I was reading again about Slade’s perennial hit Merry Christmas Everybody. Re-released again and again, it’s been a Christmas hit year after year. When it was first released, in order to keep up with sales even record pressing plants from abroad had to be, er, pressed into service to keep up with the demand.
Great story, huh? Well, it is if you’re anything to do with the performance or songwriting royalties, but not if you’d been an up and coming young artist in, say, France, and your first single, despite great demand, suddenly becomes unavailable because you’re just some young artist with nothing going for you but talent and the mighty Slade machine with all its money behind it is taking away the pressing plant facilities you need to get your record in the shops to finally get recognition for all the blood sweat and tears you’ve put in over the years. Did you do anything wrong? No. Are they any more talented than you? Arguably not. Where’s the difference? They’d got the money behind them. You don’t hear about aspects like this in the papers because it makes for unpleasant reading. For every success story there’s a whole load of unwritten failure stories, except the success isn’t really the artist’s success and the failure’s not theirs either. Maybe there was a French Slade pinning their hopes and their last francs on their Christmas single that year who got stiffed so Slade and their industry associates could get even richer. Not such a Bon Noel for them, eh?
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