People just don’t care.<\/p>\n
Every day I get e-mail castigating me that I’ve pissed on someone’s favorite act, or haven’t given enough coverage to another. I don’t doubt that you like these acts, but what fascinates me is most people don’t.\u00c2\u00a0 Music is now niche.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like knitting or needlepoint, but a bit bigger. \u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe we’ll spread the analogy to sports.\u00c2\u00a0 Music is tennis.\u00c2\u00a0 Gargantuan decades ago, most people just don’t care today. Billie Jean King, Jimmy Connors, even McEnroe…\u00c2\u00a0 Today we’ve got Federer and Nadal and I can’t tell them apart and might turn on a match once a year, whereas I used to watch religiously.\u00c2\u00a0 But now there are few stars.\u00c2\u00a0 Few personalities.\u00c2\u00a0 And on the men’s side, the game has become so damn fast as to be something completely different, the same way music veered off into hip-hop and divadom and most people stopped caring.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, some people cared, but relatively few, otherwise Mariah Carey would be selling out arenas every night, and she’s not, and a rapper other than Jay-Z could do 20,000 a night too.<\/p>\n
Or maybe we should look at golf.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s one superstar, Tiger Woods, getting the whole nation golf-crazy, but if he’s not playing, viewership drops dramatically.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, Phil Mickelson is a great golfer, but only golf devotees care about him, the average citizen might know his name and nothing more.<\/p>\n
We’re under the illusion that music is king, that it drives the culture, but it’s not.\u00c2\u00a0 Music has become the sideshow.\u00c2\u00a0 Even on "American Idol"…does anybody expect Lee DeWyze to make it?\u00c2\u00a0 We’re interested in the comings and goings of Simon Cowell, not the contestants.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, music is featured on the show, OLD MUSIC!<\/p>\n
And many people will go to hear old music live.\u00c2\u00a0 But fewer each year at higher prices.\u00c2\u00a0 After you’ve heard that famous act do its hits live, do you really need to go back?\u00c2\u00a0 And the old acts are truly in it for the money, they’ve got no dignity, otherwise, why would they be shilling on TV, appearing on "American Idol"…I’m stunned they didn’t lobby for a crawl with a link to tickets. Then again, everybody knows you go to ticketmaster.com for an experience you endure, but hate.<\/p>\n
This business will not be vital again until there’s a stable of stars, hopefully a plethora that people follow and want to see. And it would be great if they had something to say, if they were three-dimensional.\u00c2\u00a0 GaGa is a start.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, she’s got train-wreck value, but people believe there’s substance underneath, and it’s not what you think, it’s what they think.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, who else?<\/p>\n
Everybody else lives and dies on the hit single.\u00c2\u00a0 If Christina Aguilera had fans, she’d be able to sell tickets without airplay.\u00c2\u00a0 But she needs hits to get bodies into seats.\u00c2\u00a0 In the old days, bands could tour without hits whatsoever.\u00c2\u00a0 But that was back when music drove the culture, when you knew the players like sports team members, when you had to go to the show, when you were addicted to the radio.<\/p>\n
The radio.\u00c2\u00a0 And then MTV.\u00c2\u00a0 They centralized focus.\u00c2\u00a0 They delivered a platform for star-building.\u00c2\u00a0 Someone left of center could get exposure and make it.\u00c2\u00a0 Like Culture Club.\u00c2\u00a0 MTV broke Boy George big, radio followed.\u00c2\u00a0 But FM radio built Hendrix and Cream, the music was so exciting you listened every night.\u00c2\u00a0 Because everyone was different, everyone was testing limits, everybody wasn’t the same.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you don’t think everybody’s the same today, try listening to Top Forty radio.<\/p>\n
So where do we go from here?<\/p>\n
Attention without substance is worthless.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, if you shoot someone, we’ll all know your name, but soon we’ll be on to the next headline.<\/p>\n
The audience demands universality, something mainstream.\u00c2\u00a0 And mainstream does not mean compromised, it means quality! Something so good that it cannot be denied!\u00c2\u00a0 Do you really think people care about a black\/Asian golfer?\u00c2\u00a0 Of course not, what drew people to Tiger was his ability, his greatness!\u00c2\u00a0 So you’ve got a band that you like, are they so good that you can drag almost anybody to see them and they’ll like them too?\u00c2\u00a0 If not, they’re niche.<\/p>\n
But, like I said, the whole business is niche.\u00c2\u00a0 Labels believe if file-trading is stopped, an impossibility, sales will go up dramatically.\u00c2\u00a0 I doubt it.\u00c2\u00a0 People don’t care about music that much, they’re satisfied with free YouTube play.\u00c2\u00a0 And certainly most people don’t care about the individual acts purveyed…how do we get them to care?<\/p>\n
It would be great if there were a Website, like Yahoo or Amazon or Google, actually more like the Huffington Post, to focus attention and build acts.\u00c2\u00a0 But the site builders are only interested in money, not music, and therefore they focus on advertising, everything but the consumer experience.\u00c2\u00a0 MySpace had a music focus, but its user interface sucked, still, how come every year there’s a new Net phenomenon, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and there’s never one solely music based?\u00c2\u00a0 Ever think about that?<\/p>\n
The new Spotify is great, the social-networking elements trump iTunes, playlist sharing with instant listening ability is so cool…but it still doesn’t solve the problem that we’re lacking hit acts.<\/p>\n
I don’t want a world of endless niches.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s incomprehensible.<\/p>\n
And the public doesn’t want one either.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is why sales are so damn bad.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not like they just invented a new file-trading technique.\u00c2\u00a0 No, most people can live without the music that’s being sold.<\/p>\n
You solve the problem the way you always have, with hit music.\u00c2\u00a0 And the public doesn’t believe today’s music is full of hits. Their opinion, not yours.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re happy in your private little backwater, salivating in front of the stage before your favorite niche act, fine.\u00c2\u00a0 But you’re not, because you keep telling everybody they should like your act too.<\/p>\n
But most people are never going to like the Hold Steady, the National or the Black Keys.\u00c2\u00a0 Never gonna happen.\u00c2\u00a0 And the fact that you’re a big fan and react to my point by going ballistic and e-mailing me does not solve the problem.\u00c2\u00a0 I like "The Deadliest Catch", shouldn’t you?\u00c2\u00a0 No, that’s too mainstream…\u00c2\u00a0 I like A&E’s "Intervention"…shouldn’t you?\u00c2\u00a0 No, that’s pretty successful too.\u00c2\u00a0 You can watch either of them even if you’ve never fished or never been addicted, because they’ve got underlying human elements that appeal to all.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the way music used to be.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s not that way now.<\/p>\n
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People just don’t care. Every day I get e-mail castigating me that I’ve pissed on someone’s favorite act, or haven’t given enough coverage to another. I don’t doubt that you like these acts, but what fascinates me is most people don’t.\u00c2\u00a0 Music is now niche.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like knitting or needlepoint, but a bit bigger. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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-2966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-LQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2966","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}