Shop Talk: 10 Reasons Adorable Singing Cats are the Future of the Music Industry

In case you haven’t heard, the music industry is dying. This statement may not be based in numbers or statistics or, well, actual fact, but all the boo-hooing about illegal downloads and MP3s and streams and shareables and niches and Internets has to mean something, right? We need a savior of sorts, a force to give all us sad journalists and PR reps and label managers and Apple CEOs a little extra financial boost. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you cats.

A number of badass cats have scratched their way into viral video-dom this week. Of course, none of them match the 7-million-plus-hits splendor of last year’s Keyboard Cat, but we have two exciting up-and-comers. One is a dead ringer (and crooner) for Joanna Newsom (Thanks to LA Times for pointing this out) and another sounds just like T-Pain (and thank you Jezebel for that one). These kittehs, so disparate in style, have two important things in common. 1). They’re cute. 2). They’re going to save us all. Here’s how.

10 Reasons Singing Cats Could Save The Music Industry

1). They’re timely. Ben Huh, CEO of I Can Haz Cheeseburger, got over 10 million pageviews per month last year. If he can get that many hits with mere captions, think about the traffic a tabby covering Tom Waits could bring in.

2). They’re timely. A bunch of people ($2.15 million dollars worth of people, according to LA Times) went to see Babies last weekend, a film in which babies played with puppies and kitties, and which reportedly made male Village Voice reviewers ovulate.

3). They’re timeless. Who hasn’t wanted to look at a cat, ever?

4). They’re cheap. According to David McCandless at InformationIsBeautiful.net, a human artist earns around 94 cents on each iTunes download of a $9.99 album, leaving about $6.29 for their label. Cats don’t care about royalties. They care about cat food. A can of IAMS cat food costs 77 cents at Target. Seventeen cents doesn’t seem like that big of a difference, but think about that fraction of a dollar after the Keyboard Cat effect. Seven million dollars x 17 cents = $1.19 million more Capitol could be putting away annually. And while, like humans, cats might complain about getting unfair compensation for their creative material, getting horribly exploited, blah, blah, blah—unlike humans, you can just put them outside until they stop.

5). They’re furry.

6). They can tweet more coherently than M.I.A..

7). They would make excellent profile subjects (and cover stories!). No amount of hairspray/PR coaching/access restriction/charm school can keep a real cat from telling you its mind.

8). A bunch of people went to see a Broadway production where people dressed up like singing cats.

9). As aforementioned, people went nuts for keyboard cat! He played off everyone from this poor Miss Teen USA contestant to Stephen Colbert.

10). I’m willing to bet that this post ends up in our Most Read because you clicked on a link with “Adorable Singing Cats” in the title.

My Singing Cat (who sounds like Joanna Newsom according to LA Times)

Kittens in Autotune