats?) and 95+% of all tunes on platforms like Spotify not even reaching a total of 1000 lifetime plays ever. So adding a 10+ hours compilation release to the immense pile of music that basically remains unheard anyway, especially in an era in which no-one even bothers to sit through a proper full-length album anymore, is just irresponsible madness, utterly disrespectful and makes sure that artists sitting at the tail end of this one, which might come down to anywhere beyond the 30 minutes mark, will never get heard at all because there's basically zero people out there about to take ten hours out of their week to sit through all this and dedicate their precious time to a gazillion of artists they've probably never heard of anyway. And that's not taking into account that we're living through a time of increased inflation and rising consumer prices which results in a lot of ppl having to take on side hustles as well as second and third jobs to make ends meet anyway which incrementally takes away from everyone's spare time and room for venturing into uncharted sonic territories. So without having listened to any of this - and being massively in doubt I'll ever will - this one is dismissed as being one of the worst example of digital music release practices ever. Utter nonsense. Period.

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