Whose market AM I, anyhow?

Closing of the weekend. Best gas price $2.53. Now playing, "Space Lion" by Yoko Kanno & Seatbelts.

My iTunes "Genius Sidebar" has no idea who Seatbelts are and has nothing similar to offer me... but wonders if I'd be interested in its best sellers, including Beyonce, Britney Spears, P!nk and a few others. Well, no, thank you. Frankly I don't know who else I'd suggest to myself to complement Seatbelts, but it certainly isn't Britney Spears or any of the other folks on the best seller list. I bet they won't have any suggestions to go with E.S. Posthumus either. I just don't like what the industry is trying to pass off as my best options. I think that's OK with them; I'm not their market.

However... every once in a while, I come across something I really, really enjoy. There are folks putting this stuff out there, and folks besides myself who buy it. So I don't have absolutely, completely unique and unmatchable preferences. There are others. We must be a market. I wonder... whose market are we? And how do we find each other?

The massive maintstream entertainment industry here in the states pretty thoroughly overshadows everything else... formulas exist to make big sales in music, movies, books... original ideas too risky to be picked up by a major studio or publisher have to find their own outlets, and their voices are harder to hear than the cacophony of the big boys. There are a lot of ho-hum small voices, but every once in a while there's something astonishing. Probably more than every once in a while, if I knew more where to listen.

This is a good spot to say THANKS TONS to the Live 365 radio stations "Imagine Avenue" (I have now greatly expanded my collection of movie sound tracks) and "The Anime Radio Nook" (found several real gems -- I'm now a Yoko Kanno fan).

Oddball note -- first response I got on this blog was from the automated Blogger spam-sniffer, telling me that there were "elements of spam" on this blog, and apologizing since obviously there was a real person reading their letter but I needed to verify that I wasn't a spam-bot anyhow so they could remove the warning... I wonder what it was about that first post that set their spam sniffers off? I don't see anything to make into a nasty sandwich, but who knows. Maybe the gas price note. I did that because it makes a sort of interesting time reference for looking back, sort of like using stamp prices to put a date on something. Oh well. Maybe my opinions are spamesque? Awk. I sure hope I'm not spam's market.

Just to tie things together -- the Seatbelts music I'm listening to is from the sound track to the Cowboy Bebop anime series that I was watching during the last post. Japanese jazz. And iTunes still wants to sell me Britney Spears.