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

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: LefsetzLive

First everybody was gonna have a website, then they were gonna have a blog, then a page on Facebook and now pictures on Instagram. What do all these endeavors have in common? They’re passing fads. Because it was too much work and too few people were paying attention.

America is evolving into niches. I’m not talking entertainment, I’m talking people themselves. Zuckerberg has it right that we want private groups, because these are the only people who care about us.

It was all about garnering attention. But after you connected on Facebook with all the people you went to school with and distanced yourself from for good reason, what was your next move?

It’s kind of like the seventies. After the tumultuous sixties, we had the back to the land movement. And the personal development movement, i.e. EST, and Tom Wolfe labeled the era the “Me Decade.”

We are on the verge of another Me Decade. History repeats, but always with a twist. People are overwhelmed with information. They can’t make sense of it. They’re trying to figure out how to tune it out.

Yes, you have the coastal baby boomers with their anti-smartphone campaigns, but ignore them, they just want to jet back to a past that will never come back. Your smartphone opens your life, makes it easier, and it’s all personalized to you. This is the personalization that will become prominent in the twenties.

I’m not talking about tech personalization, robot personalization, algorithm personalization, this personalization will come from the users themselves. They’ll choose the info they want and the people they want to connect with. And it will be relatively few.

The internet allows us to reach everybody, but everybody is not listening. We had the Vine people, and now the social media “influencers.” They’re a fad. Because the truth is most people don’t care about them. Sure, there’s room for a few big ones, but…

I’ll give you an example. Wipe out your Twitter account and start over. Good luck getting the same number of followers. Or start a new Facebook page and see how many friends you can garner. That’s something people did years ago that they’re no longer into, they delete the invites. As for Instagram, fine if you’re posting the photos for your friends, for your circle, but if you think you can reach more, you’re deluded.

That’s right, putting on your best face, curating your image, that will be passe. We’re evolving into a more honest era, where it’s all about what your friends think of you. And the truth is they’ll forgive flaws, that’s what makes you human. And all those makeup tutorials on YouTube, the purveyors are going to give up and not be replaced.

This is a complete reset. A disassembling of the twentieth century model of gatekeepers and number ones. And the early internet model of virality. Virality is almost dead. No one has the time for it. If your friend recommends something, you’ll check it out, otherwise you’ll ignore it.

Friends have points of reference. There will be a switch to real life as opposed to internet life. Of course friends will utilize the internet and the smartphone to ease their existence, but they’ll mostly use these tools to gain information and communicate with their friends.

So marketing will become ever more difficult.

But also the aspirational culture we live in will decline. Everybody wanted to be rich and famous. Turns out very few people can be rich and famous. So why try? Everybody was gonna write an app, nobody does that anymore. Apps are something you get for free, they’re not a way to get rich.

As for getting rich… The millennials and Gen-Z are far different from their forebears. It’s not enough just to have money, how did you earn it, do you give back? Forget the disinformation paraded in the media, about influencers frolicking and flying on private jets. Everybody’s resetting their aspirations. They want fulfillment, not fame. And no one can be as famous as the stars of yesteryear.

It’s like America will become a nation of small towns. Because you don’t want to feel like a number.

Amazon is becoming the king of advertisers, because that’s where you go to shop, you only see ads for what you’re interested in. Google is losing. As for the ads you get in websites, where Facebook and Google triumph? Turns out algorithms don’t work, because they’re not personal. We’re looking for the personal touch in the machine age. Start with honesty and credibility and work from there. Everybody hates spam.

And you can be on TV and unknown.

Have an article about you in the paper and get no traction.

You’ve got to infect group by group. And the process is much slower, even though the internet is instantaneous.

We’re overloaded, we’re fatigued with what’s going on. We don’t want to hear about new, new, new, we just want to have relationships with a few enterprises and call it a day.

The internet barons are out of touch because they think tech solves all problems.

But that is untrue. And the public knows it.

So everybody will have a story and only their close friends will know it.

And everyone will be happier.

What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where a Korean boy band sings to track and blows away every performance on SNL this year?

One in which Blackpink has been the highlight of Coachella so far.

I mean you want to hate BTS, on principle. It’s manufactured, we’ve seen this movie before.

Only we haven’t. We thought NSYNC could dance? There’s no Joey Fatone in BTS and the moves were more complicated and executed flawlessly.

And the song was pop, not hip-hop.

Oh, how far we’ve gotten from the garden.

I was talking to Susan Rosenbluth, she went on the road with the band, she told me the girls know all the dances and now I get it!

That’s right, the Koreans know more about music than the Americans, at least those in the music industry. We’ve gotten so far from the garden, we don’t even know what an apple is anymore. The labels and the media tell us it’s all hip-hop all the time, but I got an e-mail from a promoter, telling me he wouldn’t book Lil Nas X, there was no demand. But BTS!

Now the song won’t set the world on fire, be embedded instantly in your brain and having you testify as to seeing God, but god, you can listen to it, it’s not offensive. That’s how far we’ve come, where the standard is being INOFFENSIVE and NOT GETTING ARRESTED!

It’s pure show business. And that’s far from what the modern music business was built upon. Then again, Mariah Carey broke almost thirty years ago, a generation and a half ago, the only credible songs Gen-Z are aware of are those from the classic rock era, which they’re listening to, but they want something new, to call their own.

Music is like politics. Did you read the “New York Times” article saying that social media is an inaccurate view of the Democratic party? As in the far left is posting constantly, the center is not.

Used to be record labels were full service enterprises, everything from pop to classical. Now it’s all hip-hop, all the time. Even the pop acts use beats. And the biggest act in the world is Adele, and she sounds nothing like this.

We’ve got to get back to the song.

We no longer live in an homogeneous society. Everybody doesn’t like the same thing. So pockets of the audience are underserved, and these pockets trump what is supposedly mainstream.

I’d buy a ticket to BTS and stay to the end. You can give me a ticket to most of the modern acts and I’d leave before it was done, it’s too boring and you can’t understand the lyrics and…

SNL is long in the tooth, it’s rarely funny, it’s just the endless repetition of the same tropes. And when BTS hit the screen my mind told me this was a new low for the show, giving up any pretense of credibility, just going with what was popular. But by seeing BTS I was converted.

And I’m not the only one.

“The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate”