When Tonje Langeteig’s “I Don’t Want to be a Crappy Housewife” became a viral video hit, the comparisons to Rebecca Black’s “Friday” were ubiquitous. Finally, our short attention spans had a new object of so-bad-it’s-good kitsch ridicule.

I thought this might be an interesting opportunity for a mashup. As it turned out, the songs work surprisingly well together. They’re in closely-related keys and have simple and largely compatible harmonic structures. They share common formal elements – a bridge with an unexpected male rapper.

Most strikingly, however, their lyrics create an interesting counterpoint – “Friday” is unabashedly about being young, while “Housewife” is about being old, and futile attempts to reclaim the innocence of youth. Friday’s heroine is a kid being a kid, while our crappy housewife is an adult, desperately trying to be a kid again.

I’m generally not a big pop music listener. This isn’t some kind of ivory tower stance – I don’t have any problem with the idea of music as a commodity. It’s just that I usually don’t find the music itself all that compelling.

But I have a huge amount of respect for contemporary pop music. From a production point of view, there’s so much to learn from chart radio – how to get a big sound, how to create “hooks,” etc.

With modern music production tools being so inexpensive and easy to use, I’m especially fascinated by the fact that certain songs win while others lose and still others become kitsch icons, when the surface level of all of them is often largely indistinguishable.

What is it – the essence of the thing – that makes these two songs the object of such ridicule? Sure, the lyrics are a little trite. But are they really that much more trite than many of the songs that sell millions of copies?

If I knew the answers to these questions, I’d be a millionaire instead of an armchair musicologist. But what’s clear is that inexpensive, easy tools have not evened out the playing field as much as we like to think. Yes, anyone can make music in their bedroom now, and it will sound 98% as good as anything else.

But there’s something in that other 2% that’s neither inexpensive nor easy.

It’s fairly well-established that the once-promising budgeting and bank aggregation site Mint has become terrible. A cursory read through the Google results for “mint.com sucks” reads like a litany of first-world financial suffering – inaccessible data, inaccurate data, almost no official support, etc.

We’re used to our web experiences getting better, not worse, over time. Seemingly every day, Google releases another mind-blowing web platform that upends an entire industry. And the products are actually good, so these success stories make sense. In light of this, it’s interesting to examine the failures.

With the benefit of hindsight, some of the spectacular crashes of the first dot-com bust were hilarious. (Anyone remember flooz.com?) It was apparently possible to get venture funding for even the most self-evidently bad ideas.

But Mint is fundamentally a fantastic idea, and actually could be amazing. Early on, they rolled out a great looking and highly functional aggregation tool, and even have a seemingly reasonable revenue model: based on an analysis of your accounts, they show you offers from vendors offering competing products (and take some sort of kickback if you sign up). It was certainly good enough to kill off a number of potentially interesting competitors early on.

Then they got bought by Quicken. The rest is history. The quality of the data and support began to drop almost immediately. What never lagged, however, was development of the revenue model. Even now, at the apex of customer outrage on their official support channels, the latest update to Mint’s iPhone app introduced…partner offers.

Who’s to blame when good internet companies go bad? I have some theories:

1. The customer is to blame. Users of web platforms are quick to buy into the illusion that they’re using free products. This is a fallacy. Web platforms are free in the same sense that network television is free; you pay in time spent being exposed to advertising. In the case of Mint, this is literal advertising – you see offers from partners. In the case of Facebook, Google, etc., the payment is more subtle. It is not your eyes but rather your data that is exposed to advertising. This doesn’t cost you time up front but you can be sure that you have something that is worth money to vendors somewhere. Because we trick ourselves into believing these tools are free, we feel less entitled to quality.

Customers: resist. Web tools are a product, just like a tangible good. If they break, complain – loudly and publicly. If this doesn’t fix it, use a different tool. There are alternatives everywhere, for everything.

2. The web platform provider is to blame. Cheered on by duped users who believe they’re getting shiny internet toys for “free,” web platform providers can easily be insulated from the need to add actual value.

Web platform providers: resist. You make things. If they break, fix them. Go home at the end of the day proud of the good thing you made, not the money you made from it. Good things are more important (and, as Google should have taught you by now, lead to more money in the end anyway).

It’s not too late for Mint. Maybe they’ll get smart, start working on functionality again and fix everything they’ve neglected. But they’ll only get there if their users start voting for quality.

This is my vote.