by Dick MacA vanity production studio in Los Angeles was hired to create a project for a young lady who wants to become a professional singer. Her mother paid a few thousand dollars and the girl was offered a selection of songs to choose from, and then a single and video would be made.
These studios have been around as long as the music business itself. I had seen LPs produced by these hit factories and they can be pretty depressing looking. They were all created from the same very dull template, probably designed in the mid-1960s when commercial pop music made the most dramatic transformation of its half-century-odd history, with a boring "modern" font
I think the name of the studio in Boston was Ace or Acme or AAA or one of those cartoon-ish names used by fly-by-night companies; only this wasn't a fly-by-night company. Area studio musicians were employed to record your album with you, and you did get a stack of LPs to stick in your trunk and give to all your friends and family.
These businesses have become more sophisticated, and in bigger markets they are required to be higher quality to compete for business.
Rebecca Black, a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles, wanted to make a single and a video. Her mother hired ARK Music Factory for the project. She was offered two songs by the in-house songwriters. She selected "Friday," which is an age-appropriate pop song in the vein of modern pop music a la Justin Bieber, et al.
The song is inane, but no more inane than most other pop songs. The production quality is actually quite high, much better than I would expect from a vanity recording studio. The video is sophomoric and would fit perfectly into the music video television play list of any television network.
The song was released online and the video was posted to youtube.com.
In one week it received three million views! Comments flooded the page and the phenomena of Rebecca Black's "Friday" took flight.
There was a lot of criticism of the song, some of it valid and obvious, some of it downright ridiculous. Some of the posts were hostile and cruel, and that's what I don't like: people wishing her ill and hoping she hurt herself or got hurt.
So, the whole thing has become part of the national (international?) dialog. Much of the dialog is ridiculous. I know, because I've participated in it.
I decided to support this 13-year-old singer and I downloaded the track from iTunes or Amazon, and I have watched the video.
Perhaps you should to:
Buy it here
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