The era of big marketing is OVER!

That was the mantra of the nineties, get the word OUT!  Let everybody know, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN!

This was radically different from the late sixties and early seventies.  When every record wasn’t expected to go platinum, back before there even WERE platinum records, back before the labels had endless wads of cash and somewhere to SPEND the Benjamins.

I mean where the fuck were you gonna lay off all that dough back then?  FM radio was a bunch of stoners you could get high, but payola didn’t really return until the resurgence of Top Forty in the eighties.  And how much did an ad in "Rolling Stone" cost ANYWAY?  Never mind "Fusion", "Crawdaddy" or "Zoo World".  And you didn’t have to pay travel costs to New York to do the "Today Show", hell, TV didn’t even FEATURE music, not on a regular basis, not in any depth.  As for wardrobe and hairstylists…they weren’t even part of the equation.  Gregg Allman didn’t need a woman in tow to fix his tresses, all he needed was a bottle of shampoo.  And what you wore offstage you wore on.  And video costs?  They didn’t even EXIST!

What broke the bands of yore was the MUSIC!

If you need any evidence that the nineties marketing era is over, just tune into MTV, the force that DROVE the business for twenty years.  It doesn’t play any MUSIC!

There was one channel.  That made or broke your act.  Playing music 24/7, at least at first.  The pipe was just wide enough to keep the audience satiated, and even though acts that didn’t get on MTV were fucked, those that made it on blew up to SUCH a degree that the purveyors couldn’t complain.

In the seventies, you couldn’t get the message out.  In the nineties it became ABOUT the message.  Letting people know, beating them over the head.  Endless videos and singles.  Promoted all over TV.

But now it’s like somebody dropped an atomic bomb on the scene.  Or maybe, more importantly, there are ALTERNATIVES!

It’s the choice that’s fucking up the system.  The majors would like us to only be interested in their wares.  But they don’t get it at all.  Signing fewer acts, working them with fewer employees, that’s going in the WRONG DIRECTION!  The goal is to have a SMORGASBORD of product that ultimately appeals to everybody, not to try to get everybody to buy the same few records.  Hell, you can market and market and nobody cares.

For everybody enthralled with the success of the Pussycat Dolls, there is a PLETHORA of individuals who’ve NEVER HEARD THE ACT!  They don’t HAVE TO!  There are enough alternative avenues of exposure.  You’re not FORCED to pay attention to the "system", just like underground FM radio gave us a respite from AM Top Forty in the sixties.  Believe me, Louis Armstrong’s "Hello Dolly" and Frank Sinatra’s "Strangers In The Night" would have done a FRACTION of the business if everybody wasn’t forced to listen to the same Top Forty stations SPINNING THEM!  Hell, I don’t watch "Desperate Housewives", or "E.R.", hell I’ve never even seen an EPISODE of either!  I fill up my viewing hours with what’s on pay cable.  Do I care that fewer people watch what I do than the mainstream network crap?  No, I feel SUPERIOR!

It was one big homogenous society in the MTV years.  There wasn’t mainstream and underground, not oversold and hip, we were all in it together during Reagan and Clinton.  Now we’re PROUD to say we don’t listen to Christina Aguilera, never mind Paris Hilton.  Oh, we know who they ARE, but we never have to listen to their music, and we LIKE THIS!

Used to be you spent enough and you got a shot at traction.  Now, you can overhype something like the New York Dolls’ return and ultimately nobody cares but the insiders.  The return of the vaunted New York Dolls?  They can’t even sell 10,000 records a week, no matter HOW skinny David Johansen still is.  People just don’t CARE!  It’s an insider circle jerk.  The music sucks.

Oh, it’s become about the music again.  Hell, that’s why Top Forty still works.  Those records that run to the top of the chart, they may be meaningless, but they’re expertly crafted pop gems.  They’ve got hooks constructed by teams, lyrics done on the assembly line.  But only the exception, like Gnarls Barkley’s "Crazy", truly enraptures you.  The rest…hook you about as much as "Afternoon Delight", which ruled AM in the seventies.  Yes, Top Forty is not the main show, but a SIDESHOW!

And the rest of the world?  A complete morass.

Spend all you want, you can’t reach those who’ve tuned the Top Forty out.  They’re lost to the major marketers FOREVER!  They know it’s all fake and phony.  If they want something new, it’s got to be real, unhyped, GOOD!  And they’ve got to discover it by themselves.  From surfing, from a friend.  If the machine endorses it, it’s CRAP!

It’s a mad dash for musical fulfillment.  Yes, it’s those in the creative labs who are going to triumph in the coming years.  It’s not about business deals, but what’s on the RECORD (er, file).

If you want to make it in this media-saturated world, you’ve got to deliver the essence.  Something so appealing that people WANT to listen to it again and again and want to tell all their friends about it.  You can’t tell your friends about Britney, everybody already knows ALL ABOUT HER!

True A&R men are going to come back.  Not the sycophants and phonies at major labels today.  People with sieves so narrow, nothing innovative can slip through.  No, it’s like the late sixties, when if it sounds good, FEELS GOOD, you commit to it.  Not because you can hype the image, or the singer is good-looking, because those things NO LONGER MATTER!  Not when it comes to career acts.  Hell, the more you hype, the shorter the career.  MTV proved that.  And everybody on the street knows that.  People want to OWN things.  Not be SOLD THEM!

It’s an era of underground.  Don’t view Pearl Jam as the paradigm so much as Ani DiFranco.  I personally think she’s overrated, but her audience believes she’s godhead and buys enough of her CDs and goes to see her in such prodigious numbers that she’s laughing all the way to the proverbial bank.  Because she’s OUTSIDE!  It’s the LACK of mainstream marketing that keeps her flame burning.

If you sign with a major label, you’d better be anticipating a brief career.  But now, after years of entertainment business publicity/information, musicians know if your career is brief you won’t make any MONEY!  Acts want to be in it for the long haul.  Which means they’d much rather go indie.  And there’s no money to break them in indiedom.  So, you can only focus on one thing, MUSIC, and hope you get lucky.

Maybe Pitchfork writes about you.  And that even leads to airplay.  Can you say ARCADE FIRE?  But this works only so long as Pitchfork is cool.  That’s the line that Fox is walking with MySpace and doesn’t even realize.  Unlike MTV, Murdoch’s minions don’t manage the brand.  Instead of looking outside, MySpace now seems mainstream, and this will lead to its ultimate usurpation as surely as Google unseated not only Yahoo, but the once dominant AOL (then again, AOL was barely ever cool).

It’s no longer about hype/marketing, but brand MANAGEMENT!

But that requires the underlying product to have soul, to connect.

And it doesn’t have to be pretty.  Check out Crocs for an example.  It just has to RESONATE!