The world of hit music will never be the same.
There aren't any hits anymore. Music, like everything else that is popular, is going viral.
A great example of viral music, because of its viral nature more than its artistic merit, is the summery yet monotonous Carly Rae Jepsen song Call Me Maybe. This is a song that not even I could avoid and while I didn't know the song title or artist until just recently, it is immediately recognizable. The song really is the definition of a virus. It spreads far and wide whether we like it or not, and it is inescapable.
You don't go to the Billboard charts anymore to see how prevalent a song is. Now it's just another trip to YouTube. Here I can see that one video of the song has attracted more than 260 million hits, while other different videos of the same song have gone viral as well. Other videos range anywhere from one million to more than 90 million views.
The other unavoidable hit of the summer, Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know, gathered more than 321 million hits in a little more time. Again, the song and video lent itself to numerous parodies, covers and alternative videos that raked in hundreds of millions of more views.
In some ways it's great that music can be shared so easily and everyone can access the tunes they want. But as with everything, there is someone in the background pulling the strings.
Apparently it was the one and only Justin Bieber, of course, who sent out a tweet promoting Call Me Maybe and launching it into a megahit. He is the source of the virus. It just goes to show that it isn't the media that holds all the sway over public perception; it's Bieber. And just like The Dude, when Bieber tells us what to do, we simply abide.
It does startle me that we're being bombarded with things that have received the Bieber stamp of approval. He has more power over what we see and hear than Rupert Murdoch. No one person should have that power, but The Biebs, due not to any fault of his own, has that influence.
It's interesting how people influence our lives. Our family and friends have very direct impacts on us, but then The Biebs comes along, and now, like him or not, he has some sort of control in pretty much everyone's lives in North America and in many other places around the world.
If it's because of him that the Jepsen song exploded, then he chose the pop song of the summer for us. It's because of him that we have baseball teams posting videos of themselves performing a choreographed dance to the song. It's because of him that somebody took the time to splice together Barack Obama quotes to make him say the lyrics to the song.
This is still democracy at work as far as I'm concerned. It's not the cream of the crop that rises to the top; it's just the easily digestible and inoffensive vanilla flavour that a teen pop star tells us to vote for. That's democracy at its worst perhaps, but it's still in action.
It's because of Bieber that I've heard this song, and now I dread the moment when he dabbles in my life once again.
