2540: Royalty Free

I was surprised to discover that a device exists purely for the purpose of streaming shit music into shops.

Actually, let me correct that: a device exists purely for streaming royalty-free music into shops. There’s a good reason for this, of course: music in the background generally makes for a livelier, more pleasant atmosphere, but not all businesses find it practical or desirable to pay up for PRS and suchlike in order to use copyright-protected music, and as such we have the rise of the royalty-free artist and their music to fill this apparent gap in the market.

The aforementioned device isn’t, shall we say, a perfect bit of kit; the available music on offer is relatively limited, and its shuffle algorithm is so unsophisticated that it’s not at all unusual to hear the same song five or more times over the course of a single hour, but it does at least perform its basic function reasonably effectively. And more to the point, through a bit of the old Stockholm Syndrome, finding yourself in an environment where this nonsense is all you are able to listen to means that after a while you might actually start liking some of these songs.

Songs like Kady Z’s Game Over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCKEoC9GRDA

Or indeed Kady Z’s Beautiful Disaster — apparently Kady Z, whom I had never heard of prior to actually investigating the dreadful but catchy lyrics to Game Over, is pretty much the queen of royalty-free music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYFMDfQgASU

Interestingly, of all the musical monstrosities that belch forth from the aformentioned streaming box, Kady Z’s are the only ones that I seem to be able to find easily on the Internet. I’m sure the others are out there somewhere, but Game Over is the only song I’ve so far managed to find by Googling the one line of the lyrics I can actually remember. (“Game over, you and me, game over, finally free.”)

All this is perhaps because in particular the two songs I’ve mentioned above I actually don’t mind all that much. As I say, that may well be the Stockholm Syndrome talking, but from a bit of additional cursory research this evening, Kady Z appears to be 1) quite attractive and 2) actually not a terrible pop artist either, seemingly drawing influences from a number of other artists including Ke$ha (most apparent in Game Over), Katy Perry and numerous other “upbeat white chick” kind of affairs.

I wouldn’t say she’s a particular artist I’m going to rush out and buy all the albums of, but sometimes it’s kind of nice to accidentally stumble across some reasonably inoffensive new music that’s a bit outside the mainstream pop charts, which remain mostly dominated by bullshit these days — yes, I am getting old, and I’m not at all ashamed of it.

So there you have it. Make an hour-long playlist with Game Over in it at least five times punctuated by other stuff and you, too, can experience roughly what my day has been like.