welcome to the social
Am I the only one who’s intrigued and yet absolutely terrified that the slogan for Microsoft’s forthcoming “iPod killer” music player, the Zune, is “WELCOME TO THE SOCIAL”? I can’t help reading it as a general theoretical category — “the social”. The new Zune commercials are calculated to avoid an Apple-style fetishisation of the physical object or its campaign packaging, and instead present everyday, popular-musical social life as the commodity — hanging out randomly at picnics where dogs lick you, and where someone’s set up a set of turntables in a gazebo, etc. This kind of calculation feels really creepy — and I used to work in advertising. WELCOME TO SUBJECTIFICATION. The extra-diegetic dissonance of the musical genres in the ads is interesting, too — the soundtrack of each commercial seems oddly out of place. It’s either quite a clever take on what it’s like to live in headphone-world, or rank stupidity.
[UPDATE — Gizmodo’s caustic take:
almost every Zune commercial has folk-y indie rock going on, with white/hispanic kids breakdancing. It’s as if the dancing is cool enough, but they don’t want to offend the middle of the country with angry black music.]
Of course, if joining a WiFi network on a Windows laptop is anything to go by, I’m expecting the wireless social music-networking aspect of the Zune — the technical basis of the “social” in question — to go as well as Bluetoothing your vCard to another phone did two years ago. Ooops, my batteries just ran out. Or oops, I have to restart.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs’ response — if you want to share music with someone, “just take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear” — elegantly cuts through the bullshit, and yet has a predictably phallocentric subtext. Just Put It In Her Ear, indeed; he begins abstractly with the idea of Microsoft’s fiddly, music-sharing technical hoopla, but by the end of the sentence, the hypothetical recipient has suddenly been gendered and given a definite article: “By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left!” Jobs is no doubt referring to the generic girl that nerds like Bill Gates couldn’t pull at school. Taken in context with one of Apple’s latest commercials (in which a PC-produced home-movie is represented as a hairy guy in drag who can’t compete with the much more convincing femininity of supermodel Gisele Bündchen, who appears as the product of Apple’s iMovie) this fantasy of the girl as the recipient of your musical manhood is kind of stunning.
you should go here to read mac fic prompted by that apple commercial. it's great.
Grrrr, site down. Damn Six Apart servers...
I can't tell if the Zune ads' carefully calculated hipsters are any more carefully calculated than anyone else who populates ad-land. That said, they seem to have changed tack with some of their newer ones (The second link there still does push the "music-sharing as commodity" angle though. The first one doesn't seem to push much at all).
In other creepy Zune-related news: not sure how much weight there is behind this, but word on the street is that MS might be building some sort of referral-credit scheme into the Zune, ie: you beam someone a song, they like it, their copy self destructs, they buy it from the Zune store and you get a kickback (Microsoft has looked at something like this before, it seems: discussions around the news have unearthed an MS research paper entitled "Off-line Economies for Digital Media").
Everyone reporting on this seems to think it's great idea, but frankly it scares me a bit: imagining for a minute an alternate in which I buy a Zune (and use a download service to purchase music – I like the physicality of CDs, even if all they do these days is take up shelf space), how many grains of salt do I take with music recommendations? What stops this scheme (if it does indeed eventuate) from turning every Zune owner I meet into some kind of potential musical Amway rep?