Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Well, I think it's just arrogant

You would think, wouldn't you, that if you were a publication called BBC Music Magazine you would be quite content with the web address bbcmusicmagazine.com, no? I mean, it makes sense. It describes the purpose of the web site rather well. Perhaps you could quibble that it should be bbcmusicmagazine.co.uk, but other than that it does the job.
But that's not good enough, is it? Because "the world's best-selling classical music magazine" isn't content with just being the world's best-selling classical music magazine - which means what, anyway, just that maybe more people buy it than commit murder. Oh no, so-called B so-called B so-called C so-called Music so-called Magazine has loftier ambitions than that and now the web site is classical-music.com. World domination beckons! Because now the magazine is up there with its unhyphenated brethern: gibberish extravaganza classicalmusic.com and classicalmusic.co.uk, which is apparently home to The Escape Committee: Gamekeeper to the web rhino.
So now when we think of classical music on the intertubes we must think of BBC Music Magazine. This will end in tears, I know it. After all, anyone who believes everything that Universal Music Group tells them will be aware that "Deutsche Grammophon is classical music". Could this be the opening skirmish in a war for the very soul of classical music? I'm absolutely convinced it must be. I think we can safely assume that at some point in the future our corporate overlords will rule that someone somewhere does indeed have the rights to the use of the term "classical music", just as the U.S. Olympic Committee has exclusive ownership of the adjective "Olympic".
In the meantime, let me conclude this ill-conceived diatribe by remarking that on the old bbcmusicmagazine.com you could log in without going to a separate page, and on the new classical-music.com you can't. Swine.

1 comment:

JFLL said...

I wonder how much they paid for this web address? And did it come out of the BBC licence fee? (OK Nereffid, I know you don't pay it, so you couldn't care less.)