Simple minds

[matrixmann]

People are easily satisfied with pretty useless and low-quality things. They don't aim for higher art or good sound quality of the rubbish they purchase as "music". Rather they care about if they think it's the best they can get.
And what they think is the best is determined by the industry wanting to make money with them.
Not that it had not been the case 10 or 20 years ago, a second explosion age of consumerism, but factual judgment and experience once had seen better periods where people listened to them.

Comments

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

It's true, but mostly people think about what other people like when making choices about what to watch or listen to. They want the social bond that choosing simple and mostly dumb things instead of more complicated and challenging ones. I've had a lot of experiences where I've told someone that I had been reading something like War and Peace or watching Godard films and most people get a scared look in their eye for a moment. More than almost anything people want to feel like they belong and are liked. So, it is very difficult to keep choosing things that most people don't like.

To go from there, I've met people that do keep choosing things that most people don't like that turn into total pretentious assholes because they lose touch with what is really good about some types of art that are not that complicated. So, it is a very complicated issue.

[matrixmann]

That, but also - how do I put it?
The first who comes up offering a solution that is <>handy, this one is most probably going to be the one who wins the race.
It doesn't matter how much low quality of music MP3s are, the main subject was that you could carry it anywhere to a friend or somebody to impress and the devices didn't take up that much space in your pocket.
Or, take for example e-readers - you can take your books anywhere and you can have a thousand ones without much complication. In the view of that, it doesn't matter to them that your electronic purchases are being surveiled and studied what you could want next.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I knew a dj at Goth clubs that would only choose to play his favorite sons from very obscure bands and hardly anyone would dance because that really isn't what people there wanted to hear. I don't think the songs he chose were of that much greater quality than what was usually played. It was a goth club in the first place and the regular djs would play some songs that were arty and not mainstream.

I've known a lot of students that went to graduate school in literature and started liking more and more theoretical writing that stopped even having narratives, stories, plots etc...

Or it is like how people that study film for a long time can start to like only really rare and experimental films and stop liking what most people agree are the best films because they want to show off how much they know. Or maybe it is like they love that they love obscure things. I can be a little like that and have went too far towards liking only a very narrow range of films and fiction and writing and it sucks to go that far and lose touch with liking say JRR Tolkein or the Game of Thrones series.

[matrixmann]

Hm... This kind of behavior can fail, but it doesn't need to.
It depends how much you become an insider of scenes and how much you keep hanging out only in them. Also with this artifical constructed attitude "I don't want to put up with the mainstream".