No Platinum Albums
Is it streaming, albums, the music or all three?
If you’re looking for evidence that the sales model is dead, here it is. If you’re a marginal band on the road surviving on $20 signed CDs, if you’re employing sales shenanigans as publicity to drive concert attendance, I’ve got no problem with that. But if you’re decrying the death of sales as a vast conspiracy of the military industrial complex, I feel sorry for you. Things change. Agitating for a return to the past based on the loss of some beneficial features in the future is futile in a world where we sacrifice the keyboards of our BlackBerries for apps on our Androids and iPhones. Something is always lost in the march of progress. You could lament the disappearance of vent windows in automobiles with the advent of air conditioning but you’d be fighting a losing battle because the exclusion of these small windows saved the manufacturers money and most people didn’t miss them, when was the last time you even thought of them?
Most people don’t miss owning music. They have faith in the internet. They believe access is like electricity, something you can count on. And if you still believe you need access to stream music I feel sorry for you, you’re uneducated.
So the public has spoken, people don’t need to own the product. They don’t need to show off their wares to others, but they still want to listen.
They just don’t want to listen to the album.
If we can’t force people to buy long players, if we put them online to be cherry-picked, people are going to. So the album is purely a promotional device, a way to get the antique media to trumpet your name and product and existence in this vast world of ours. But one shot promotion is a fading paradigm itself. It doesn’t pay ongoing dividends. In a world where what happened at noon is already forgotten at midnight who cares that you spent years crafting ten songs to bestow upon us. Come on, you’ve seen the story… This is my very best work, I love my producer, I’m in a good space, you need to listen…
Make me puke.
Turns out you’re not selling your brand, that’s another bunch of crap, you’re selling your music. And unless your music appeals, you’re screwed.
And here’s where the naysayers go nuclear. All this hogwash about the cost of production, the years of commitment, the odds stacked against them, the entitlement to attention. Where did they learn these untruths? It’s like a college graduate believing he’s entitled to a 500k a year job just because he graduated, delineating all the while what he studied in school. No, if you want our attention, you’ve got to earn it, the hard way, by making music we want to hear.
And some of this music is made every year. A lot of it by the usual suspects. Like Max Martin and Dr. Luke. And this makes everybody not working with them crazy. They say these pros make hackneyed tunes undeserving of the airwaves. But these complainers seem unable to construct competitive product.
So as we go forward, more than ever, it depends on the hit.
And it’s harder to have a hit than ever before. Because everybody’s listening in a different place. Which is another reason why there’s no platinum albums. Top Forty may be the dominant radio format, but most people aren’t listening to it!
And it turns out country fans have computers, they don’t need to buy the product either.
A hit opens doors. It goes viral via public comment. That’s right, the public makes the hits. Don’t believe me? Sing a song off of Beyonce’s latest album. Better yet, sing a Lorde song that’s not “Royals.” In an era of plenty, we only want the best.
And that sucks if you’re an artist who thinks they need forty minutes to make a statement, if you make music that must be listened to forty times to get it. I’ll be honest, in the seventies I came to like so much stuff because of radio repetition. I can’t all of that stuff was great. But today, no one is subjected to that level of repetition.
So, forget sales, they’re history, they’re a niche item. They’re the past, not the future.
And forget albums too. You’re creating a body of work.
But don’t think if you release one track a month that’s a good strategy. The key is to get a hard core audience that is interested in whatever you do and to feed them on a regular basis and to know this is where it ends unless you deliver something so special they make it go viral. That’s right, you’ll get more attention putting out an album and taking advantage of the media machine than throwing crap on the wall, but that promotional game is fading. Just like SoundScan numbers in publications are soon to be passe.
And know that music is hard. Those who write hits in five minutes wrote a ton of crap before that. And that writing a song is easy, but writing a great one is hard. And the fact that you like it does not mean everybody else will too.
Meanwhile, radio keeps driving down the niche road. It’s still the most powerful way to expose music, it’s just less powerful than ever before, and this is never going to change. Because radio hasn’t changed, it’s got phony personalities and too many commercials and makes you listen to what you don’t want to in order to hear what you do in an on demand culture. Just spinning records on radio is death, the same way airing videos on MTV is such.
So, so long platinum records. You were a construct of the classic rock era, when the music was so good everybody clamored to own it. Music was the iPhone of its day.
And so long diamond records, invented during the heyday of MTV when we all watched the same programming and were exposed to the same music. Today infinite choice has made that an impossibility. You either own the distribution channel, like YouTube, or you purvey quality, which attracts a crowd.
And soon, so long gold records. That’s right, not even 500,000 people will want to hear your long statement, because they don’t have time. It’d be like watching “House of Cards” and finding out there was only one good episode. Who’d want that? Furthermore, music is not episodic, order is unimportant, it’s about endlessly repeating certain tracks.
So the game just got harder. That’s right, the internet killed the CD cash cow and now even iTunes downloads, it made the history of recorded music free at your fingertips and you’re looking for some kind of justice, a way to turn back the hands of time, but that’s never gonna happen, that’d be like Commodore rereleasing the Amiga to great acclaim, knocking Apple off its perch, ain’t that a laugh.
But this really isn’t news. Everything I’ve said above has been in plain sight for nearly half a decade. So if you’re complaining, if you’ve been caught flat-footed, I feel sorry for you. You’re behind the times. In the information age you know nothing. You run your operation on your heart instead of your head.
Then again, if you put your heart in your music we might want to listen to it.
All we want is some truth. From someone who can write, sing and play.
Sounds simple, it’s not.
