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Not only are they to merge but they will continue to trade separately, although they claim that sharing infrastructure and back office functions will generate savings of more than £3.5 billion. It suggests that in a intrinsically oversaturated market place – where after the initial years of rolling out the technology, everyone who is likely to get a mobile phone has one – the only option available are: undercutting competitors, obfuscation through overly-complex tariffs and locked-in contracts or consolidation. Since the first is self-destructive when consistently pursued while there’s a natural limit on the second – customers respond agentially by sharing information and relying on consumer groups and magazines – rationality inclines corporate strategy towards the latter.
However following the brands doesn’t tell the full story. As T Mobile and Orange are owned by Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom respectively. The former is the largest telecommunications company in Europe while the latter is the third largest. Now prior to today’s announcement of the merger – although I wonder if it still counts as a merger if they continue to trade under seperate brands – both Vodafone and O2 had made separate bids for T Mobile. 02 are owned by Telefonica of Spain, another one of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe, while Vodafone is the largest telecommunications company in the world by turnover. So this isn’t just a UK story. The biggest companies in the world – achieving that status inevitably through similar strategies of consolidation elsewhere – are eagerly chomping at the bit to further the same process in the UK and, with each step, taking the mobile phone market away from anything resembling meaningful competition. You’d have to be spectacularly naive to assume this is going to benefit anyone other than the shareholders of the companies in question.
Well it was only on Christmas day that I found out about the ever-so-engrossing race to Christmas number one: Jeff Buckley vs Alexandra Burke, the X-factor winner. Of course the most cursory search shows that the former, now deceased, was signed to Columbia Records whereas the latter, after her win on one of the most irritating tv programs ever conceived, was signed to Syco Records, founded by that utter cunt Simon Cowell and, according to whom, Syco accounts for 40% of the profits of its parent company Sony Music Entertainment. Guess what? It’s also the parent company of Columbia Records. So the real effect of the ‘campaign’ to preserve musical values was to whip up a huge media storm and makes lots of money for the company that depends on precisely the sort of crap pop music that the so-called campaigners saw themselves as reacting against.
I’d previously been completely oblivious to this. I’ve been lost in my own little world for pretty much the whole of december. So I just had a look on facebook. I found 44 groups of various permutations before I stopped counting: some wanted Jeff Buckley to be number 1, others wanted to stop Burke from getting to number and others were about how much superior the Buckley/Cohen songs were to Burke’s. I ignored the plethora of Buckley groups that didn’t mention the christmas number one in their title. No doubt many predated the ‘campaign’ but from my brief search it seemed the number 1 was, perhaps inevitably, the hot topic on them. The largest group has 146,279 members. The image above is from this one. There was letter writing and a ‘flash mob’. There’s also a Jeff Buckley new music group which tries to “keep the spirit of what we achieved alive” by getting recognition for artists who are deemed to be under appreciated. Like I say, it was only on Christmas day that I found about this because when some family friends came over, we ended up talking about it. This is viral marketing at its best and fuck me did it work:
Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1] Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.[2] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.
I think at the start of this there were street teams who got paid and this is evidenced, at least in part, by the sheer quantity of groups on facebook with few members. Obviously many of these were probably the result of people hearing about the ‘campaign’ and thinking “me too”. Even so when something proliferates unsuccessfully to the extent that these groups did (i.e. most of them had under 200 members) it’s a sign of a conscious attempt to project a sense of plurality. I don’t find it particularly likely that this many people heard about the ‘campaign’, felt sufficiently moved to take part and yet were either unaware of the countless existing groups (some of which were very popular) or chose not to participate in them. This was deliberate: you start many groups in the hope that a few of them will take off.
So what was the result? Burke got christmas number 1, Buckley number 2 and Leonard Cohen’s original came in at number 36. Wonderfully Cohen is also signed to Columbia Records. Burke sold 576,000. Buckley sold 495,000 after, as the Guardian puts it, “an internet campaign masterminded by music fans who feared that Burke would desecrate Cohen’s 1984 anthem”. An internet campaign that made the people they set out to depose an awful lot of money. The phrase useful idiots comes to mind, no? It’s hard not to sneer when you read people posting on these facebook groups about how it feels “good to make a difference”.
In case anyone takes this the wrong way because I’m well aware I sneered like a mother fucker while writing this: (a) I love Jeff Buckley and think the X-factor song is a travesty (b) I’m sure people genuinely felt very strongly about this (c) the point I’m making is that it wasn’t just the internet campaign that generated this outcome for Sony, the response and awareness, even amongst those who wanted Burke to win (10 popular groups on facebook before I got bored counting) as well as the coverage of the popular ‘contest’ in the media was integral to the whole marketing strategy (d) I too think Simon Cowell is a tool.
The largest group says its campaigns is set to “make a huge statement against the barrage of cynical manufactured pop dirtying up our charts”. Surely a bigger statement would be not feeding the media strategy of the corporation involved? When I think someone is a tool I prefer not to ‘campaign’ to make them* a lot of money, even if I feel passionately about the aesthetic idea being expressed in the campaign. At the end of the day it is an aesthetic idea. This isn’t a political campaign, it was motivated by an attempt to preserve musical value against the corrosive forces of crass commercialism. In the process the energies that in a healthier democracy would have been directed towards politics and society are instead fixated on individuals expressing themselves for the stances they take re: music and culture. Maybe if we lived in that healthier democracy it would be possible to fight for aesthetic ideals without making a multinational corporation a fuck load of money in the process? I can’t help thinking from reading these groups how much sublimated desire to make a difference was expressed within them. People want to join together and do stuff. They want to fight for what’s right and good and true. It’s a sad indictment of our society and the profound evisceration of our politics that this is what that goal, in practice, amounts to.
*Or to be precise their company’s parent company with whom their business interests are deeply and irrevocably intertwined.
Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest US investment bank, has filed for bankruptcy protection, dealing a blow to the fragile global financial system.
The news led to sharp falls in share prices around the world, and officials took measures to reassure markets.
Lehman had incurred losses of billions of dollars in the US mortgage market.
Merrill Lynch, also stung by the credit crunch, has agreed to be taken over by Bank of America, the latest twist in a dramatic turn of events on Wall Street.
Well there’s been another high profile victim of the global economic mismanagement of the last 17 years and, much like the others, the victim played a large role in their own downfall. We’re now in a situation where the states that, at the behest of the corporate sector and the intellectual intermediaries it funds. were so reluctant to interfere in markets and yet are now being relied upon to prop them up. It exposes the ethical absurdity at the heart of actually existing neo-liberalism: risk is made public and profit is made private, a state of affairs legitimated with the fiction of market equilibrium, the perfect alignment of private and public interest. At least there seems to be a growing recognition within economic elites of the intellectual incoherency underlying neoliberalism and the harmful consequences of it that are starting to outweigh its ideological utility.
Will this lead to a shift in opinion regarding the status of the super-rich as wealth creators? Peter Wilby made a great case in this weeks New Statesman as to the problems inherent in courting the super-rich through globally competitive regulation and taxation regimes, in the hope that they will act as wealth-creators and raise net wealth in a manner that outweighs the (inevitably) resulting growth in inequality. Markets and the super-rich can’t be left to their own devices because a corporate culture driven by the incessent short-term demands of financial markets (as well the self-interest of large-scale managerial stock-holders) works to preclude the sort of enlightened self-interest which is necessary to work towards the reproduction of the social capital – the infrastructure that produces an educated & healthy workforce – that’s succesful capital accumulation relies upon. The market-driven financial bubble of the post-Cold War era, which it seems is drawing to a close, led to a capitalist triumphalism wihch relegated questions of long-term sustainability to a peripheral role. It was simply assumed that growth would continue and that the good times would continue to roll. The confidence with which the expectation manifested itself, as well as the role this confidence played in sustaining belief in the integrity of global financial markets, left questions concerning the future uninteresting and unimportant, hidden behind an immensely profitable social anarchy. Yet this is now changing. The cracks are showing and, with them, the sense of fixity that the capitalist system has carried with it over the last decade. Things are getting interesting again. I think the most likely of the outcomes that I like is a globalist neo-Keynsianism as a necessary stabalizing strategy for global capitalism (perhaps going along with a reform of multinational institutions led by an emboldened Russia and China, as well as an increasingly irate Majority World asserting themselves in the geopolitical spaces opened up by the transition from a unipolar to multipolar world). Perhaps also opening up a space for a new democratic socialist politics?
