Too Much Of Nothing
You need a direct relationship with your audience.
Let me give you an example. In the last century and the beginning of this one, if you were on terrestrial radio, if you were on MTV, you were part of a community.
That paradigm is kaput.
There’s a conception that if you just get enough publicity, if you just break through into this world or that, you’ll be golden.
But that is untrue.
I’ll give you an example. Taylor Swift. She’s in her own business, her own vertical, she competes with NO ONE! It’s not buying a ticket for a Swift show or someone else, either you want to go see Swift or you don’t.
That’s at the top. But what I’m really concerned with here is the bottom.
People are looking for an express train. They want to get on it and journey to greatness. But that train does not exist. Nowhere. A late night TV appearance is meaningless unless it’s on SNL. And the SNL brand has been fifty years in the making, acts come and go, but SNL remains, it’s bigger than any act on the show. Used to be people tuned in SNL to see a specific act. Now they watch SNL and then view an act. Because this is not the only place you can see your favorites…they’re everywhere, assuming you’re looking!
Let’s take the movie business as an example. Which is cratering, off 11% so far this year. Its problem is it is reinventing the wheel with every film. No one is a fan of the movie theatre itself. Sure, there are some exceptions, but the defining factor of whether you go to the flicks is whether you want to see that particular movie.
Used to be you found out about movies Thursday night, mostly on NBC, with a bombardment of advertising. Now, the target audience doesn’t even watch network television. And everybody hates ads, they’re easily avoidable.
People are fans of Netflix and the product comes and goes. Netflix gets you with its monthly fee.
How do you get your audience hooked?
Oh, you can try a moonshot. Getting a big story in the paper, on some TV news show, even ginning up a fakokta story for the gossip columns. But it’s one and done, you need a continuous story.
When you have a direct relationship you cannot let it lie fallow. You must constantly feed it, or people will go elsewhere. Forget the brands of yore that made it in a prior era, the dinosaurs of rock and metal. They can get away without new music, announcing a big tour every year or two. But if you’re a new act, having developed in the last couple of decades, you not only need new music, you need YouTube clips, you’ve got to burnish the relationship with your audience, which will probably grow slowly, if at all. You milk the audience you have, you don’t fantasize about an audience you’d have had in the last century.
This is the fallacy of the bitching about streaming payments. Acts don’t realize their status. They think since they’re professional, everybody should be listening to them. But they’re not. Only a very few are. At least there are many more ways to monetize than there were in the last century.
You must adjust. You must realize that the public is overloaded. The internet may have burgeoned, but people’s brains have not. They can only handle so much. How do you penetrate them?
The tsunami of news is overwhelming. Just check out Apple News+, and everybody competing for attention has a clickbait headline.
If you’re a student of the game you know more than the average person, but even you don’t know everything. Used to be the music business was comprehensible, but if you know every act today you’re lying.
So you need to change your focus. You must build upon what you have.
Hell, don’t even bother to follow the top-line news. Does it really affect you if Spotify makes a new deal with Universal? It really doesn’t affect you if Ticketmaster signs up a new account. But rather than focus on your own career, it’s easier to follow the business, and too often people complain about it. YOU’RE IN YOUR OWN BUSINESS! Take care of your home and then everything will turn out all right.
But you want someone to make it easier. Everybody wants it easier. But the paradigm of today is harder, because there’s so much in the pipeline. You’re competing against TikTok, YouTube, video games…you must be more interesting to a certain sliver of the public than these outlets. You must be more interesting than the hits of the past, because they’re easily accessible.
The lift is heavier than ever before. You can declare yourself a musician, but establishing a career is nearly impossible.
So, there are scapegoats. Spotify, Live Nation…
Those are just vessels. They are tools that you employ.
But you must have enough success to take advantage of them.
Have I discouraged you yet?
Good. I’m the antidote to all those websites taking your money and telling you they’ll help you have success.
Making music for a living is harder and slower than it’s ever been before. Even the major labels can’t establish hit acts, and they’re trying to do this 24/7.
You must be innovative. You must be focused.
And you must dedicate an incredible amount of time to the process.
Does this sound boring?
Then music is not for you. Go to college and follow a path. Music is the great unknown. Sure, people need it, but they don’t need YOU!
How do they convince them they need YOU?
You must be unique. Maybe your music, maybe your stage show, maybe your online personality, MAYBE ALL OF THEM!
There are very few stars, everything is cottage industry these days.
But the upside is anybody and everybody can play.
But not everybody can succeed.
But the internet allows you to get your music out there and play by your rules.
But people would rather have a defined path.
There is no defined path. That was blown up years ago.
We are living in the wilderness.
But people are foraging. How do you hook them and keep them?
That’s your job. Go micro, not macro. That’s the route to success and survival.
