The worst part of the supermarket experience isn’t the blinding UV lights, or even the heavy traffic of soccer mums moving their trolleys at a snails pace. It is, without doubt, the music.
The rotation of any supermarket’s soundtrack is basically anything in the current top 40 charts mixed with their own god awful promotion songs performed by fading sell outs. Congratulations, you now have Status Quo’s ‘Down Down’ jingle stuck in your head for the next hour. (Sorry!)
But what would happen if this were to change, and say, a supermarket decided to go against the grain and support local independent artists? Well in the UK that’s already happened, but maybe not with the results you’d hope for.
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As NME reports, British supermarket chain The Co-Operative Group recently launched a campaign to exclusively only play new, unsigned artists across all their stores; an initiative made with honourable intentions to use their platform to support rising musicians from local communities rather than repeating the same handful of chart-toppers from major label artists who, really, couldn’t care either way if a supermarket played their song or not.
All good, right? Great idea? Well, apparently not.
The Co-Op Group’s campaign wasn’t commended with praise, but instead, with a furious protest in the form of a hyperbolic army of people armed with torches and pitchforks.
Just take a look at some of the not-so glowing feedback the supermarket was bombarded with on Facebook:
Interestingly though, as NME (and the above Facebook post) point out, the original anti-indie protest wasn’t even coming from Co-Op customers – but from the actual staff.
Apparently workers just couldn’t bear the grating sound of supporting local artists in need and, heck, you really do start to miss hearing Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy’ when you don’t get to listen to it eight times in a four hour shift.
It finally got to a point where the tortured checkout chicks missed their little Iggy so much they stood in solidarity to force their employer to scrap their indie nonsense and once again fill the aisles with mainstream bangers.
The supermarket chain have now released an official statement on the matter, which read, “We recently piloted a new in-store radio service to showcase and show support for unsigned music acts. We did this because the initiative aligns well with The Co-operative Group’s new purpose of a championing initiatives which support our customers and their local communities. We have, however, had some negative feedback from colleagues.”
But it’s not all bad news – it looks like the supermarket chain are digging their heels in the sand and are refusing to scrap their plan entirely.
“We’ve listened carefully and have acted to reinstate well known acts while retaining slots on our programming for unsigned musicians to have their songs heard.”
Ugh, this is why we can’t have nice things.
