cool dry place

Rogers is using “The Holy Ground” by the High Dials (mp3, 4.2MB) in their television commercials shilling their new mobile download service. I have a few things to say about that.

I was unaware that the High Dials really existed. Given the complete lack of attention they have received from anyone outside of little clubs in Toronto, I simply assumed I had made them up. I seem to remember a dream I had a few years ago, where my friend Katie and I went to see them at The Horseshoe as part of CMW. We had to sit through 45 minutes of Death from Above (critically acclaimed or not, they live on in my memory as deafeningly shitty) before the Dials took the stage. The audience was unimpressed (eclectic Montreal bands were still four months away from becoming cool) and basically stood and scowled at them for 20 minutes until the set was cut short to accommodate Nardwuar and The Evaporators’ impending idiot love-fest.

Upon reflection, I realise that that all happened.

So this Rogers commercial started playing on the television and, as I normally do when I hear a great song in an unexpected medium, I got up from my chair and jumped around and announced to a bemused Sherry, “That’s that song by those guys!”

She called them sell-outs and went back to her book.

Sherry has the right to not give a damn about the High Dials. We first met around the time I bought their first album, and in the first few months of our relationship I had an annoying tendency to show up at her house and pack her Windows Media “now playing” list with Beck and Sloan and Plaskett and the Tragically Hip and erase from it any trace of Radiohead and whatever else she used to listen to before there was a loud hairy Regan in her life. And then I’d top it all off with “Things are Getting Better (mp3, 5MB),” a four-minute-and-twenty-second instrumental orgy of sitars, electric guitars, hand-claps and a horn section that I first experienced on CBC Radio 3 (back before they shut the site down and replaced it with a podcast/playlist operation run by zombies that’s basically Chart plus audio content) and couldn’t get out of my head for months.

Her retaliation for these unsolicited musical interludes is ongoing, and usually involves making me watch Oprah or the Food Network.

The point I originally set out to make is that the High Dials haven’t sold out. They’re doing what they have to do to get by. By the fact that their song is used in the commercial, we, as naive consumers can assume that at least a portion of their catalogue is available to paying customers of Rogers’s music download service. Setting aside for a moment the debate about whether such download services are good for the consumer, we see a band that can’t get radio play because they rode the wrong edge of the double-edged can-con sword securing a source of income in a new content-delivery model to a platform that has traditionally been dominated by high-cost ringtone versions of top-40 darlings.

Good on Rogers for banking on Canadian content.

Again setting aside any debate over Rogers’s pros and cons to the consumer, I like their advertising. It is unique among Canadian communications companies in that the ads don’t rely on cartoony animals and feel-good slogans; a typical Rogers ad features real human beings acting out a usage scenario — father pauses hockey game for tender moment with son, lovestruck twentysomething makes dozens of phone calls searching for his dream girl, and so on. My favourite so far has been the one for the “4GB Music Phone” in which a woman takes the phone around to her friends, having each copy selections from their own collections into the phone before giving it as a gift. It’s an activity that flies in the face of the current trend toward tenacious and litigious defense of “intellectual property rights” and in fact mirrors the horror story told over and over at press conferences and in politicians’ ears in defense of the many faulty and oppressive DRM schemes being implemented at every level of creative content’s path from creator to consumer.

This thoughtful woman who loves music is stealing from musicians.

It is a usage case that will be completely impossible with any tracks you might choose to download from Rogers’s newly-minted unlimited music download service. All music purchased will play only in the in-phone Rogers music app (Mobile MusicPlayer) and on your PC (and only yours) in Rogers MediaPlayer for Windows.

But they’re really good songs.