1. Long Haul, Not Front-Load

Front-loading is for movies and SoundScan. You’re not making movies and SoundScan means less than ever before and will continue to die.

You wanted a big first week in SoundScan so retailers would order more music and the mainstream press would hype your debut. Physical retail is dying and now inventory is unlimited online. Elvis Presley dies and there are few records in the store, it takes weeks to catch up with demand. Michael Jackson passes and albums and tracks start flying out of the iTunes Store immediately. If there’s demand, it can be fulfilled today. But you’ve got to create the demand. One spike of publicity is not going to do it. At best, it creates a bit of awareness. But it doesn’t get anybody to listen. Assuming you’re paying attention to the mainstream press, it’s a long way from there to listening to the music. How can you get people to listen to the music first?

“Gone Girl” was a viral sensation. Most people weren’t even aware of the hype upon release. Great word of mouth sold the book. Music is now more like books, taking a while to marinate and spread in society. But music, when done right, lasts even longer. Your goal is to have a career.

If you’re doing publicity at all, and publicity is only for pussies, your artwork should sell itself, a campaign should last at least a year. Or don’t even start.

2. Lead With Your Art

A great publicity campaign for a lame record is worthless. Kind of like a great video for a lame song. Focus on the art. Date of release doesn’t matter. Some things blow up immediately, most take a while to find their niche and grow. Think about what you’re selling and focus on that. PSY wasn’t selling a song but a video. So he made sure the video was excellent. What sold the video was viral word of mouth. The mainstream press was last. The mainstream press is only first on what is lame and evanescent. What’s cool starts off the radar.

3. Celebrity Imprimatur

The Carly Rae Jepsen story. Justin Bieber tweeted about “Call Me Maybe.” Celebrities endorsing music that they’ve got no investment in draws attention to it. It’s the best way to reach new listeners. This used to be the opening band syndrome. That can still work a bit, but people have been trained to think the opening act at a concert is lame, that it may not even square with the taste of the audience, that their placement is more about money than music. Look at the Twitter followings of some of these famous musicians. They can reach the target audience much better than the mainstream press. Unlike the mainstream press they’re trusted. This paradigm works now, it might be abused into irrelevance in the future. Just like YouTube views and Amazon reviews are now faked.

4. Give Your Audience The Tools

If you want mystery today, put up the video, release the track online and then say and do nothing else. Create a frenzy surrounding your track, have questions asked. That’s a reasonable way to go. But even more reasonable is to have a plethora of information available to surfers once they get hooked. Wikipedia and Facebook pages, a Twitter feed. The problem with mainstream media is it stops. Whereas if you really entice someone they want more. Online is about endless links and discovery. Allow those who are interested to do this.

5. Be Outside

In the eighties and nineties we had a monoculture. Driven by MTV and radio. Whereas in the sixties we had the mainstream and alternative. We’ve got the mainstream and alternative today. The mainstream is dependent upon hits. A ton of exposure. It’s more about the mania than the art.  There is a business in this, but less than ever before. Many used to sell double digit millions. Now only Adele can do this. You want to align with your fans, not the machine. That’s the key to longevity. If you get so big the machine is interested you can play with it, but last. If you put the machine first, you’re alienating those sneezers who will push you over the tipping point.

6. Your Fans Do The Work

If nobody is retweeting, if your video count doesn’t go up, maybe your art and its message are not good enough. If you can’t inspire people to do your work for you, you won’t make it today. We’re inundated with publicity, it washes right off of us. The only thing that sticks is the words of our friends.

7. Steady Stream Of Art

Don’t be worried about killing what’s breaking. The longer you stay on something, the shorter your career. Money men are interested in milking the hit, artists want to have careers. Keep pushing stuff out there. Satisfy the bleeding edge. These people are the ones who broke you to begin with.

8. Touring Is A Victory Lap

It used to be where you made fans, now it’s where you cement relationships and make money. Don’t tour so long you avoid your online presence. Online is a fire that you must continually stoke.

9. Mobile

If your site and its attendant elements don’t work seamlessly on handheld devices you’re operating with one hand behind your back.

10. Statistics Versus Money

Be your own barometer. Worry about pleasing yourself, not others. Don’t worry if all your sales are not counted, if you’re not mentioned in the trades. Have your own plan and be satisfied with your achievements. If you’re Amazon, you keep growing and put profits in the future. If you’re a fad, the money comes first. Create your own plan.

11. Have Your Own Schedule

The disadvantage of being tied to a major label is their agenda is different. They’ve got quarterly profit reports, they want you to put out your music during the Christmas selling season. Furthermore, major corporations are the opposite of nimble. They need agreement and approval which can take forever to achieve. You want to be able to turn on a dime. Maybe you need a second video. Maybe you need a new track. The web is about fast and slow. Fast to make changes, slow to grow.

12. Immediate Is Not Necessary

It costs nothing to have your video up on YouTube. No one’s going to delete it or ship it back. It’s a land mine waiting to be discovered. If you believe, stay the course. You never know what might trigger interest.

13. Fake Is Found Out

Society is more sophisticated than ever before. Websites are dedicated to decoding the truth. If you try to break the rules, you’ll be found out, and you may never recover from the hurt.

14. New Forums

First came Twitter, then came Tumblr, Pinterest… Don’t cover everything in a scorched earth policy, participate where your fans are, where it fits for you. Tumblr allows you to go on at length. Pinterest is for pictures. If you’re a photo whore, Pinterest might be where you want to be. The key is to take chances and have fun. The web is all about risks, which are anathema to major labels and the rest of the old guard.

15. Radio

Comes last. If it’s first and your track fails, which even those of the superstars do, it’s done. Better to percolate online and be added by radio long after the fact. Cee Lo’s “Forget You” percolated online long before it became a radio staple. Hell, the original version with the obscenity was a web phenomenon. Perfect execution. Drop it without publicity and let the online denizens build it into a monolith. Surfers owned it, the mainstream press was picking up the crumbs.

16. Cycles

Are permanent now. It’s just like life. You’re working and creating constantly. Sure, it takes up all your time, but creators want to create. If you feel burdened by the constant need to be in your audience’s face…you won’t make it. This is what Amanda Palmer does best. That’s why she raised over a mil on Kickstarter. She continues rallying her troops, posting on her site, oftentimes not even about music, but life. She’s three-dimensional, people are drawn to her.

17. Not All Your Fans Are Hipsters

There are very few hipsters out there. The regular people will support you, play to them.

18. TV

Ain’t what it used to be. Whether it be late night or track placements. It’s hard to game the system anymore. Late night will give you a professional video, but it won’t sell records. If your song is so good that it’ll break out of a TV show, chances are it’ll break just fine alone online.

19. No Rules

These are just guidelines. Create new ways of doing things constantly. Just don’t do it the old way. It ain’t even working for the old farts.

My inbox is blowing up with Bowie backlash.

And normally I would not react in print, but I’ve got two points to make.

The first is a correction.

It turns out the YouTube video of the clip has in excess of two million plays. Why the Vevo take has so few… All I can say is when I clicked on the link on Bowie’s page yesterday, Tuesday, the link didn’t work at all!

But the reason I’m invading your inbox one more time today is because I want to delineate a point about our society. Frank Rich did a good job of writing about it the other week in “New York.” It’s that we build false heroes in our society, like David Petraeus, the press looks at them uncritically and then…we find out these people are human.

Kind of like Lance Armstrong. If you follow his history, you know about that drug test that… You knew he was doping. But if you wrote that, and I did, you were attacked, look at what he’s doing for cancer research!

Bottom line, people need someone to believe in. And they defend that same person to high heaven until a sharp spike is driven into their mind proving otherwise.

Point one.

The ticket fee problem is the acts’ fault, not Ticketmaster’s.

Ticketmaster would go to all-in ticketing tomorrow. It’s the acts that don’t want to do this. But the ignorant public keeps blaming Ticketmaster.

So my inbox is filling up with people saying MAYBE DAVID BOWIE WANTED TO MAKE THIS MUSIC! GET OFF HIS BACK!

Giving this ancient hero all kinds of credit and breaks he doesn’t deserve.

Maybe you believe otherwise.

Or is your life so simple and overwhelming that you’ve got heroes, that you truly think these people are better than you, with pure motives and an inability to fail.

Ever meet any of your heroes?

You’d be stunned.

So often famous people are mercurial, difficult, and they don’t give you the time of day. If you haven’t been dissed by one of your heroes, you haven’t met one.

So I take a critical approach to David Bowie’s new music and his marketing plan and the basic response is…

HOW COULD YOU?  HE’S DAVID BOWIE!

This is the same kind of thinking that got the press and the nation believing there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because the President and his minions said so. What’s going to keep this nation free is not guns, but critical thinking.

If we’re still talking about David Bowie’s new music a year from now, I’d be stunned.

BUT HE’S DAVID BOWIE! STOP TALKING RIGHT NOW!

I saw David Bowie perform “Ziggy Stardust” before most of you were born, at the Music Hall in Boston back in ’72. He was great then, he hasn’t been great in a long time.

Could he be great again?

We’ll see.

But if you think the new track is great please don’t send me any recommendations. And good luck in this new world where good is not good enough, where you’ve got to be SPECTACULAR to succeed!

We’re truly living in an era of superstars.

And if you can’t deliver at this high level you’re forgotten or you never made it.

What did Jack Nicholson say in that movie…

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH?

You want to believe your heroes are flawless and your music is worth listening to.

HA!

 “Suckers For Superheroes,” Frank Rich on Petraeus, et al

P.S. The more e-mail that comes in, the more people agree with me. Proving once again the haters are knee-jerk reactors who attack first.

P.P.S. While I’ve got your attention, I want to tell you someone e-mailed me a solution for my iTunes search problem. The default is to search the entire library. Click on the magnifying glass on the left-hand side of the search window and select “Filter By: All” in the drop-down menu and it works the old way. Thank god for crowdsourcing, but these programs should be intuitive to the individual.

Yesterday’s news.

I’m not talking about the man himself so much as his new track, his new album… A circle jerk publicity campaign that the old wave ate up and we’ve already moved on from. I mean how can someone who used to get it so right, who was on the bleeding edge, get it so wrong?

This is the guy who did Berlin/electronic before most people had a clue who Eno was and did the Bowie Bonds deal and now he signs with Sony and puts out a new album and the sycophantic press hypes it and drives those who care, who aren’t that many, hell there are only 29,359 views on Vevo as I write this, to the video which features a song so dirgey and so mediocre as to tarnish his entire legacy, if he hadn’t been doing that himself for decades.

How come these oldsters don’t get it? They made music that lasted forever, now they just want to play for a day. Employ the old school publicity paradigm on steroids which is ignored by everybody but the aforementioned sycophants who think we’re still living in 1974.

Bowie, want to get it right?

Do it the Mumford way.

UNDERSELL!

First he needed to go on the road, playing small venues at fair prices that you couldn’t get in. That would generate real publicity. For what happened as opposed to what’s coming. And if you’ve got something real, the fans do the work for you. They tweet, they Instagram, they spread the word. Instead, Bowie’s caught up in the mainstream echo chamber.

Second, you put out a new track that kills. And “Where Are We Now?” does not. It needed to be upbeat, it needed to be one listen. Not something that you might like over time, not when the whole world is watching.

Third, leave the audience hanging, waiting for more.

Instead of the album, drip out the singles. Create cutting edge videos. Keep the excitement going. Keep your name in circulation.

But NO, David Jones shows his age by doing it the old way, getting a check from Sony and trying to drive something down our throats that we don’t want.

Maybe he ain’t got great new music in him. Maybe he’s dried up. If so, don’t call our attention to substandard work, you ruin any opportunity for clamor if you somehow come up with something good in the future.

But my bottom line point is now more than ever music is for the long haul. You start slow and build. If you start big, you oftentimes fail thereafter. Like where do PSY and Carly Rae Jepsen go now? But at least give them credit, they came up with certified hits. The PSY video is riveting and the Carly Rae Jepsen song is so hooky, it’s velcro.

The news cycle is endless. Nothing sticks. We don’t want announcements, we want SUBSTANCE!

 David Bowie: “Where Are We Now?“

iTunes 11 is a disaster. If Steve Jobs were still alive it wouldn’t have happened, and if it had, someone would have been fired.

They took a program which did what it was supposed to, manage your music and allow you to shop in the iTunes Store, and added so many features as to make it unusable.

Let’s start with the search. Instead of getting the tracks in your library, you’re proffered choices. And navigating to your selection is slow and it used to be you just searched and what you were looking for was in the window. But no, they had to IMPROVE IT!

And once you’ve got your selection, you’ve got a flippy triangle that gives you choices, always a different number, as many as nine! All I want to do is play a track! And this is my business. Is listening to music the business of anyone at Apple?

The company blinked. It endured hated for so long it upgraded a program that worked fine to begin with. They pushed it over the edge. They turned it into Microsoft Word, something with so many features it’s damn near unusable.

Steve Jobs famously said on his deathbed not to run the company like Disney, where the enterprise was paralyzed by asking “What would Walt do?” But to abandon one of Jobs’ core principles is headscratching. Usability always came first! You needed no training, no manual, everything just worked and you could employ it intuitively.

Not iTunes 11.

Only the haters bitch. If you listen to the haters, you’re screwed.

Were the hoi polloi complaining? No, iTunes was their default, the go-to item.

It’s only the blowhards and “power-users” who complained about iTunes.

If something’s not broken, don’t fix it.

Most of your user base, most of your fans, won’t complain unless you screw up. They’re satisfied. We see this time and again in the logo world. Some idiot at the company decides to modernize and comes up with a new logo they like, the hipsters like, but the mainstream users hate! Most recently with the University of California. I didn’t attend, but anybody, including myself, could see the new logo didn’t have the same gravitas. You put in four years (maybe more) and you end up with a trendy seal? For something that takes this investment you want an imprimatur of tradition. Hell, my college diploma is in Latin, I can’t read it, but I know it’s serious!

And this is especially true in music.

DON’T LISTEN TO THE CRITICS TELLING YOU TO CHANGE!

It’s one thing if you’re convinced you’re on the wrong path, if you’ve got questions. But if you think you’re doing it right, stay the course, don’t listen to idiots telling you to change willy-nilly, even if you haven’t gotten commercial traction yet. Change the sound and you’ll alienate those who are already on board. Kind of like Gabe Dixon. He put out one of my favorite albums of the century, 2008’s “The Gabe Dixon Band,” then he followed it up with a slick concoction I can’t even listen to. He should have just stayed the course, waited for people to catch up, he had it right!

Kind of like the iPhone 5.

Do you find the rank and file, those getting an Android for free, bitching that the iPhone 5 doesn’t have the latest and greatest features? No, you only hear from the bleeding edge, people who upgrade their phones sometimes twice a year, that the iPhone 5 doesn’t have this or that. But these are always features used by almost nobody. They’re cool, but do they belong in a phone? Hell, most of these phones are hard enough to use to begin with, to get more than e-mail, texts and calls out of. Simplicity is a virtue. In addition to a huge curated app store, what makes the iPhone 5 great is the easy upgradability and the answers to your questions, never mind the raw usability.

Sure, Apple was first with the tablet, then again that’s not really true, the company made the first USABLE tablet.

And even Palm made a “touch” smartphone previously.

As for the iPod, it was just a refinement of what already existed, albeit with high speed transfer.

You don’t always have to lead.

But you do have to get it right.

And Apple got it wrong with iTunes 11.