When Capitalism Goes Wrong
Have you seen the new "Chrysler Group" ads in which Lee Iacocca (or some diminutive relative of his) intones, "If you can find a better car, buy it"?
What a load of crap.
I remember back in the '80s, when Iacocca, now 80, first used that line in commercials. At the time, he was hawking Chrysler's infamous line of K-cars, perhaps the biggest pieces of junk ever to set wheel to the road. (If you don't remember them, does this help? Chrysler LeBaron, Dodge Aries, and Plymouth Reliant.)
Perhaps out of sheer chutzpah, those ads actually worked at the time; people went out and bought Chryslers. Will they again? It's hard to imagine. Chryslers' cars have improved since that time, but still...if I could find a better car than a Chrysler? To do that, all I'd have to do is look at any car made by Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Subaru, and so on.
I was thinking of this as I read an article in today's Times about how Sony has been caught in a payola scandal. Apparently Sony was giving away computers, trips, sneakers and other stuff to disc jockeys in exchange for playing songs by Sony artists. Now you know why Good Charlotte and Celine Dion have careers.
What's the connection? In both instances, I think, capitalism isn't working. Chrysler is using ads that are literally incredible; Sony is trying to shove bad musicians down people's throats. (Well, ears, really.) The result is that consumers, who are more sophisticated than they were back during Iacocca's first time around, may actually shun Chrysler cars more than they do now; and music fans, bored of formulaic radio, start stealing music off the Internet, listening to webcasts and Podcasts, and just generally rejecting all the crap that the music biz shovels out to the public.
Here's a particular irony about the Sony story: Apparently it's totally fine for Sony to break the law to get you to hear their music...but it's totally, totally wrong for consumers to break the law to try to hear/download music that they actually like....
