More Proof the Music Business is More About Image Than Music

Aging Welsh band The Alarm can't get arrested these days, now that the music industry considers the band a "has been." Rather than live with that, the band decided its music should be judged on its own merits, rather than on the merits of the band's image, and they took action. Sending out unlabeled copies of its new single "45RPM" to radio stations, the band got a terrific reaction to the new song, but people who listened to it thought it came from a new band that The Alarm was managing. This gave the band an idea...

Releasing the single under the pseudonym "The Poppyfields," the band hired a teenage rock band called The Wayriders to lip-synch in a video for the song. Guess what happened? The single charted in the U.K. Last I checked, it was in the Top 30.

"We decided we would do something where it was judged purely on its own musical value," singer Mike Peters told BBC News Online.

Personally, I applaud this move. It just goes to show the sad state of music these days, and that image-conscious industry execs wouldn't know a good song if it walked up and bit them on the ass.

Maybe we should do something similar here in the U.S. Maybe during the week of April Fool's Day, musicians could release their songs without attribution, leaving the talentless entertainment corporations to figure out what constitutes a good song the old-fashioned way - by throwing on a pair of headphones and actually listening to the stuff.