Is this an ending, the descent for ambient music ?

Yet again the internet has given birth to another overnight sensation, this time its actually a 35 minute piece of ambient music ? What baffles me is how this fairly interesting piece of music has taken off ? I mean most ambient music on the web by a well known artist would be lucky to get a couple of thousand hits per year with one of their tracks, so for an unknown electronic artist with 203 followers on soundcloud to reach half a million in one day its hard to understand how ?

Well I guess the name of teen pop idol Justin Bieber and his hit song "U Smile" has helped somewhat in drawing an audience to this genre of music usually ignored by mainstream followers or could it be the mastermind of some major music marketing executive to further boost the profile of J Bieber by causing a viral sensation ?

Seemingly The track in question was achieved by simply importing the original 4 min pop song into some free software and slowing it down by 800%, which I have to admit the results are pretty interesting. The track now reminds me a little of John Foxx's "Cathedral Oceans" album but without the deeply emotional impact. Some people are claiming this to be the most beautiful ambient track ever created, like the music that could possibly be played on the PA system at the pearly gates ?? Seriously though you wouldn't have to search for a very long time on youtube etc to find ambient music thats far far superior.

Ok so this track could be a very positive thing for the ambient music scene in general or more than likely it could start a worrying new trend, I can imagine already thousands if not millions of people around the world already trawling through their pop MP3 collections frantically time stretching track after track in the vain attempt to find the next instant ambient hit..

So where does this leave the producers of real ambient music ? will everything we produce from now on be judged as some pop song we simply slowed down and called it our own ? or does this open us up to a whole new audience of ambient lovers ?

Hopefully though like all internet sensations, it will be forgotten about in a few days, the major record labels will continue to spew the same old shit, artist like Shamantic will probably never make a buck from his own music and the real ambient music world will continue pleasing their small group of dedicated fans..


Time will tell...




J. BIEBZ - U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis