Music Biz Ails; Columbia Hires Canary As Consultant

Music industry has found the answer to its mounting ails, which all iPod world by: album sales, being replaced by singles downloads, Tower Records and Borders closes apparently not a clue what music store.

But now there seems to be hope on the horizon. Columbia Records, try a radical new experiment. The record giant and a principle offender musical nonsense about an all too obliging government has kept a canary, much as songbirds have been employed to detect, by passing out the presence of poisonous gases.

The job of catchy bird is to give the executives at A & R department of a reality check of what a good song is.

Here is the new protocol. First the staff listens to a new track. If they think it has potential, they play it for tweety bird. If it starts to sing, they can present ditty to management for probable release.

On the other hand, if the canary just stare in silence or fall off its perch, the track is deemed not music.

Rumor says that the music industry can be recreated at a new melodiousness. So far hipsters in pop and rap in Columbia's A & R department has played over a hundred select for canary. But they have not managed to play yet one that has inspired the bird to sing together.

When the canary is nature's own expert song is just no way to get around that the singing creature is the ideal judge of catchy music.

Of course, A & R has grown somewhat impatient with the stringent new standard, but management can not afford to relent.

Indeed, the President of Columbia posted a sign in the A & R department that says: "If going into the woods to listen to the birdsong was good enough for Beethoven, it's good enough for us."

So A & R staff, much to their reluctant tutelage, to lie with only one choice: Listen to this bird.