Long title no?
Up until about a week ago I was a subscriber to Bob Lefsetz‘ blog. Around a year ago Bill_H suggested it to me during a conversation about the music industry. So I gave it a shot, and honestly I found it fascinating. As someone who has very little to no interaction with musicians outside of his own niche genre, its rare that I would get opinions that didn’t start with “I really LOOOOOVE Mindless Self Indulgence and…” it was refreshing to hear from someone who actually knows the industry.
Eventually I got bored of Lefsetz, he would often digress into things that I didn’t care as actively about, or rant about albums sales, the types of things I would have an interest in if I were having a conversation face to face with someone about. Though there were some things that he said that stuck with me. Manly things I didn’t want to hear. Things like “You will never be that famous.”
Initially what I heard was “You will never be able to make a living doing what you want to do. Also, you are a fatty.” (Ok, maybe not that second part…) Honestly my main goal is to be a working musician, I want that to be my full time job. What Bob-o was trying to say is that I will likely never reach the level of “ROCK STARDOM” that we saw in the latter half of the 20th century. He posits that we will not be another Rolling Stones/Beatles/Eagles/U2. He attributes this to the same thing I attribute it to: the Internet. Yes, once again that series of tubes is to blame for the inevitable destruction of a chunk of our culture! But don’t go blaming piracy (though admittedly that is a factor) because the real reason is that the internet makes it so that artists don’t have to be signed to a major label to have their music heard in mass, nor are they needed to help distribute the music.
27,257,952 is a lot.
People who never would have been able to get a record deal are becoming internet superstars, look at Tay Zonday, Chocolate Rain has 27,000,000 views on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong, I consider him to be more of a meme than an artist, but the fact is, he has a good 27 million more views than you or I do on our music videos.
The bottom line is that he has made money off this song. He did a Dr. Pepper ad! He was in a Weezer video! He was parodied on South Park! All without a label. The PR machine that he tapped into was the internet, and that’s all anyone will need for a long long time.
Is this selling out arenas? No. Is he going to be known for anything but that song in 5 years? No. But it doesn’t matter. It’s proof of concept. Stars no longer are born solely out of hard work, years of scraping by, waiting for that “one big shot” where the right person might hear you.
I’m beating a dead horse here I know, if your reading this that means you’ve been to the internet, and that all of this is old hat to you, but I wanted to spell it out again anyway.
The way I see it is the record labels are going the way that the movie studios did in the 1950’s with the collapse of the Studio System. They no longer control the sole means of appropriation, marketing and distribution of music. It hurt them for a while, but the studio’s adapted. We still have movie stars, we still have big budget films, we still have the same groups of people working together over and over again. The only difference is that the movie studios didn’t have YouTube to compete with.
If the media companies are smart (which from what I have seen, they are not) they will adapt to this new set of trends. More and more artists are shrugging off their labels and going partially or completely independent because the studios are not offering them anything that they either can’t do themselves, or can’t find someone or something else to do it better with less restrictions.
Times have changed, and now it’s up to the media companies to catch up or bow out.
