Every technological revolution changes the music.

The invention of the 33 1/3 vinyl album allowed the creation of “Rubber Soul” and then “Sgt. Pepper.” Suddenly the album was a statement instead of a single and a bunch of filler. Then when you could no longer simulcast your AM stream on FM, we got free-form radio. Then MTV came along and made it about how you looked. And without a hit single, you were toast. And then streaming came along and killed the gatekeepers.

The barrier to the creation of music is essentially nonexistent. You can make it on your laptop and for a small fee get it on all streaming services, not that anyone will listen to it. As a result there’s a plethora of product. Those prognosticators of yore said Napster and the internet would kill the production of music, just the opposite has happened.

And now you can break a record without radio. Radio comes last, not first. As for MTV, it’s a non-factor. The labels angry they didn’t get a piece of it should just be glad Murdoch bought MySpace. In other words, music is forever, the platform is not, stay in your lane.

But now the major labels’ lane is signing what is commercial and only commercial. The system needs hits. Furthermore, the labels rarely develop the acts, rather the acts develop themselves and the labels poach them. But if you’re not making hip-hop or pop, or country, no one wants you, does that mean no one wants your genre of music? No.

You see on Spotify, et al, there’s no massaging of the data. A stream is a stream. Such that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In other words, the Spotify Top 50 counts, after that?

The labels and the media are oriented towards this. Hell, seemingly every newspaper prints the “Billboard” Top Ten every week. There’s this focus on the most popular, when the most popular is less popular than ever before.

So no one can force a hit. It’s not about your relationship with radio or TV, that’s not where the active listeners are. Ask any publicity person, other than “CBS Sunday Morning” and SNL, no television appearance moves the needle. When people can see video for free, on YouTube, why should they make an appointment? As for appointments, this is what is killing the old time players, both the networks and the cable channels, they don’t realize the consumer makes the appointment now, they’re in control, and if they can’t watch it when they want to, oftentimes they don’t watch it at all.

And you put out your album and nothing happens.

But why should there be an album?

Albums used to be half an hour, but then when CDs replaced vinyl and cassettes, an album could be seventy minutes, who had the time? But it was financially lucrative. Now the economics are completely different. Oftentimes only the hit is streamed, listeners are not interested in the rest of the dreck. So why make it? This is the tradition musicians can’t understand. Sure, if you have an album you can get reviews, you can concentrate your publicity around it, but it doesn’t matter! Only your fans are gonna listen anyway.

So you can do whatever you want. Which is one of the reasons hip-hop and pop dominate. They don’t wait years between releases, they put out multiple albums a year, singles whenever they want to, they’re in touch with the audience, those in the other genres are not.

And since hip-hop lives online, it dominates the streaming chart. We knew hip-hop was popular, we didn’t know it was THIS popular until streaming, just like we didn’t know country was that popular until Soundscan.

Now some might say playlists are the new gatekeepers. But the truth is, list makers don’t want to piss off the labels, who they depend upon. There was one playlist that mattered, Rap Caviar, and then Tuma Basa bolted to YouTube for more money and was never heard from again. And if Alphabet were smart, it would buy Spotify today, because none of their streaming services have gotten traction, and YouTube and Spotify would meld together well.

Now in the old days, the hits were all that mattered. Then FM gave non-single acts spins and whole new genres of music flared. But this is not happening in streaming because everybody’s still hampered by the old model, where only the big hits matter.

But then Lee Abrams came along and codified FM playlists and AOR radio was king and the music business was never healthier.

Will someone come along and codify Spotify and the rest of the streaming services? That’s what we’re waiting for, someone to make sense of the tsunami of tracks. But the streaming services are run by techies, and if they promote one track they leave another out and the industry gets pissed, whereas with radio music was just fuel for advertising, where the real dollars were. But music is the heartbeat of the streaming services.

So now what?

This limited genre streaming will come to an end eventually. Something will break the hegemony. Because there’s too much unoccupied land waiting to be inhabited. This is how Warner/Reprise became the dominant label in the seventies, they signed multiple genres of acts, no one does that anymore.

And the labels are downsizing and investing in anything but music as they continue to try and make their nut. So they’re leaving a giant opportunity.

The internet has proven there’s an audience for everything, however small in some cases. But in music, we’re narrowing the offerings, that makes no sense.

All we hear about is Beyonce, is she truly the only thing happening in music? This myopic focus on limited product is the antithesis of the internet ethos. It’s why AT&T canned the old regime at HBO. Sure, it was the true Tiffany network, but it didn’t make enough product! In other words, AT&T was smarter than the Hollywooders.

And there are a lot of people smarter than those in music.

But there’s just not enough money in it.

But there will be. And then we’ll see change.

Yazhou was in Hong Kong.

Maybe you grew up with this technology, but for those of us who grew up in the twentieth century, it’s positively amazing. It’s kind of like asking my mother what it was like before television, I couldn’t fathom it. And now I’ve lived through a revolution myself, a technical revolution, the internet. It’s commonplace. Even the government has you fill out forms online. Twenty years ago people were afraid to enter their credit card number, now we live on our phones and…

My phone said Portland, OR. I don’t know about you, but this past week I’ve been inundated with calls talking about taxes and social security. I’m savvy enough to know they’re scams, but the worst thing is if only a few people bite, they make their numbers. So they keep dialing, and I keep blocking. But then they call on other numbers. It’s a cat and mouse game I tell you.

Usually my junk calls come from Gardena, CA. Have you been to Gardena? The odds of me knowing someone from there are…nil.

So I don’t pick those up anymore.

And to tell you the truth, I don’t get many phone calls to begin with. I rarely talk on the phone. So if someone is dialing me, is it important?

You know, you wait all day for a call and then a number comes up that’s not in your address book and you decide to let it go to voice mail and then you can’t call back, you can’t connect, it drives you nuts.

But this call from Portland, OR… No message was left, but there was a text, it was Deborah from CNNi. Now I know if they’re looking for me they want me to come on, but I’m out of town, I can’t go to the studio. So we’re texting back and forth and we agree we’ll Skype and dial in the time and…

This is for real business. Oftentimes I deal with companies that are untogether. But they’re gonna test the connection a half hour before and that’s when I get the text from Yazhou.

Now at this point in time, unique names are not uncommon, you don’t think much about it. And a young woman comes on the Skype screen and she has me adjust the angle of my laptop and close the door behind me and we discuss some technical stuff, and then she asks me what I thought about BTS on SNL.

Now I start to wax rhapsodic, telling her I loved the first number, but not the second, where they rapped. And I figure Yazhou was gonna give me the inside spin, being from the demo, and that’s when she tells me she’s in Hong Kong, and that SNL is blocked there.

Now Yazhou goes on to testify about BTS. Smiling as she says that America finally gets it. And I start to kvell. I’m sitting in a condo on a laptop using hotel wifi talking to a young woman in Hong Kong, who’s just doing the technical work, the actual show is gonna be done in Atlanta.

And she speaks English perfectly. I figure she’s doing time over there, paying her dues. But she says she’s Chinese! I can’t believe it, I ask her if she was born in the U.S.A. Nope. But she did spend a few years in school over here, but only a few.

And I’m intersecting with the Chinese miracle on my laptop. Here’s this educated young woman confident in her skills and… Forget all the xenophobic Americans, I can’t fathom it. How did this happen? We feel we can contact anybody in the world whenever we want to. And thirty years ago we thought fax was a breakthrough!

And then I’m connected to Atlanta and we have fun talking about BTS. The anchor asks me if I really think BTS on SNL was better than Gary Clark Jr on the same show, and I say DEFINITELY! Because Gary Clark, Jr. can’t write a song to save his life. He’s an excellent guitar player, but they don’t let the Korean boy/girl bands out in the world until the songs are perfected.

And I’m going on how New Kids On The Block was the progenitor. Oh, don’t e-mail me about some act from the sixties, I get it, you’re a muso and I must be wrong. And then Lou Pearlman perfected the formula, with the dance moves and better songs/production, i.e. Max Martin. And then came One Direction, from a TV show, but they famously didn’t dance. But their career was driven not by radio hits, but online mania. And now BTS has the songs, the dance moves, the meaning, yes, there are messages in their music, just ask their fans, and once again, it all happened online, the traditional music business was caught flat-footed. Yes, the album’s coming out on Columbia, but they’re at the end of the food chain, this was built by people who’d been doing it a long time who were confident in their endeavors and knew it was just a matter of time until the U.S. caught on.

And then John asked me about Blackpink, and I said it was a veritable movement. And it’s so exciting, these Korean acts breaking the hip-hop/pop hegemony. They could have been created in the U.S., but NO!

This shows you what the internet can do.

And I’m still amazed.

Nothing catches fire anymore.

Unless it’s Notre Dame Cathedral.

Or to put it another way, we haven’t had that spirit here since 2012, with “Gangnam Style.”

Of course there are exceptions, most notably with Mayor Pete. But that was based on substance, and the truth is politics/Washington D.C. is the internet of the era. As for entertainment?

And high school kids. They’re in a pressure cooker, so their stuff spreads and we’re told it’s dominant but it’s not. That’s the failure of streaming charts. They bury all but the popular. Non hip-hop/pop acts percolate in the marketplace over time. They’re sold one by one. Therefore, they don’t shoot up the chart immediately and get no publicity, but they’re real.

You just can’t reach anybody anymore. There’s no place everybody is. A teenager wouldn’t be caught dead on Facebook, and a lot of boomers dropped out years ago. As for Twitter…forget the bots, most people signed up for an account, found the service too difficult, and never went back. So it’s a small population tweeting and reading. Furthermore, check out the number of followers of the mega-tweeters. Unless they’re household names, their numbers never break five digits, and are oftentimes much less. And most followers who are actually on Twitter don’t see the tweet, so why do it? It’s a small population tweeting on a regular basis, and most people don’t need to follow the news in real time, so…you can tweet and have no effect.

Or post a YouTube video. If you’re going for subscribers now, good luck. The influencer race peaked a couple of years ago, and those not superstars have moved on to Instagram, which is Twitter with pictures, with about an equal effect. Instagram is about documenting your life, which after the newness wears off, other people are uninterested in. It’s vapidity on parade. So expect posting to decline.

But the truth is if you’re trying to gain a fanbase from scratch, good luck. Be thankful anybody is paying attention at all.

You can post it, but that does not mean people will read it, never mind share it. We’re all overburdened with info, so we only forward the most fascinating, the most important, which is very little. And the dirty little secret is nobody reads it anyway. Bump into them and ask them, they’ll try to fake it, but the truth will be revealed.

Kind of like those e-mail newsletters with articles to read. You sign up and click through a couple of times, but then you stop, the information is not vital. God, think of how many articles have been forwarded to you that you haven’t read.

We all watch different TV shows and read different books and listen to different music. So nothing catches fire and blows up, because no one’s got the time for what they’re already interested in.

So marketers furiously look for publicity in newspapers, blogs, believing it will start a fire. But it won’t unless it’s truly eye or ear-popping. It has to be equivalent to the Beatles, or at least Adele, to get traction.

Otherwise, you’ve got to convert people one by one. Which sellers hate. Because it’s slow and difficult and you win or lose on your merits. It’s hard to fake people out, and they’re certainly not going to tell anybody else.

So, it’s about train-wreck or quality. And even then, word is gonna spread slowly. Just look at all the clickbait on legitimate websites. You know the drill, lurid headline and when you click through you’re inundated with ads, so you don’t.

Marketers have brought this upon themselves. We’re overloaded, we’re not paying attention. We have to hear it from a trusted source before we’ll click.

So nothing lights a fire on the internet overnight.

Which means that big publicity campaigns fall flat. And if you can see the sell beneath the supposed event, people are turned off. That’s what killed viral music videos.

So there is no overnight success. No instant adoption. And that’s what the system was built for, to create a towering edifice overnight.
There’s no sure-fire way to the top.

Own it.

Tune in tomorrow, Tuesday April 16th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: HearLefsetzLive

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