Mix Tapes from Car Manufacturers
Making mix tapes was "the" thing to do when I was a teenager. The ability to record music off the radio and place it on an audiotape, name it something cheesy, and pass it over to friends was a great pasttime, and if you were lucky, you had a friend with a mixing board who had access to the cool new techo tunes from New Order, Camoflauge and Depeche Mode.
Then came the era of CD's, and the ability to mix songs onto a cassette became an art that anyone could pick up - which explains the pull of Monster Ballads.
Maybe I just wasn't a big music fan, but the best mixes always came from the cool retail stores. Abercrombie and Fitch some awesome playlists in the mid-90's, and if it weren't for the fact that their music systems played a different format, I would have taken those tapes and copied them for all my friends.
But now Music has taken a new twist, as car companies have joined coffee shops with their own playlists. This goes far beyond the cd you received when you bought your new Pontiac - this is full-fledged music playlists provided by car companies like BMW and Mercedes.
I was reading Mirona Iliescu, a Romanian blogger, and found this entry about Mercedes Mix 12.
Mercedes Mix 12? I never heard mixes 1-11! It seems that the noted car, excuse me, automobile company is putting out music as a branding phenomenon to remind the public that leather seats and cruise control enable a life style, but good music defines it.
(Speaking of Romainian bloggers, Mirona, who blogs at Cheezy Cheeky, provides some startling statistics about women in upper management in Romania. I wonder if they get paid as much as men.)
Back to the music - I think it's great that Mercedes is putting out playlists, but my real joy come when Bob's Auto Shop starts giving away iTunes playlists of the best of Southern Rock free with every muffler.
Then came the era of CD's, and the ability to mix songs onto a cassette became an art that anyone could pick up - which explains the pull of Monster Ballads.
Maybe I just wasn't a big music fan, but the best mixes always came from the cool retail stores. Abercrombie and Fitch some awesome playlists in the mid-90's, and if it weren't for the fact that their music systems played a different format, I would have taken those tapes and copied them for all my friends.
But now Music has taken a new twist, as car companies have joined coffee shops with their own playlists. This goes far beyond the cd you received when you bought your new Pontiac - this is full-fledged music playlists provided by car companies like BMW and Mercedes.
I was reading Mirona Iliescu, a Romanian blogger, and found this entry about Mercedes Mix 12.
Mercedes Mix 12? I never heard mixes 1-11! It seems that the noted car, excuse me, automobile company is putting out music as a branding phenomenon to remind the public that leather seats and cruise control enable a life style, but good music defines it.
(Speaking of Romainian bloggers, Mirona, who blogs at Cheezy Cheeky, provides some startling statistics about women in upper management in Romania. I wonder if they get paid as much as men.)
Back to the music - I think it's great that Mercedes is putting out playlists, but my real joy come when Bob's Auto Shop starts giving away iTunes playlists of the best of Southern Rock free with every muffler.
posted by franki durbin @ 12:06 PM PERMALINK
1 Comments:
Lovely end note, Jim, and perhaps not that utopic.
About BMW's audio books, here's what Buzzmachine wrote, as well as what others and I said about it.
Accepting your wages' challenge above, here's the update my post now features: to follow the theme somewhat deeper, inside wallets and pockets, I looked into wages, as suggested by Jim Durbin. According to CEC-WYS Romania [RO], women generally have wages 20% smaller than men's, mostly because they are heavily employed in industries not that rich (e.g. agriculture), as well as due to the fact that they do not have the courage to ask for rights that law--semingly--guarantees and state bodies monitor. Yet, according to a CPE report (PDF), these figures are for 2002. Unfortunately, from what I get on their website, the report they launched on May 3rd this year does not cover the theme at all--is it, perhaps, taboo? Or merely impossible to assess due to the overload in grey and black wages? As put by a report [RO] issued in March by the ONU information center for Romania, wages of women are 'significantly' lower than those of men except for the construction industry, while 2005 saw a decrease in the number of start-ups belonging to women, as compared to 2004. If three legitimate sources build such an unclear, unsettling picture, I will pass the question to more resourceful investigators.
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