Is the number one commodity in today’s world. Unless you can get it, you cannot proceed.

1. You don’t get multiple bites at the apple.

Since attention is scarce and stretched if someone checks you or your product out and is not closed, chances are they will never check it out again. Which is why you should not launch before you are ready and when it comes to a product many companies release first iterations as betas, signaling the customer should expect rough edges. If the concept is good, if the utility is reasonable, people will put up with bugs in betas.

2. You can’t spread the word, your users must.

Advertising is crippled. As is press. They can cause a limited amount of awareness but people today are turned off to ads, never mind DVR’ing TV shows and watching HBO and Netflix, they employ ad-blockers on their web browsers and if you’re paying for advertising you’d better have a monster launch with a ton invested otherwise it’s a no-go, and it still may be a no-go if you spam everybody. Because you can’t reach everybody and people are wary of advertising, they don’t believe it, they need to hear it from their friends.

We all need to hear it from our friends. Who we might know in person or might just know online. It’s about trusted filters. And those filters guard their credibility wisely. Credibility is everything in the attention economy. If you can’t be trusted, then you’re probably going to be ignored. You’re building your reputation every day online, and all the bread crumbs are there for everybody to see.

We don’t take a look until our friends/trusted filters tell us to. And oftentimes, we have to hear from multiple friends/trusted filters that something is worth checking out.

3. Overnight success is history.

MTV blasted acts to the moon and they fell to Earth just about as fast. If you can gain major attention in today’s world right away chances are you’re going to immediately fail thereafter. Because few things live up to the hype and the hype causes backlash and in today’s world it’s not about stagnation but evolution, what does version 2.0 look like, how good is the follow-up song. When the bar is set so high to begin with chances are you cannot jump over it the second time around and people will stop paying attention.

Better to grow slowly.

4. That which is big may not be anointed as so.

Forget the awards shows. Hell, look at the Oscars, those pictures they were honoring all had mediocre grosses at best. And the media is a tool of the companies purveying. Other than politics and wars, where newspapers have full time reporters, the rest of what comes over the transom as news is really glorified press releases. So you read about something and then it has no traction thereafter. Because it’s not that good and there is no base to sustain it and the press is not that powerful.

No one has come up with a metric to detail what gets attention in today’s economy. Except for maybe Netflix subscribers and Facebook usage, but as for art…

We’ve got grosses in film. Ratings in television, but the best shows aren’t rated. And we’ve got streams in music. All these quantifications are relevant (and ignore the weekly “Billboard” chart, it’s out of touch!) But how to quantify the success of “Hamilton,” which for over a year played in only one theatre and has had no Top Forty success, but is referenced by Seth Rogen at the Oscars, sung along to by Melinda Gates… “Hamilton” has yet to peak and unlike so much other art it crosses ethnic and political boundaries, it’s one of the few things that appeals to all. But there’s no chart, just a lot of press which doesn’t resonate.

But when someone tells you about their favorite “Hamilton” song…

Then you feel the bond and know how big it is.

We all have our own internal chart now. We determine whether something is big or small. And we do this by gut feeling. Hell, the media missed the Trump phenomenon completely. But based on the blowback I was getting online I knew something was up. Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters. If you don’t think something is that big, despite the press hosannas, it’s probably not.

5. Don’t hammer the audience.

If you spam us every day looking for attention we ignore you. Launch and then follow up. New songs/more product is much more important that more publicity. Satiate the core, which wants more. It’s the core who will spread the word. But if you drop an album and promote it for two years you’re missing the point. You’re going after the looky-loos, the least committed people, your core is burned out on your new work and abandons you. You need to keep the attention of the core. And the more you say “Look at me!” the more you are ignored, or made fun of. Sure, there’s train-wreck attention, where someone blows themselves up and we all know about it, but it lasts for about a day.

6. Don’t have airs.

The most successful people in today’s economy are accessible. Look at Mark Cuban, responding to the hoi polloi’s tweets. He could run for President and win, he’s more credible than Trump and on TV every week too. So come down off your throne and get in the pit and mix it up a bit. People want to be able to touch you, even if it’s only online.

7. Respect your audience.

You’ve got no time and they don’t either. Even babies are scheduled, we’re all overwhelmed. It’s a privilege to get someone’s attention, you’re not entitled to it. Ask for it nicely and thank people for giving it and don’t ask for too much. Ask people to listen to one song, not an album, if they like the one they’ll ask for more. If you send ten, they probably won’t listen at all. You don’t want to overload people.

8. Pull economy.

You cannot push, that’s positively last century. Sure, you can grease the skids, pour some oil to get something started, but it’s only working if people are demanding more. And if they are not, you don’t have a marketing problem, you have a product problem. Marketing has never meant less. It’s seen as phony and manipulative. You lead with your product. And it’s either growing or failing. Either every day more and more people are watching your YouTube video or you need to make another one, that’s different.

9. You rarely feel like you’re winning.

With everybody clamoring for attention and traditional news outlets challenged you oftentimes don’t know whether you’re winning or losing. Which is why today it’s about stamina and follow-through. When someone hypes you on the work of a twelve year old, laugh and ignore it. The “artist” doesn’t have enough experience to understand the game, they just want fame. And those seeking fame first and foremost are losing out in the attention economy, because it’s not about the one time buy, but a continued relationship. And when there’s no there there, people move on. So you’ve got to polish your product and create new ones and stay in the game, constantly tweaking what you’ve got and trying new things, and if you’re getting more attention you know you’re on the right track, if not, back to the drawing board.

10. Evolution

This is where we are today. Tomorrow will be different. Virality is a thing of the past. As in faking it to get everybody to pay attention, it rarely works anymore, we’ve seen the trick and if you’re trying to goose the process for instant success you’re on the wrong track. Today it’s about an overwhelming number of messages, tomorrow it’s about the winnowing down of those messages. What will this look like? Will there be new gatekeepers? Will so many outlets fail that the ones remaining have more power? If you’re not reevaluating and pivoting on a regular basis you’re being left behind. Now, more than ever, what worked yesterday won’t work tomorrow. So you have to keep experimenting. But success remains tied to attention. Your goal is to get people interested, dedicating their time, giving you their money. And the more sunlight there is online, the less fakery there is too. So, instead of promoting, you should be practicing. The truth is we’re all looking for great stuff 24/7 and if we find it we tell everybody we know. Let it be you we are telling everybody about.

This record should be bad. A guy with no deal doing it independently, we’re inundated with the work of wannabes, we trust labels, radio and the press to weed out quality.

But what if they don’t?

The first criterion for music is listenability. I don’t care about theories, the lyrics, first and foremost it must be ear-pleasing. And I dropped the needle on Aaron Watson’s “Vaquero” and I didn’t want to take it off, and each track was equally rewarding, how can this be?

Remember when you used to buy an album and break the shrinkwrap and sit down in front of the turntable and marinate in the music? Walk around the house and wait for it to seep into your brain? When there were many fewer acts and recording was expensive and you bought an album and you listened to it?

Today it’s different. Everything’s available at our fingertips and we’re beaten into submission by the press and social media but the end result is always so unsatisfying and we end up discarding it all, going back to the oldies.

I’m waiting for the music business to have some self-respect, see itself as a cultural institution as well as a moneymaker. Give credit to the filmmakers honored last night at the Oscars, they were shooting for the stars, whereas too much in music is lowest common denominator.

And then there was Jimmy Kimmel. Terrible on paper, a sheer wonder in action. Because he had no airs, he was an everyman shooting straight and it worked. We used to have people in music like that, who let the work speak for itself. Come on, Jimmy’s jokes hit the target again and again whereas those much more famous than him, known for their comedy work, failed in the gig. Maybe this is the new paradigm, we’re all in it together, that anybody who holds themselves up as a star is a target. And we’ve got so many of these people, more famous for the penumbra than the work, which makes this Aaron Watson album such a revelation.

I’d never heard of it. Nor him. But I got the following e-mail from Marshall Altman…

“Hey Bob,

I’m wondering if you’ve heard this new Aaron Watson album yet. There’s a story here about independent country artists that I think you might find interesting.

Check the album out here:

Aaron Watson – Texas Lullaby

Been enjoying the letter more and more over the last few months. Thanks for telling the truth.

Best,

Marshall Altman

Ps – Full disclosure, I’m the producer on this record, but the story started long before I got involved…”

And I clicked and started playing it before I read the part where he kissed my butt, just to check it out and dismiss it, but “Texas Lullaby,” the opening track, started to lope along and I couldn’t help but saddle up and go along for the ride.

He was just eighteen
Full of fire and gasoline

It’s a STORY SONG!

Remember when music reflected our humanity back upon us?

And Watson doesn’t have the best voice, but the changes resonate and the chorus was catchy and if it’s so simple how come seemingly no one else can do it?

Well, we’ve got Chris Stapleton, who’s selling a bit more gravitas, but he went from zero to hero overnight, that’s how hungry we are for soul-fulfilling music.

And then I started to do some research. Turns out Watson’s last indie album, entered the country chart at number one, and that this new one, “Vaquero,” might exceed the sales and streams of Little Big Town’s new one and enter at number one too.

Which means Aaron Watson’s got fans. And they’re supporting him.

Which gives me hope.

But not as much as listening to this album, which has no clunkers, none I’ve found yet. Too much of today’s new music I just want to take off. It’s repetitive and shoots too low.

And I’m not saying Watson is an intellectual, but he is a beacon, showing us you can reject the system and do it your own way and win.

Then again, he’s been doing it for nearly two decades, his initial LP came out in 1999, and that’s far too long in a world where we want it all and we want it now.

Maybe you can get better with age. Maybe you don’t have to do what’s au courant. Maybe you can just get behind the wheel and drive into the wilderness and people will follow you.

Don’t expect Bob Dylan.

If you hate Nashville and Texas don’t even bother to tune in.

If you make music and wonder why it’s not you having the success, move right along, stay on your sour grapes highway.

But if you’re someone who went to the rodeo with the Byrds, ate burritos with Gram Parsons, liked the SoCal cowboys and are looking for something new to listen to while you do the laundry, drive your car, when you’re unworried about your image and are just going on with your life, you might find that you want Aaron Watson riding shotgun.

He isn’t reinventing the wheel, but at least he acknowledges the wheel still exists, and that’s a rare thing in a world where real instruments are anathema, vocals are tuned and songs are something written by committee.

Check it out.

Do we blame the internet or income inequality, the inability to rise above and get ahead?

Every damn day people tell me I’m an asshole online. And let me tell you, if I say something negative about you or your project, it’s open season, it doesn’t surprise me when you reach out and castigate me. But when there’s no nexus, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, why such vitriol?

Used to be society was divided into those who ruled and those who were ruled. And we kind of liked this, because we had economic mobility, we thought if we just put our nose to the grindstone we could get ahead. But then mothers were working alongside fathers and bills went up and income stayed stagnant and everybody started to scratch their head and say, “Wait a minute here…”

Now the paradigm’s been blown apart. The elites think they rule but they don’t. That  was the story of the Presidential election, those who knew better left behind those who supposedly didn’t and those on the losing end decided to give the middle finger to the winners of society, the educated, the advantaged, even if it was against their best interests, because as the bard from Minnesota once told us, when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

And the artists are a black hole. Chasing a buck too. Anybody with power refuses to go on record in any meaningful way for fear of alienating a potential customer and the nobodies keep clamoring for attention, when they’re not hating online.

But now they’re tipping over headstones.

I want to know why this is the Jews’ problem, please tell me what my tribe did to become the most hated. Seems we’re decried even more than immigrants. But that bozo shot those Indians in Kansas and what’s even scarier is the nincompoops have guns, it’s like the wild west, if you feel safe…

You aren’t.

But what’s funny is those who feel most at risk aren’t. Those red state denizens where the terrorists don’t go, because there aren’t enough people there. Believe me, they’re going to Oklahoma and Idaho last. But we must beef up the military for a perceived threat that doesn’t exist, when we can blow up the world many times over and we cozy up to the real enemy, Russia.

Makes your head spin, doesn’t it?

But no one wants to accept any blame. Trump wants more facts before he weighs in on Kansas, even though he heard rumors of election fraud and cheering Muslims in New Jersey and had no problem rushing to judgment and pontificating on those subjects. Because golfer Bernhard Langer, not even a citizen, is a more trustworthy authority than the media.

If you’re educated, if you’re doing your job, you’re scorned.

How can this be?

I get it, people have been left behind. But does this mean we give up on facts, we give up on truth, we no longer respect those who are educated and informed? What next, rogue doctors performing surgeries after learning their craft on YouTube?

So the elites won’t acknowledge that globalism results in losers who must be helped and the losers keep telling us we need less government and more guns but we had better not cut their Obamacare.

This is the county we’re living in. One where no one seems to be in control.

We as a society should be excoriating hate. We should be shaking our fists and rallying for truth and understanding.

But everybody’s watching their own news and so much of it is biased and everybody feels powerless so they just yell at each other, over and over again, all the damn time.

But words hurt less than actions.

Once you start shooting people in the name of hatred, once you start vandalizing Jewish cemeteries, calling in bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers, you’ve got a major societal problem. One that we must be led out of.

But who is leading, who do we respect anymore?

I can’t respect a President who believes everything he sees on Fox is right.

And I can’t respect a Democratic elite that left the working man behind.

But I do know we’re only human, flesh and blood.

They teach us to be good citizens…

But now Betsy DeVos wants to eviscerate public schools, even though the latest research shows vouchers result in lower test scores. We want to segregate ourselves more. By race, by religion, by income.

And endgame is?

They’re coming for you next. Don’t think you’re immune. You can pray to your God all you want but that won’t make you safe. Your only choice is to love and understand your brothers and sisters, but this is hard to do when you have trouble making ends meet.

The media has been neutralized. Trump is fanning the flames of discord.

And I’m very scared. Because I’ve been on this planet quite a while and have never seen it this bad. Where anti-Semitism is legitimized. Where immigrants are the root of all problems. Where truth is for pussies and we make up alternative facts that befit our desired scenarios.

Come on, what kind of coarse society do we live in where every immigrant has to be afraid of being rounded up and kicked out while the poor aliens are picking out fruit and the rich aliens are aiding breakthroughs in Silicon Valley. I’m not saying people should be able to cross borders willy-nilly, but if you think the major issue in this country is immigration, you’re not looking at the real problem.

You and me. Who’ve been here from day one. We’re standing by as our society fails, feeling hopeless as we yell at each other online, pointing fingers at everyone but ourselves.

A change has got to come.

And it’s got to start with us.

We are America. We make policy. We have power.

And I don’t care who is in office, who won any election, this hatred has got to stop.

Was in the process of destroying his career.

First there was that “Playboy” interview.

Then the “relationship” with Taylor Swift and the resulting bite-back song.

Then the firing of his long term manager for a newer au courant one responsible for hits, which Mayer so desperately desired, wanting to emulate the success of his younger girlfriend Katy Perry, and when no hits ensued he fired the new manager too.

Now John Mayer is 39. “Room For Squares” came out over 15 years ago. In today’s here today gone today culture almost no one sustains. So how come he’s suddenly so successful with a boffo arena tour?

It certainly had nothing to do with hits. There’s a subtle shift in the music business, it’s all going live. The chart is inane, not sure whether it’s about sales or streams, and only a small subset of the population pays attention to the hits on both streaming services and Top Forty radio, and the rest…

Is a vast morass indecipherable unless you’re deep into it.

Now it’s about your fan base. You can employ publicity to try and make them aware, but if your goal is to convert new fans, you can’t do it, only your fans can do it, by spreading the word online. Of course, hits make a difference, but unless you make beat-infused music you can’t have one.

Concerts are burgeoning. It’s a new golden age. In a digitized era people are looking for some honest truth. Which is probably why you should can the dancing and the hard drives and deliver humanity. That paradigm, of reproducing the video, evolved from a now passe era, that of MTV, when clips could cost a million bucks and become cultural touchstones. Today people watch videos on their phones in postage stamp-sized windows, it’s about the music, not the image, and that’s a good thing. And anybody with a smash video has seemed to lose traction thereafter. Can you say PSY, can you say Baauer? So when people go to the show they want to feel the buzz, the electricity, of a one of a kind event, not the exact same circus that’s gonna play the next day in Pittsburgh.

Of course there are exceptions, successful touring spectacles.

But that brings us back to Mr. Mayer. His career was at a nadir and what did he do, play with the Grateful Dead!

Now there was a predecessor. One Bruce Hornsby. Who too had gigantic soft rock radio hits and then threw them over in a 180, venturing to where it was conventionally thought his audience did not tread. But this turned out to be untrue. Some fans remained and Bruce made a whole coterie of new ones, much more loyal than the old ones, the fans of Jerry, et al. Because, as established above, it’s your fans who keep you alive, not the press, and no one is more loyal than a Deadhead.

And Mayer could always wail. So he goes on the road with Weir and crew and kills it. He single-handedly brings back the magic that once was, the shows even eclipsed those at Fare Thee Well, because it was about music and not nostalgia and it was akin to Derek Trucks reinvigorating the Allman Brothers but in this case Mayer was already a star. And refused to take a victory lap. The old Mayer would have hyped up his appearance, taken credit, in this case he was mostly silent, he let his axe do the talking, and boy did it.

So he could play with the Dead, his old career was moribund, right?

Wrong. Like a musician instead of a star Mayer decided to walk into the wilderness. Make music satisfying himself instead of searching for hits, go on an aural journey instead of playing the game. Instead of dropping an entire album and carpet-bombing the universe with publicity, he put out an EP, four songs, back in January, and another four tracks just yesterday. And there’s nothing a fan wants more than new music, and in the modern world four at a time is just about right, easy to check out and digest.

And there was a winner on “The Search For Everything – Wave One,” “Love On The Weekend,” with that smooth sound that made John Mayer the darling of women everywhere.

But the revelation was the opening cut, “Moving On And Getting Over,” where he was suddenly on the losing end. Having loved ’em and left ’em, prolonging his adolescence, it ended with Katy Perry and Mayer can’t seem to get over it, he’s depressed and vulnerable and ultimately RELATABLE!

“I’m one text away from being back again”

But he’s not. It’s over. He’s alone and struggling.

It’s personal. Which is what we’re looking for.

And “Still Feel Like Your Man,” the opening cut on “The Search For Everything – Wave Two,” released yesterday, is more R&B than conventional Mayer. Reminds me of no one so much as Todd Rundgren, who embraced his Philly roots on an irregular basis, it was so refreshing, you could not put him in a box, and suddenly you can’t put Mayer in a box either, he’s EXPERIMENTING!

Wow, it isn’t only Mayer’s career that’s been moribund, but music too. We’ve had the same pop sound with the fake drums for nearly two decades and the classic acts don’t even bother to make new music and when they do it’s substandard iterations of what they did before and suddenly the standard bearer for testing limits is John Mayer?

Now “Love On The Weekend” has 27 million plays on Spotify. Significant, but not stratospheric. Then again, only the pop hits can go nuclear on the service, hit triple digits, and there was some radio success, but the track was not a smash. It made it to number 5 on Hot Rock Songs, a dead format if there ever was one, and number 19 on Adult Top 40, a natural format for Mayer, but not a breakthrough, and on the Hot 100 it climbed all the way to number 53, which is kind of like not being on the chart at all.

Without this airplay the three other tracks on “Wave One” don’t have as much traction, but one has nearly ten million streams and one just over five million, which is quite healthy. In other words, Mayer is getting support.

But he’s detached from the game. Sure, he was on “Ellen” the other day, but in reality he’s now in the John Mayer business, being a musician not a star, and it’s working for him!

It’s possible he’ll have another hit, but it doesn’t seem to matter. He’s gone from being two-dimensional to three, from pretty boy to musician. He’s continuing, testing limits and making new music when most of his contemporaries are oldies acts playing to dwindling audiences on double and triple bills.

It wasn’t headed this way. John Mayer’s career was headed for the dumper, down, down, down. But he took risks, refused to play it the way everybody told him to, and it worked!

And it can work for you too. If you play to your fans instead of the media. The system needs fodder, to chew up and spit out. It’s a thrill to have a hit, but the focus is less on music than it is on the penumbra. But if you can garner an audience that loves you first and foremost for your tunes instead of your celebrity, they’ll follow you anywhere. Arguably, your celebrity works against you. Mayer’s vulnerability on these new tracks illustrates he’s just like you and me, he still hurts, we all still hurt.

And we all still want to feel good.

So we go to the show to hear the songs we know and the ones we don’t and dance in the aisle and smile and if you can deliver this experience you can sell every ticket in the building.

Like John Mayer.