(originally uploaded by evie22)
[...] Do you want to make a deal with a major, for their theoretical infrastructure, or sell to your core and make eight bucks a record? That’s the new game. Instead of selling your soul to reach everybody, concentrate on your base, growing your base, organically. There’s plenty of money in the music business today. Just stop swinging for the fences. A bunt gets you on first too.
Yeah, but a home run gets you home with a guaranteed score, instantly.
That’s the promise the industry has sold to potential talent for years, and it’s what talent dreams about when taking a shot at making it within any industry — put in the work and come home with stuffed pockets.
It’s a calculated business promise to fulfill an understandable desire, but as Bob alludes to, it’s an even greater long shot for success in this day and age.
Consider the recent changes at play within the music business:
- Music videos have become a relatively weak form of promotion with the death of MTV as a full-time video channel, and the explosion of decentralized video online
- FM radio has become a wasteland for mainstream retreads and bottom-line enhancing rotations
- CD sales are dropping year after year, as people no longer buy into the $12+ price point of an album
- Sold out mega-concert are primarily limited to dinosaur super-acts while being supported by old people with cash to burn
- Online radio, such as Pandora and Last.fm, is gaining larger and larger communities each year
- Music event listings can be created with numerous online services, which greatly increases competition for the entertainment dollar
- The web allows people (artists, producers, merchandisers, venues and fans) to easily connect with one another, which reduces the need to participate within big label infrastructure
There will always be acts willing to turn over creative control for a gamble at a quick road to celebrity, but majors labels aren’t the equivalent to the employers of your father’s 40 year-long, one gig career. Majors don’t cultivate the longevity of an act unless the act breaks big and/or sells consistently well… and that has become harder and harder to sustain through industry marketing.
Once we all moved beyond the boob tube and FM radio as our primary introduction (and reinforcement) to new music, the majors began to lose their ace in the hole for generating buzz. And while that programmable market still exists, it has shrunken considerably. Even more disconcerting to the majors must be the fact that many of those people who dodge the one-way sales pitch of traditional media go on to rebel against the machine by simply participating and uploading their own media files online.
By default, the two-way nature of the live web expedites the evolution of our perception of industry — from a one-way street into a partnership, which is the exact opposite type of consumer relationship any mainstream industry wants to deal with.
More and more, people want to connect with the artists they support and on levels deeper and more far reaching than simply buying an album and playing it over and over again deep into the night prior to hitting a show. And labels don’t know how to turn that desired community into a commodity.
I don’t know if I’d use the same metaphor of a bunt to describe the choice of embracing community over signing away one’s soul shooting for the aggregate, but advising musicians to work on building their own careers by interacting with the people that dig their sound?
Rock on.
When I read this in combination with the Lefsetz musing, the whole relationship between artist and fan is still couched in conditioning. The bunt is in breaking that conditioning that is the lens of money and power.
There is an alternative lens which Lefsetz’s alludes to but did not articulate, that the way out of a conditioned response to music is shift from the lens of money and power to the lens of love and value.
That lens of love and value is the sacrifice fly, it is the bunt which Lefsetz seems to be describing and this means a shift from the conditioned response to a free spirited response, since we are all conditioned beings.
The relationship of money and power in music to conditioning is synergistic, but what Lefsetz describes in his piece is a shift is the relationship of love and value to free spirited choice which is symbiotic.
The net result is that to take a transformational step - fans have to change their conditioned relationship to a free spirited one, as well, but a money and power based focus remains the barrier to this organic growth.
If we take the Beatles as an example of a band conditioned to the lens of money and power, then we know why Brian Epstein groomed them the way he did and why their songs became simplistic and easily understood.
Whereas money and power scaled in the West as the Beatles became a modern phenomena, something quite different occurred in the underground movements in the communist controlled Soviet Union.
In the Soviet Union, people who were denied basic freedoms viewed the music of the Beatles through the lens of love and value. In the West the Beatles became a commercial force, but over there - a revolutionary one.
Indeed when we look the influence that Yoko Ono had on John Lennon, as an artist that looked through the lens of love and value, Lennon had not only found his anchor in Ono, but he found a more significant voice.
One can only then imagine the road John Lennon would have travelled if the original anchor in his life and a member of the original Beatles - Stu Sutcliffe had not died of a brain hemorrhage in Hamburg.
Sutcliffe, like Ono was an artist rather than a pure musician and since he too viewed the world through the lens of love and value, then one can then contemplate the music John Lennon would have made with Stu.
The mindset of love and value isn’t some fluffy Beatles song, those songs were conditioned for money and power rather than crafted for love and value. What matters today is if fans are aware of their own conditioning.
Whenever we are conditioned to a certain type of music or we view the world as a battle against or a pursuit for money and power, we continue to wear the old lens and then I ask, what’s really changed in music?
Yet the organic route, is a route that is finding its shape and free-spirited music then is the connection between musicians and their fans but also more importantly the connection between listeners and their own choices.
M.
The question for musicians isn’t what kind of new monetary game they should be involved in, it is how one views the middle class empire, the existing ones in western countries and the emerging one’s in China and India. These emerging nations are societies were most graduates will speak English and these are cultures that can either be fed the lowest common denominator, or become one’s where creativity rather than stupidity becomes the higher value. How can knowledge or mind based societies thrive on industrial models of passive consumption?
In the history of arts, great works of art were commissioned by the rich, and the patron’s of this art where wealthy families. In the emerging world ahead of us, the middle class is a collective of miniature kings and queens all living in their castle. Given that these are educated people, connected by modern technologies, then the model for music must surely become one that is a whole lot different to the psyche of the modern market place. At some point it has to evolve around human need rather than revolve around the machine.
Open source and P2P systems have been in the past developed for technological construction, the output of which is often software or operating system product, but I don’t know if it has truly been fashioned for a world where creativity becomes a key driver to foster the national asset of talent. I personally think that far too much emphasis is put on how to make money rather than how to create value. The money maker model is today’s mentality of narcissistic space but the value maker model is about creating a smarter space.
We already know that appreciation of music improves the mind and that conditioning of music can dull the mind. It all depends on what music is doing to the ear culture. We also know that there is a difference between money making and investing and that market capitalization developed because stocks became a vehicle for describing value. There is no reason why this middle class does not become investor’s in the arts in an arts market, the way medieval patron’s where in their particular age.
This brings us back to the idea of patrons but more importantly a distinction between market capitalization and market creativity. The passive stance is a world of fans, but there is no reason why patron’s are not participants in the earliest part of the music or arts life-cycle. In a collaborative world where music can become a honeycomb of creativity cells, surely there is an opportunity for creating music appreciators - (appreciators rather than investors). There is no reason why patron’s are not involved when music is being created.
This means the development of collaborative networks based on appreciation and music since it is auditory is perfect medium for such a network. Patronage should be a feasible reality if the reality of the emerging global middle class isn’t resisted but accepted. Then it comes down to creating collaborative cells where patron’s can view music being made “or born”, contribute to their own education and awareness of creativity and support music as an intelligence rather than as a product.
That would require the view that the future isn’t simply about gross national product, but gross national creativity and that means appreciating smart spaces rather than me spaces. Whether such a creative renaissance occurs in my lifetime is still a pie in the sky nothingness, and depends on whether diverse music is viewed has an essential value in society or if it is simply a process of consumption. Personally I don’t think we are ready for this, for we live in a society where the nature of trust is still mechanically manufactured rather than highly and deeply evolving.
M.