Usually I try not to watch the TV, but if I don't have anything better to do than stare at it for a couple of hours, I usually turn it on first. This turns out to be a mistake, if you can believe it. If by some chance I had forgotten just how much I hate all of the marketing departments of the world, some terrible commercials come on to remind me.
So the other day, there were these commercials for "Now THAT'S what I call music!" Vol. 417, or something. I was pretty tempted to buy it, since it has all of my "chart-topping favorites," but then I realized that by "chart-topping favorites" they meant "the reason you stopped listening to radio."
I think they should have just come clean and tried to market the whole thing honestly. You know, something like this: "Are you too poor to have a CD burner, and none of your friends will burn you the music you like because you like worthless crap that they would be embarassed to steal from a file-sharing server? Buy our CD! It has all of the over-played hits that stupid teenaged girls rushed to the top of the charts on ONE CD! These songs have been carefully selected by balding marketers that have determined that there is a 78% chance that your demographic will enjoy this music! Just listen to what these REAL CUSTOMERS have to say about it!
'It's just like listening to overplayed radio songs, only without commercials.'
'I love all this music. I don't love it enough to buy the CDs of these bands, but I do love it a whole whole whole whole lot. That's like, a lot. I love it!'
Tired of listening to the same old music all the time? We sure hope not, because we're trying to sell you this!"
I don't see how people can listen to that crap, anyway. If it's not annoying enough that they play the song all the time, people have stopped writing real music and just write 4-8 measures and then repeat them over and over. So you feel like the song is overplayed before it's even over. They play a 3 second clip of the song on the commercial to convince you to buy it, but what they don't tell you is that those 3 seconds are actually the only 3 seconds of the song.
I think next time I'd rather watch the TV gnaw my arm off.
