Who remembers excitedly, gathering around the TV on a Friday night at 7pm, to watch your favourite artists perform (mostly!) live? I do! Since the age of social media and music streaming platforms, I feel like there has been a real disconnect between music artists and their audience; a gap that Top of the Pops (totp) previously, used to fill.
The excitement of watching the latest music video from Bon Jovi or Michael Jackson, would define the entire week and continue to be the topic of conversation. Totp is a music show that not only transcended generations (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s etc) but also featured the official music charts top 40 in the UK, but also connected fans with their favourite artists, as you could get tickets to attend the live show.
The world has moved on in so many ways, but literally nothing has replaced this direct fan and artist connection. In my opinion, if anything, social media has created a “distance” between fans and artists, as more often than not, it is the management team that run the music artists social media accounts, or the artist posts carefully curated content, which minimises their sense of realness.
There were many variations of totp back in the day too, with channel 4 having the chart show, and CD:UK on ITV, but totp always remained the favourite one, and I think it’s high time it returned to our TV screens, so that people can return to the good old fashioned discussion of “who’s going to be number one this week…?”
Jem Girl at the Piano 