There’s really something confusing not in a good way about the marketting lingo behind the Oda resonant Speakers website.
I say it’s confusing because primarily there’s something to like about the idea : the videos and pictures showcase the listeners as positionning between the two “speakers”, and this framing makes it feel like the primary purpose of the device is to separate from the screen, and put the focus back on the music, and the speakers here (with their fancy wood pannel look) are really thought of as an actual replacement of the screen rather than sitting behind it, which puts the speaker back as the primary interface of the relationship between the listener and the artists, which is an especially bold take for something that seem to have a focus on live performance (increasingly considered as a “visual” experience, with more and more push toward making music performance “audiovisual shows” rather than just music performances).
So all of that, I like a lot and find it interesting. Now everything else… it’s so confusing, it’s actually confusing in general to feel like we live in this era of make pretend, nothing is clearly explained, it’s just a gigantic blur of “exciting” buzzwords, there’s a sexy line up of big names artists and you have no idea how they got there, what’s the business model behind it, who gets what which I find absolutely essential for a subscription / season based service like this one. They claim “We pay meaningful performance fees to give artists an opportunity to create something unique and stretch their creative limits.” which means nothing really, what’s meaningful, did Madlib and Arca get a similar fee than any other name that will perform on this platform? Is the “Oda speakers” sales, supposedly expanding the audience, completely decorelated from the subscription revenues like the graphic is suggesting which would be very suprising (I expect they at least make a cut of the sub based service, but that cut is never mentionned in the graphic anywhere it just looks like they make money from selling the speakers) ? There are so many things that could be simply answered and are not. Because yes it’s a very different thing if Oda is some sort of heavily funded (by who, how?) company that can pay in advance a huge line up to do some name dropping and kickstart a product, or if it’s a new kind of business model that stands for something politically and those artists were in on it and wanted to back that up. There’s also a quote from “The Quietus”, so I went and checked what the Quietus thought about it : The Quietus doens’t “think” anything about it because they’re actually business partners in this venture, so much for the quote. And ultimately : yet another “subscription based” service, except now… for live, which until now was the only kind of revenue stream that wasn’t tied to subscription, which means it wasn’t tied to the “scaling” logic and brutal competition that plagues sub based services and so on.
It’s tiring for me (I guess from reading comments here and there that many many people have absolutely no problem with it) that marketting has become some sort of diet political soda with all the life-changing / revolution-inducing words, but none of the actual desire to move past the most confusing and exploitative marketting techniques, or define actually new structures for the companies and business models supporting them. I feel sorry for myself that it disturbs me so deeply.
Despite all of this, I hope this project takes off for all the points mentionned in my first paragraph, and I also hope my worries are answered to by a more transparent follow up to their initial marketing campain, which from the tone I’m reading and if I understand it well enough, is clearly aimed at semi-wealthy urban upper socio-professionnal people who are more focused on their way of life and personnal relationship to their experiencing of music, than precisely to the politically conscious trying to redefine the way we consume music through structural rebuilding (which are probably a kind of sub-niche in that group anyway).
