to the football vs. music question is that you don't choose your club in the way you do your music, in my own and I would guess many other's experience one is born into supporting the club. You support one club but many, many bands or artists.

We still live in an era when its a bigger taboo to criticise Girls Aloud than it is to criticise The Sex Pistols or The Clash. Inverted snobbery has replaced snobbery and its in no way an advance.

I usually find those who would argue that there's nothing wrong with pop stars selling their wears to corporate interests are the exact same people who call Ben Elton a sell-out for working in West End musicals. The new rules seem complicated, many people don't have a problem with their favourite artists letting their songs be used in adverts or dumb movies, but what if they announced they were going to duet with James Blunt? I would suggest the new non-puritan fanbase would soon be reaching for the pitchforks.

You said:

"The notions of "selling out" or "keeping it real" seem ridiculous, idealistic and antiquated"

I'm a wee bit depressed that you think idealism nicely slots between the words ridiculous and antiquated. There's as much hypocrisy with modern apolitical music as there was with any half-arsey attempted integrity of old. Give me the latter any day, at the very least it might raise awareness of an issue, raise a few bob for charity or involve the musician owning a pair of gonads.

It’s funny you should do a compare-'n'-contrast between football and rock, because I’ve been half-heartedly brewing a blog on a very similar subject for the last few days.

It turns out that certain aspects of rock – particularly "classic" rock - music can be equated quite neatly with recent developments in football. You could say that Rod & Britt are now Becks & Posh. The preening, pouting rock god has been reborn as Cristiano Ronaldo. Overblown Live at the Budokan triple albums are back in the form of the big clubs' no-doubt-commercially-viable-but-otherwise-risibly-irrelevant summer visits to "emerging markets". The plaster-casting groupies have been recycled as shag-and-tell WAGs. Peter Grant is now coining it as a players' agent specialising in the darker, bung-bound arts. And the green-and-gold protest is, of course, punk redux.

History is repeating itself, although our culture's preferred entertainment has changed.

Rock is dead. Long live football.

Says everything anyone needs to know about football in the here and now.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-England-Lose-Phenomena-Explained/dp/00073011...

No, I'm not literally standing in a lay-by arguing with a crisp packet.

Their stance is that you're only 'selling out' if you compromise your art for commercial gain. If you record a song and later on someone wants to give you £50k to put it on an advert for baked beans, fair enough. If they ask you to re-do the vocals to sing 'I gotta lust for Beans' or 'We live on Beans, we are Sparta FC' then that isn't.

are acts who are made to be sold and there are acts who sell their music.

The Monkees were made to be sold. The fact that they made some great songs was perhaps indicative of the belief at the time that you still needed great content even though you had the marketing all sewn up and a virtual monopoly on an audience pregnant with expectation and disposable income. Perhaps The Monkees are revered more now than they were then by the simple fact that they could sing without aid, play instruments and get something down in a studio without needing a bank of knobs and buttons to polish it all into a presentable form.

Nowadays it's more difficult to know which acts are made to be sold and which acts sell their music. All music genres have been compromised by commercial objectives and to a large extent all genres have been homogenised through common factors such as factory-line production techniques, the ubiquitous video and instant accessibility across all media.

As a result it's harder to tell whether the song you are hearing has already been compromised to the extent that it's a "sell-out" or whether it's a genuine moment of serendipitous coincidences . Often the route of the song to your ear has followed essentially the same commercial rules and routes. It's whether or not the song was written at source by someone with a need to make music or by someone with a belief that they could play the game to get rich by writing a song.

...I'd boo Campbell every time he got the ball.* What the Spurs fans will never forgive is that he allowed his contract to expire, so that he could leave on a Bosman ruling, so he could use his zero price tag to engineer an even higher wage packet. So the club that nurtured him from their youth team were left with nothing, and he went to our bitterest rivals, professing bewilderment at why crossing this divide was such a big deal.

* I naturally do not condone any of the homophobic or racist abuse Campbell has received. But booing and cries of 'Judas' are fair game. It's a football ground, not the Royal Opera House.

selling my talent was how I made money. Did I care about all of the tracks on which I played? Of course not - in just the same way that those of you with a day job have days when you don't particularly care about your job. You just get your head down and do the best you can in order to avoid getting sacked :-)

With the greatest of respect to the Massive, you need to remember that 99.9% musicians have to earn a daily buck to eat - a small fraction of musicians have a deal that means they don't need to work to pay the bills. An even smaller fraction have the sort of deal that allows them to sit around idly pontificating on their art. In almost every case, the art takes second place to eating and housing.

'Selling Out' is how musicians put a roof over their heads.

If you consistently told your employer and all their stakeholders that you were "definitely, 100% going to sign a new contract", having been nutured, highly paid and respected by that employer throughout your career - all blatant and calculated lies - also depriving your employer to "cash in" on your talent to the tune of an eight figure sum on the basis that you trusted his word, would you be totally surprised and alarmed to receive "dogs" abuse everytime you went back in to the home of your earlier company? Especially when your new employer manager asked you at interview stage "can you cope with the abuse" - you answer "absolutely" and then spend years whining and bleating about it like scolded schoolgirl and ringing Radio 4 for a moan.

Then, when you have made another move in your career, to a business who have extended your international reputation and paid you significant sums to add to your multi millions in your tax beneficial bank accounts, now find themselves on hard times in administration making average Joes redundant left right and centre, do you a) count your blessings or b) sue them for more cash?

Sol Campbell - I'm not a fan.

I'm a Hold Steady fan, both in the literal and Facebook senses of the word. Yesterday, the Facebook group for the band notified their fans that their new record is now available for pre-order. I put my order in for the package containing the album on 12", the new single on 7" and all the songs plus a bonus track or two on FLAC or 320 MP3 (by the way, I was delighted to see my favourite formats recognised in a package like this. Brilliant stuff).

What wasn't fair enough, apparently, was the fact that the band were using iTunes as well as their own sales channel to market the new record. Time and again they were accused of "selling out" on the comments accompanying the notification on Facebook. My response was "don't be ridiculous - the band have got to eat, for fuck's sake", or words to that effect. Here is a direct quote from one of the Great Unhinged (same man having already commented about the "sell-out"):

Look at all the little suburban corporate shills. I bet all of you who don't understand why its a sell out have your little Ipods ready, and your iphones all set to download them. How sad are you people, my god!!

The upshot of which is that I suppose there is a tiny minority for whom "selling" is the same as "selling out". Or at least, selling using a large corporation (or anything bigger than an anarcho-syndicalist commune) to help with the distribution.

Bunch of bollocks, IMO - as previously stated by others, the only real sell-out is one where the quality or content of the actual work is compromised by the sale.

My personal favourite example of which, by the way, is Shed Seven re-recording "Speakeasy" for Dixon's Link a few years ago: "At the Link it's easy!"

Brilliant.

In my eyes, they are a band who have sold out. Not because, with their latest record, they have finally really cracked the mainstream, but because of the way they have changed to do so. Gone is the deep fried grittiness of their early work to be replaced by over-produced MOR rock balladary. This is not musical 'evolution', but a deliberate ploy to appeal to the teenage girl market.

And yes, that deep-fried grittiness phrase might not really work, but I'm sticking with it:)

I don't really have a problem with bands selling songs to adverts. I do have a problem with artists selling themselves to the highest bidder and principles be damned. But then that's not restricted to musicians.

The thing is the main offenders seem to invariably be the mass market stars who have made a fortune already. Why on earth does Beyonce need to sell her soul to some dictator for a couple of million more?

Now love him or hate him it was definitely hats off to his decision not to do a gig when he found out it was a function room full of bastards, sorry, debt collectors thus losing his fee.
Personally I would have trousered it, gone out and taken the piss out of the leeches and given it to a debt charity!

Same thing - Murmur, Reckoning, Lifes Rich Pageant all great albums. Shiny happy people was a fluke hit single the propelled them into a different league. No problem with that at all but surely its not a reason to make crap music all of a sudden?

Same with U2 and I am sure a load of other artists but I cant be arsed to look back at potential culprits.

What would surely have been a complete anathema to Pete in the 70's - a greatest hits slot at the Superbowl, and songs clips on TV shows - now seems to make perfect (commercial) sense.

There's a compelling logic - if someone wants to buy, if it's yours to sell, why not? It's not always a good match I'd admit - "Alright Now" and chewing gum? Lydon and butter?

That said, Iggy flogging insurance from a company that won't cover musicians, and Pet Shop Boys covering mounting CD's on one of the UK's most homophobic papers do make me wonder if there are some circumstances where the cash just isn't enough of a justification.

what wouldn't you do for money?

If you were an architect would you design Auschwitz?

Guantanamo Bay Detention centre?

Prison with execution chamber?

Low-security detention centre?

Same applies in any walk of life there must be a moral line that you would not cross. What worries me is that as a result of the anti-PC hysteria no one seems willing to discuss these issues any more. I'm with Extra Texture on this I preferred it when public figures espoused values that they then failed to live up to as opposed to the cynical anything goes attitude of today.