All the focus is on streaming numbers when it should be on how many tickets you can sell.

Pop music is a highly-promoted arena based on a single song, which may stream prodigiously, but that does not mean the act has any fans.

Fans are made live. That’s where the bond is sealed.

For nearly two decades acts have been complaining that they have to go on the road to make their bread, as if this is a bad thing. The paradigm has shifted completely, if you’re not willing to work live, the odds of you having a lengthy career are not good. Furthermore, what works on the road is oftentimes completely different from what’s in the Spotify Top 50.

See streaming as promotion. In truth, many artists are making a fortune as a result of streaming. But then there are the artists complaining that despite even six digits of plays, they’re not making any real money.

Now the dirty little secret is very few of the acts in the so-called golden years ever got royalties. You may have heard them on the radio, and money was generated by airplay and sales, but this cash was eaten up by expenses and bad deals. The label would charge everything to your account, from limos to videos. It was very hard to get ahead unless you had a slew of hits/success and you had a manager who renegotiated. So, this fantasy that you’re being screwed by streaming is a falsehood. And the sooner you accept this, the sooner you can focus on building your career.

Streaming is the best thing that ever happened to you. Whether it be the DSPs like Spotify or social media. Your music is exposed. In the pre-internet era, very little music got exposure. But now, if people want to hear your music, it’s just a click away. The audience doesn’t have to buy it to hear it. Then again, there’s a plethora of material in the food chain and it’s harder than ever to gain attention.

So don’t focus on boosting your streams, focus on building your audience, which starts live and is goosed utilizing social media. See your recordings as an afterthought.

Look at Billy Strings… He plays arenas, seen as one of the biggest breakthroughs of the last five years, with tons of media attention, never mind fans. But his streaming numbers? Positively anemic for an act of this caliber. Not a single track of his breaks a hundred million streams. Sure, he’s got stuff in the low eight figures, 18 or 22 million, but only two cuts even break 50 million.

Now these numbers are nothing to sneeze at, but compared to the acts in the Spotify Top 50, they’re a joke. And it’s not like there’s a hit that’s waiting to go stratospheric. The material is secondary with Billy Strings. It’s about his playing ability and the music made live. Yes, you can check in with the cuts on a DSP, but you’re probably more interested in a live video on YouTube or recordings from Nugs.net or the Internet Archive.

Sure, you can call this Grateful Dead model, but don’t take that too far. Yes, the recordings were a secondary revenue source for the Dead, but they were progenitors, from a different era. Jam band music survives on the fumes of the Dead, and its live business is nothing to sneer at, but that’s not the only kind of music that works live.

But one thing that doesn’t work live on the way up is production. The Spotify Top 50 play big buildings and charge a lot for tickets and therefore believe they have to provide a ton of production, oftentimes with a lot of the music on hard drive. That’s more like a Broadway show than music.

And interestingly, what works live is oftentimes not in the genres featured in the Spotify Top 50. If you’re a starting pop singer, who doesn’t write, or only gets credits in collaboration, good luck. No, live, first and foremost you must have the chops, you must have the ability to play and sing.

Writing is important too, but not as critical as it is with the Spotify Top 50.

Rather you’re selling more than music, you’re selling a performance, an experience. A live, human experience in a computerized/mechanized world. Audiences are not looking for perfection, they’re looking to feel connected, to be moved.

And once you make a fan live, usually they’re a fan forever, if for no other reason than they paid for the ticket, they’re invested, it’s a sunk cost!

Guitars? They rule live, even though they may be hard to find in the Spotify Top 50.

Rock is not dead live, it’s fully alive!

So if you’re an up and comer, focus on gigs, whether they pay or not. Get yourself in front of people, learn the ropes, hone your act. If you’ve got it, people will respond.

And this does not mean you can never have a hit. And you never know when the Spotify Top 50 might flip, to career artists who are individuals who have something to say.

Also, live, bands rule. On recordings… It’s easier to focus on a single person, and no one wants to share the wealth, and managers don’t want to have to deal with four or five people or more.

All this focus on streams is skewing perception. The media constantly publicizes the record charts, but ticket sales and grosses might as well be locked up in a black box. Then again, everybody lies about ticket sales on the way up, it’s part of the hype.

It’s amorphous as opposed to clear-cut.

This is why the label groups are in trouble. They’re in the wrong business. The focus now is on live. There’s a much broader audience for live. Talk to people…it seems that everybody is going to multiple shows, acts don’t only play the metropolis anymore, people are hungry for live music.

Provide it.

Tune in August 22nd to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

Phone #: 844-686-5863 

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Don’t sign with a major label.

Unless you make broad-based pop or mainstream hip-hop (country is a world unto itself, with its own rules). That’s all they’re interested in. They’re equivalent to NASA. They plot endlessly for rare moonshots, they’re not interested in suborbital journeys, they want to bet it all, play for keeps.

And isn’t it interesting that rocketry has been taken over by outsiders like SpaceX. Amazing what one man with a vision and a checkbook can achieve (got to give Elon props here).

If you don’t make music in the designated genres, the majors probably don’t want you anyway. But if they do…what exactly are they going to do for you?

The majors are about money and business relationships, and those mean less than ever before.

The majors’ relationships are with gatekeepers: radio, TV, DSPs. They curry favor. But everybody knows that other than SNL and CBS “Sunday Morning,” TV doesn’t move the needle at all. It’s the modern equivalent of seeing your name in the paper. Cool, but meaningless.

As for terrestrial radio… The active demo, which skews young, doesn’t listen. They grew up in an on demand world, they don’t want to be told what to consume, never mind wait for it.

And then there’s press… If you think youngsters are getting their info from traditional outlets, you’re wrong. They don’t trust them. The writers have no credibility in their world, they only listen to their friends.

BINGO!

Did you read the story about Angie Nixon’s victory in Florida?

Leave the politics out, that’s not the point…

Other than the fact that what she was selling, a progressive viewpoint, was not served by the mainstream. This is anathema to insiders, they want to exert control over the process, but the bottom line is the public is alienated, doesn’t feel it’s being listened to.

And it’s the same case with music.

We’re in a Lou Pearlman moment. You remember Lou, right? Who had an idea which ultimately turned into a juggernaut. He formed Backstreet Boys and NSYNC when boy bands were seen as a novelty/joke, took them to Europe to break and hooked them up with Max Martin, a hungry Swede, to make these two acts the biggest in the world. And he did this right under the majors’ noses. The people who worked at the major labels were too hip for the room, they not only weren’t interested, they didn’t want their images tarred by association. However, by signing both of these artists, Clive Calder ended up with a multi-billion dollar buyout, the largest of its kind, ever. The money always comes from thinking outside the box.

Now let’s be clear, Nixon was not a nincompoop with no history. She had experience, a record, she was seen as a legitimate candidate, by the people, if not the establishment. But rather than listen to the words of the high-priced consultants, Nixon employed word of mouth, direct contact with the public to ensure success. More than ever, everyone is an individual these days. They want to be seen as such, not taken for granted, not spoken down to, and if you close them…THEY’LL SPREAD THE WORD TO EVERYBODY!

You’re selling passion. And no one is more passionate than a fan of an act on the way up, they feel that they own them, as long as the act hasn’t been forced down their throat.

Nixon’s opponent Alex Vindman raised $16.3 million dollars.

Nixon raised $975,000. Nixon couldn’t even afford one television ad. But she won by twelve percentage points.

Now let me be clear, not everybody can win. Not everybody has the talent. Dunning someone to pay attention when the music is not worth it will never work. But instead of banging your head against the major labels’ door, bang on the door of your ultimate customers. They are the definitive test. If they don’t want to spread the word, change what you’re doing or make peace with your obscurity.

You need to start off the radar screen. You need no PR.

And you must superserve your audience.

Fans want more. They don’t care if it’s covers on YouTube…forget official releases. Everyone in social media knows that sans frequency, you’ve got nothing. You’ve got to release clips, you’ve got to make people feel that you care about them…not some radio programmer or some other gatekeeper. It’s one on one.

That’s how you build it. Via direct connection, one by one.

And if you’re thinking about that big break, that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, stop before you start. The process is incredibly slow. You may be on the verge of giving up multiple times. But if you stick with it…

Once again, it’s 10,000 hours of HARD WORK! That’s the science, left out of Malcolm Gladwell’s book but in the definitive work “The Talent Code.” If you’re not challenging yourself constantly, it doesn’t matter how many hours you put in. It’s not about writing three songs and then spamming them across the internet. It’s about writing hundreds of songs, so it becomes reflex. Learning how to play the guitar or piano at a professional level. You pay your dues so when the spotlight is upon you, it’s natural.

And speaking of natural, that’s what sells. Humanity. Honesty. People may go to see the dancing fools in arenas, performing to hard drive, there is a business in that, but not as much as someone who connects directly.

The majors could employ this strategy, but then they’d be in the artist development business, which they left behind decades ago. The majors are just hoping they can sign you if you’re successful. But the truth is there’s a good chance your music might never stream in prodigious numbers. So what exactly can the label do for you?

As for signing with an indie… If you’re not willing to do the work yourself, don’t even start. There’s no black box, no magic, and no shortcuts. It’s you that have to be dedicated, you that have to work to make the connection, which all starts ONLINE! If you’re not willing to live online, you’re living in the last century and have almost no chance of success.

Young people know all this.

But not all young people are infatuated with music. They are looking for something different, something honest, and when they find it, they tell everybody they know about it. Look at Noah Kahan. He had one hit, “Stick Season,” which was a cult favorite, spread by word of mouth, before it broke bigger. Sure, Kahan is signed to a major, but you can’t point to another act in his genre having the same success on a major.

If you break it, people will be beating down your door to get in business with you. It’s these axioms no one wants to hear, because it might be a reflection on the quality and marketability of their work. The truth is Hollywood, the media-industrial complex, is peopled by sharks looking for prey 24/7, and there’s very little stuff worth biting.

But if you create it…

Mr. Old Crow Medicine Show.

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