The educated elites can’t fathom the pop stars. Built on an assembly line by multiple workers there’s nothing behind the facade and the music is formulaic.

Meanwhile, the youngsters and the uneducated flock to these performers, what gives?

The pop stars are aspirational. Their fans believe they too can become famous, can replicate the formula. You don’t have to be a member of the mostly nonexistent school band, you don’t have to practice your instrument in isolation for a decade, you’ve just got to sharpen your will, work on your countenance and promote the hell out of yourself on social media.

The performers of yore, who built careers over years, who spoke of their deep feelings and performed benefits, have not stopped complaining since the Napster era. You see they got all these tools, but their income and reach declined. They’re angry. They feel shut out.

Hip-hop is a way out of poverty.

And country is a way to give the middle finger to the elites who govern, who tell them they know better.

And everybody loves Taylor Swift, because she reaches the most people and she makes so much MONEY!

So, we’ve got a thin layer of mega-successful acts, basking in the adulation of the unformed wannabes, and…

Everybody else is left scratching his or her head.

The focus on money is both a turn-on and a turn-off. Classic acts lament they cannot make enough and fans feel closed out completely. Ticket prices are sky high and there’s no way you or me can ever make that kind of dough, meanwhile the acts keep saying they love us, their fans, but we read in the gossip columns how they party with people we’ll never know at places we’ll never get into having flown there on a private jet while we’re crammed into a plane with no overhead bin space because the airline is nickel and diming us to the point where everybody’s taking their luggage on board.

What’s going on?

Are the Kardashians winners, or the harbinger of a great divide, a great disaster, wherein everything we think we know is wrong?

How much can we venerate winners of a system that we can’t even compete in, whose spoils go to those we believe worthless?

When is change gonna come?

Turns out there’s a lot of turmoil in the entertainment business culture. We’re all at home, trying to get ahead, but the truth is we’re just data for the marketers, for the websites. They overload us with ads, pour on the cookies, and when we use adblockers they cry foul and tell us if we don’t disable them there will be no more websites.

And if we stop posting on Facebook the site will implode.

But this is all we’ve got, this low-level entertainment where we alternately burnish our image and hate on our brethren while the owners laugh all the way to the bank.

You can’t compete with Facebook, never mind Google, Apple or Amazon. The door is closed. You can write an app, but you can’t get any traction, you can’t make any money, no one will ever see it, never mind download it.

And they keep telling us YouTube is the new frontier, that anyone can make millions. But it turns out you need views in a triple digit million amount to get paid reasonably and I don’t personally know anybody who’s won this lottery, do you? We’ve got all these tools but no success, because all the spoils go to the man, but we keep plugging away at the keyboard, even though odds are as bad as the lottery.

There’s a great dissatisfaction in the country today. And the elites, the winners, don’t seem to understand. They think they deserve their spoils, that the gravy train will never end. As if we’re still listening to prog rock and hair band music, as if Rick Astley and a legion of has-beens still rule.

But they don’t.

We haven’t had a new sound in decades. Used to be the slate was wiped clean on a regular basis, but now the industry doesn’t want that, they want formula, they want insurance, they want no risk.

So, when it feels like you’re getting screwed, you are.

If you’re an act that doesn’t make Top Forty music you’re looking at a life of low-paid indentured servitude to your career.

If you’re a fan music might be cheap but tickets are expensive and so is merch and after pledging your undying fealty you’re left with nothing in the end, like being a fan of Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy way back when.

The landscape is ripe for acts that speak to this dissatisfaction, who are less about lifestyle than truth, who are not about embracing the trappings, but the music and the music only.

It’s coming. Unrest has been brewing. A vacuum needs to be filled.

And it’s gonna be.

We already had our Brexit moment in the music business, it was called Napster. The industry was coasting along on high-priced CDs and catalog replacement, with lowered-artist royalty payments to boot. But when given the option the public revolted against the one good track on an overpriced album model and stole the wares willy-nilly. What else is the public pissed about?

TICKETING

You can’t get a good seat at a fair price and all the good seats go to scalpers. In an era of transparency, all we’ve got is opaqueness. The industry thinks that it’s winning, but it’s not.

A. Availability

There must be a chart of the tiers of availability. The levels of pre-sales. The number of holdbacks. You curry favor by providing information. Once the public knows the game, it can adjust.

B. Fees

An insider’s game wherein the fees are held out of artists’ percentage yet paid by the fans which blame Ticketmaster and other ticketing companies. All-in pricing is required. The fees are part of the ticket price, without them the business would collapse.

C. Pricing

Either raise the prices or go paperless, those are the only options. Instead, the acts fall back on a position of not wanting to look greedy, but they end up pissing off their fans all the while.

EVENT SPACE

Lineups, bad food and endless advertising. The whole world has gone upscale, but the industry’s venues look and are run like third world entities. Of course there have been improvements, but so much more can be done, assuming money is spent, but no one wants to spend on the little people, the attendees, the way no one worried about the working class that lost their jobs and couldn’t make ends meet.

YOUTUBE

This happened once before, the artists appealed to the public, but it backfired, because performers were seen as rich crybabies. The public wants instant access to everything, it wants a free tier. Raise ad prices, negotiate behind the scenes, but this is one area where sunshine is doing the industry a disservice. Nobody likes a complainer.

RADIO

Twenty-odd minutes of commercials per hour??

Terrestrial radio has a disinformation campaign as good as the Koch Brothers’. It keeps saying listening numbers are sky high when seemingly no one under twenty tunes in and oldsters complain too. There are options, and radio has been hurt, despite what stations say.

POP

Only one flavor, vanilla? Baskin-Robbins would go out of business! The industry is responsible for promoting a broader spectrum of music. Don’t say people don’t want it, they do. It just has to be promoted, people have to be exposed to it. All major labels must sign long term deals with non-pop acts, invest in them… This is what Warner Brothers did in the seventies, and then it became the most credible, powerful and profitable label. Bring true artist development back, not the long term promotion of one album, but the ability for an act to find itself and grow over a number of projects.

TRANSPARENCY

Straight percentage splits with acts, which all recoup at the same rate. Get the artists on your side and they’ll not only be happy, but they’ll testify and more people will want to join in.

SPONSORED TOURS

Call it charity. Instead of a NOW collection for the already big, how about a sampler of what needs to be heard, fifteen tracks every couple of months, with a tour to follow. It’s the industry’s obligation to break acts. Used to be labels and radio worked hand in hand to do this, but labels are less profitable and radio is too codified, praying to the dollar as opposed to culture.

LEAVE SOME MONEY ON THE TABLE

The endless sponsorship deals, the endless cross-promotions, have undercut the credibility of music, which was once an outside art form that spoke truth, that drove the culture, that everybody rallied around. But now that the goal is to become a brand and sell out to a brand it’s hard to believe in acts. There’s plenty of money in the industry, and that which is seen as credible makes more, just ask Adele.

You get out ahead of your audience, you envision potential problems and work on solutions. But the music industry has been a short term, desperate operation for far too long. No wonder nobody with a brain wants to get involved, it’d be like joining the Mafia in 2016, after the government put a dent in all that.

You start off with respect. Then you move on to transparency. Then you get in bed with your customers, you make them feel involved, that they have a voice.

We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.

It’s kinda like vinyl records.

They make no sense, but there’s a vocal minority whose heartfelt desire is to jet back to the past.

Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist, put your emotions aside, I’ve got thousands of discs, and a turntable to play them, but I don’t, because it’s too inconvenient. But the truth is it makes no sense to listen on vinyl to that which has been recorded digitally.

Sure, there are a couple of rich, high profile acts that record to tape, like Dave Grohl, but everybody else uses Pro Tools. It’s a complete digital chain. And at the end you put the result on a record, where you have to compromise the sound just to make sure the needle won’t jump and compensate for the inner groove being shorter than the outer?

Makes no sense.

But it FEELS right.

Kinda like a return to what once was. When albums were king and listeners couldn’t easily cherry-pick the tracks they wanted to hear.

But there’s a huge contingent of people who love the new system, who use it to their advantage, not only Drake, who releases endless mixtapes, but the wannabes who can now participate, who can record and post their material, options that were unavailable to them previously. You had to have a deal to record, and distribution, both retail and radio, were closed off to you. You still can’t get your product in the record store, that inane place with little inventory the Luddites can’t stop venerating, and radio is still closed, possibly more than ever, but you can get your stuff into the iTunes Store and post it on YouTube and Spotify where people can hear it for free.

ANATHEMA! Those entities are the ENEMY! They’re ruining the business!

So which way is it? Was the past better than the present or do we live in a changed world and the best thing to do is adapt and cope?

Or, to put it another way, if we had a music industry vote, how would it turn out? Would streaming be eviscerated, albums be everything and record labels be all powerful once again?

But we can’t go back, that would be ignoring the digital revolution, which happened spontaneously, with Napster. And when that outlet was closed, new ones popped up, not only utilizing P2P but lockers and…

So one can argue we’ve created some order in a land of chaos.

But it doesn’t FEEL that way.

Now you understand Brexit.

Daniel Ek is the foreigner.

The youngsters are the elite.

And the old farts are the same as ever, unable to fathom a changed world, doing their best to return to the old.

Yes, I think it would be close.

The old acts would certainly vote for a return to the past, their recorded revenue has sunk precipitously. You could tell them that live money has gone way up, far outpacing inflation, experiences being king in a digital world, but they’d say there’s still a shortfall. And that they’ve got no desire to employ social media to enhance their “brand.” They just want to spend 500k to make their albums and drop them every three years, parceling out singles to radio thereafter. They’re sick of the competition, when everybody can play it diverts fans from their work.

And this appeals to a segment of youngsters too. They’ve read about the old days, they want some of that. You can tell them all day long that odds are they won’t get a deal and even if they do they won’t get rich but they don’t believe that, they think they can sell 10 million discs.

But the fans, who get no media, having no house organ, love the new world. They can sample everything for free, dig down deep on websites, learning more about their heroes, even interact with them on social media. Sure, the world is imperfect, one can catalogue the failings ad infinitum, but is it really possible to return to the past, and is the past really that much better?

It’s a global music business. Which means successful acts can make more money than ever, without leaving home their wares are available to stream and buy in far distant lands. But few acts can achieve this ubiquity, shouldn’t we cripple this option so the disadvantaged can get ahead?

I’m fascinated by the Brexit vote. Things haven’t been up for grabs since the 2008 crash. It’s kinda like making Trump President. If you’re bored with the status quo, if you believe you’ve gotten the short end of the stick, put the stick you have left in the spokes of the bicycle and watch the whole thing crash, see how it all plays out.

But then I realized, both of these financial meltdowns were preceded by the music business meltdown, we’ve been coping with change for fifteen plus years.

But I don’t want to give up my iPod.

Which I gave up for my iPhone.

I don’t want to give up my Sonos system, I don’t want Alexa to lose her hearing and be unable to play the music I call out to her.

I don’t want to only be able to play my tunes at home.

I certainly don’t want to go back to recording cassettes.

MP3s don’t sound as good as vinyl. Then again, Tidal allows you to stream in CD quality, as does Deezer, and it turns out most people don’t want to pay for it. Funny how we’ve stopped hearing about the quality issue, the war is over.

So, feel damn lucky you live in today, that the music business has adjusted so much. The landscape is confusing, progress still needs to be made, but if you want to return to the past…

You’re probably playing vinyl records.

Wait a second, isn’t music video dead? Didn’t it bite the dust when MTV went to scripted programming? How many years did we hear musicians bitch about this?

They were completely wrong. Video is bigger than ever. And it’s in your hands as opposed to the gatekeepers’. It’s the same, yet different, as everything is in the future.

This clip is cut from the same cloth as Madonna’s “Sex” book. That’s the appeal, it’ll bring so many looky-loos, but in this case you don’t have to buy it to see it, that’s so last century, it’s free for the taking on the internet. Because in today’s world you don’t charge for everything, you garner your audience and monetize later, like the tech companies.

Now there was a premiere at the Forum. At first I bought the press reaction, to this and the Madison Square Garden reveal, that everybody’s showing up for a non-show. But the truth is when you’re young and dumb with nothing better to do you do. Show up, that is. I remember going to record store in-stores, just to be close to the band. If I were still twenty five I’d pay $25 to go to the Forum. To be part of the experience. Come on, imagine the story you could tell, you could dine out on it for weeks!

And since the Forum is an all music building, little advance planning was necessary. So different from being beholden to sports teams in arenas that view music as a second-class citizen.

And there was little advance notice. When tours go on sale a year ahead of time, locking up that dough, all commerce, this was a whim. It was happening right away. Kanye knows the modern paradigm. Just like advance publicity is history, you don’t want a long lead time, immediacy is everything. And, in a world dominated by screens, hanging with real live people is such a thrill. It’s worth twenty five bucks.

So, you had the event, which was monetized. At a very low price.

And now you’ve got the video.

Unlike in the days of MTV, you can watch it on demand. You don’t have to wait for it to come up. This is what Netflix knows and terrestrial radio doesn’t understand. We want it all and we want it now, and if you aren’t moving your enterprise in that direction you’re headed for the trash bin.

And despite its fame, ratings for MTV were paltry. 100,000 people at a time was de rigueur. Well, right now 70,898 people are simultaneously streaming “Famous” on the feed I’m watching. But they can play it again and again, embed it on social media, spread the word… Today music is a virus, and it can infect broad swaths of the public rapidly.

But then it so frequently burns out. This is a stunt. We won’t be talking about it next month, if we’re even discussing it next week. But that’s okay, Kanye will come up with something else. Whilst radio takes a year to move a track up the chart modern creators know it’s not about reaching every last potential audience member, but satiating the core and moving on.

As for the content, when you marry boobies and fame you’ve hit the jackpot. All but the asexual want to see this clip at least once. Hell, you slow down on the freeway to view an accident, right?

And this is a trainwreck the media can’t avoid covering. The modern media, which has little analysis but loves headlines which generate clicks so they can sell advertising. Kanye is their dream, whether you like him or not.

And Kanye claiming it’s all real just adds fuel to the fire. Come on who would believe this? But the press prints it.

But they won’t tell the story of the up and coming act, unless the performer has an ace PR person. But even if you get ink, there’s no virality, which is the juice that fuels the enterprise today. If it’s not spreading, it’s not happening.

If you were alive back when, when Madonna put out her book, you might claim you’ve seen this before. But not really. Not only is this externally focused, not solely about Kanye in the clip, it’s a demonstration of modern pull, whereas Madonna was all about push. The media and the public are coming to Kanye. Madonna had to push her book down our throats, she’s still utilizing that paradigm, not knowing she appears desperate.

But few can be as hot as Kanye.

But he’s not a creature of the machine, he did all this himself.

That’s what the modern tools will give you.

That’s what the internet provides.

It’s all good, as the kids say.

Watch here:

Kanye West’s “Famous” Video