Sold 517,000 albums last week.\u00c2\u00a0 The third highest debut this year, after Lil’ Wayne’s "Tha Carter III" with 1,006,000 and Coldplay’s "Viva La Vida" with 721,000.<\/p>\n
That’s piss poor.<\/p>\n
‘N Sync sold 1.1 million albums IN ONE DAY!\u00c2\u00a0 By time a week had passed, "No Strings Attached" had sold 2.4 million copies!\u00c2\u00a0 Are the Jonas Brothers that much worse than ‘N Sync?\u00c2\u00a0 No, times have changed.<\/p>\n
When "No Strings Attached" was released in 2000, Napster was available, but few individuals other than college students had high speed connections.\u00c2\u00a0 But, more importantly, MTV still ruled.<\/p>\n
Do we blame MTV for playing no videos?\u00c2\u00a0 Do we applaud Justin Timberlake for biting the hand that fed him at the last VMAs?\u00c2\u00a0 That would be a waste of time.\u00c2\u00a0 Because it’s not like videos are completely unavailable on television, there are numerous channels, even programmed by MTV itself, higher on your cable dial that are essentially wall to wall videos, but no one wants to watch them, at least not in prodigious numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re interested in watching a video, you go to the Web, see what you want, on demand, instantly.\u00c2\u00a0 The days of sitting in front of the box for hours, waiting for your favorite video to appear, are done.\u00c2\u00a0 The collective consciousness built around MTV is history.<\/p>\n
The major labels keep beating the piracy drum.\u00c2\u00a0 And I won’t say P2P and other private transfers are insignificant, but more important is the change in our society, its decentralization, people scattering into niches.<\/p>\n
You used to have no choice.\u00c2\u00a0 You listened to what radio and MTV fed you.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, youngsters hate radio and are tuning out in droves, if they ever tuned in to begin with.\u00c2\u00a0 The history of music is available at your fingertips, you can go exactly where you want to and leave the rest behind.<\/p>\n
The mainstream press has not caught up on this, because it’s based on the old broadcasting model.\u00c2\u00a0 Lasso the most people and dictate.\u00c2\u00a0 But does YouTube dictate?\u00c2\u00a0 eBay?\u00c2\u00a0 They’re just aggregators, in total they’ve got more users than the old mainstream dictation media outlets do, it’s just that everybody’s involved with completely different media.\u00c2\u00a0 And, if something garners a lot of eyeballs, it’s usually a train-wreck, some inane video about saving Britney or two cups that gets a momentary spike and is then forgotten.<\/p>\n
So, if you light yourself on fire, people will pay attention for maybe a day.\u00c2\u00a0 But then it becomes, what have you done for me lately?<\/p>\n
Which is why the publicity stunts no longer work.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re seen as such.\u00c2\u00a0 And the more you parade yourself in the mainstream press, the higher the risk you turn people off.\u00c2\u00a0 If Coldplay entered the market today, they’d be a fraction of the size they are, and people wouldn’t hate Chris Martin.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that Coldplay was one of the last bands to eke through under the old dictation system, we were all paying attention then, we’re not anymore.<\/p>\n
What are the new acts that have broken?\u00c2\u00a0 All we read about are the old acts, with critical mass, charging a fortune, going on the road.\u00c2\u00a0 And the only oldsters who could sell records, the Eagles, released an album that almost no one has heard.\u00c2\u00a0 They may have been paid by Wal-Mart, but it’s almost like the album didn’t come out.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people have never heard "Long Road Out Of Eden", whereas back in ’77, if you hadn’t heard "Hotel California", you didn’t have ears.<\/p>\n
This has got nothing to do with quality.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s got to do with options.<\/p>\n
As for the Jonas Brothers…\u00c2\u00a0 They even had their own damn movie on Disney, "Camp Rock"!\u00c2\u00a0 This is even better than what ‘N Sync was the beneficiary of way back when.\u00c2\u00a0 But as strong as the Disney brand is, it’s not that strong.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not Big Brother.\u00c2\u00a0 It can make hits, but not everything featured evolves into a ubiquitous phenomenon.\u00c2\u00a0 How many kids are surfing the Net instead of watching what’s fed to them hour by hour on Disney?\u00c2\u00a0 How many kids are listening to oldies or something else?<\/p>\n
Lil’ Wayne…\u00c2\u00a0 Have you heard "Tha Carter"?\u00c2\u00a0 Not unless you’re interested.\u00c2\u00a0 You have to seek it out.<\/p>\n
I live in a Rihanna free zone.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not 1964, I’m not subjected to her latest track next to the work of the British Invasion.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, if it were 1964 today, Beatlemania would be a sideshow.\u00c2\u00a0 Pointing out that even if you’re GREAT today, your traction is going to be limited.<\/p>\n
I actually think the Jonas Brothers are a step up from Miley Cyrus and a lot of the recent pre-teen dreck.\u00c2\u00a0 They can play and they can write.\u00c2\u00a0 But obviously, kids are more interested in their own camp experience than the faux one portrayed on the Disney Channel.\u00c2\u00a0 You might say that they have a short attention span, but that is wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 They graze until they find what they’re truly interested in, then dig extremely deep.\u00c2\u00a0 Guitar Hero is better than the Jonas Brothers, they’d rather play the former.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t have to consume what the man feeds you any longer.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the story of the twenty first century, not piracy.<\/p>\n
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Sold 517,000 albums last week.\u00c2\u00a0 The third highest debut this year, after Lil’ Wayne’s "Tha Carter III" with 1,006,000 and Coldplay’s "Viva La Vida" with 721,000. That’s piss poor. ‘N Sync sold 1.1 million albums IN ONE DAY!\u00c2\u00a0 By time a week had passed, "No Strings Attached" had sold 2.4 million copies!\u00c2\u00a0 Are the Jonas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-lt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}