{"id":9773,"date":"2015-04-25T07:29:16","date_gmt":"2015-04-25T15:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=9773"},"modified":"2015-04-25T07:29:16","modified_gmt":"2015-04-25T15:29:16","slug":"music-first-stardom-second","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2015\/04\/25\/music-first-stardom-second\/","title":{"rendered":"Music First, Stardom Second"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t get an Apple Watch, but every celebrity known to man has been seeded one to make them look cool. Who&#8217;s using who? And if you think it&#8217;s the musicians who are coming out ahead, you own no Apple stock.<\/p>\n<p>Used to be different. Players weren&#8217;t rich. They were in it for the dope, the sex, the hang and the music. It was a lifestyle. What did Donald Fagen sing in &#8220;Deacon Blues&#8221;&#8230;&#8221;I cried when I wrote this song, sue me if I play too long&#8221;? There are no blues in popular music today. No one&#8217;s crying, unless it&#8217;s about the loss of recorded music revenue as they charge a zillion dollars for a ticket.<\/p>\n<p>Once again, watch this video:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=kEsJqtiU-2A\" target=\"_blank\"> Tidal &#8211; End The Suffering<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In it you&#8217;ll see how rich Jay Z and Madonna and the rest of the Tidalites truly are. Turns your stomach, makes you lose sympathy.<\/p>\n<p>Ever know any bluebloods?<\/p>\n<p>I certainly did. Back in Connecticut. They wore chinos and Topsiders and drove old Fords, they didn&#8217;t flaunt their wealth, it was unseemly. Now it&#8217;s all about showing how rich you are. Then again, a lot of the techies don&#8217;t. Zuck wears a hoodie and doesn&#8217;t brag about flying private, that&#8217;s for the &#8220;artists.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>No wonder no one believes in them.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the Tidal story. It&#8217;s got nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with income inequality. Once upon a time it was about forming a tribe, a fan base, people who heard your music and followed you everywhere. No one wanted to follow anybody to Tidal. Why?<\/p>\n<p>The story was completely missed by the media. Because the goal is to write a book and go on a lecture tour. Used to be writers were outsiders who were in it for the alcohol and the truth. Now they&#8217;re wannabe stars themselves, who don&#8217;t want to offend anyone on their way up.<\/p>\n<p>Once the artist is divorced from his fan base, he&#8217;s screwed.<\/p>\n<p>Your fans are all you&#8217;ve got. Life is long. You want them in your pocket after your hits dry up. And they will. No one has ever sustained.<\/p>\n<p>But the players play on.<\/p>\n<p>The classic rockers didn&#8217;t know there was that much money in it. Go back and read the interviews. Ringo figured he&#8217;d become a hairdresser, everybody was out on a lark, having fun before their real lives began. No one thought being a rock musician was a role you could play to the end of your days.<\/p>\n<p>But today Ringo hypes Skechers.<\/p>\n<p>Explain this to me Mr. Starkey&#8230; Do you want to buy a baseball team? Don&#8217;t you have enough cash? Or are we supposed to believe you just want the rest of the world to be turned on to a great product.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s food. Something evanescent that everybody&#8217;s talking about. Remember chefs? The unheralded nobodies? Then they were in the right place at the right time and they became rich and famous. The stardom comes AFTER!<\/p>\n<p>But today everybody believes it comes before.<\/p>\n<p>They want to be famous, they want to be rich.<\/p>\n<p>They don&#8217;t want to be musicians.<\/p>\n<p>A musician is someone who practices, ALONE! Explain that to today&#8217;s social media darlings.<\/p>\n<p>And a musician is someone who is oftentimes ignored. Sometimes for his entire career. And a musician never bitches he can&#8217;t get paid, he&#8217;s privileged to be playing.<\/p>\n<p>But not today! Today everybody with a YouTube clip feels entitled to be wealthy. They&#8217;ll spam you to watch and complain if you don&#8217;t. As if everybody could make it. What, are we living in Lake Wobegon?<\/p>\n<p>How about saying no. How about ending the fashion parade and the ghost writes and sitting down and hammering it out yourself. How about testing limits and blowing our minds.<\/p>\n<p>But that can&#8217;t happen. That&#8217;s too hard. It might piss somebody off. Remember the Dixie Chicks?<\/p>\n<p>AT LEAST WE DO!<\/p>\n<p>Most of their contemporaries have faded in the rearview mirror. Because if you don&#8217;t stand for something, you stand for nothing.<\/p>\n<p>We want people who stand for something. We&#8217;re a nation of followers looking for leaders.<\/p>\n<p>They used to be musicians.<\/p>\n<p>No longer.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t get an Apple Watch, but every celebrity known to man has been seeded one to make them look cool. Who&#8217;s using who? And if you think it&#8217;s the musicians who are coming out ahead, you own no Apple stock. Used to be different. Players weren&#8217;t rich. They were in it for the dope, [&hellip;]<\/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-9773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-2xD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9773","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=9773"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9777,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9773\/revisions\/9777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}