image cc courtesy Mandiberg @ flickr.com/photos/theredproject/
Investing in Artists: Consider a Promotionless To Popular Strategy First article at Music Think Tank has a few great points, and many holes. Essentially the author is saying that crowd-sourcing most if not all promotion is the only way to go. Anything else that works is a fluke. He goes further: if all artists followed the current conventional industry wisdom, musicians as a class of people would drive fans away in social settings, much like financial planners, lawyers or car dealers. I think there’s a lot of truth to this point. Readers intuitively understand people don’t like being “targets” for anything (especially advertising!), so they might accept his other points. The problem is, some of his other ideas are plain wrong.
The best show I ever saw was Big Black at the Jockey Club; I caught them by accident because I was working there that night, and managed to round up nearly a dozen friends after their sound check blew me away, but that was the extent of their audience. Years later they played the Southgate House, half full, yet in spite of critical raves and plenty of fans, they were on their break-up tour. Many of the best bands in the world fail due to poor promotion. On the other hand, no one has failed for too-effective promotion. Sure things are a little different in our viral, socially networked world. And yes, if every band suddenly got good at promo, it’s value would shrink, as fans tune out of your message. The TiVo effect is reality. That doesn’t eliminate the need for promotion, it actually increases it, but it also changes strategies. Valid, workable solutions are the opposite of “promotionless”; they have to be deeper and more strategic than ever, to cut through the noise.
The Old Spice Guy, played by Isaiah Mustafa, is a machine, not a real person. To go viral this machine required a team of copy writers, a video crew, and a strong IT backbone, driven by a very conventional PR push to encourage (or even pay!) celebs to ask him questions. Like the Tea Party, it’s powered by database driven design techniques, not grass roots enthusiasm or organic clicks and mails. It epitomizes modern dataesthetics, but from the outside it feels genuine and always fun. This campaign could never have been considered in a “Promotionless to Popular” paradigm. Aside from truly viral characters, like the Korean guitar playing kid or the Numanuma guy, no one really takes off effortlessly.
Amanda Palmer. Lady Gaga. MIA. OK GO. These are the best examples in the music biz of viral, organic fan-driven success. And yet none of these acts fit the theory posed in this piece. They epitomize the opposite: Pure 24/7/365 always-on promotion! Where are the examples supporting this theory in the real world? Bruce Warlia doesn’t offer any, maybe because none exist.
The non-existence of examples isn’t evidence that this is just too new or some sort of cutting edge thinking. Without examples it’s just a theory, and not an especially new one. It’s actually the core ethos of punk rock for the past 30+ years! We heard it from The Sex Pistols. We heard it from Mods in the UK in the early 60s too. Authenticity, rawness, and fan-driven style and fashion tie-ins are pretty old school. Likewise, rejecting contemporary promotional culture isn’t new… Who likes being the victim of a sales spiel? Let’s get real!
So why am I posting at all? Look at the comments below the article. This is Yet Another Bad Idea from Industry Central that tons of ground level working artists are buying into, to rationalize their failure. Unfortunately I see no evidence that it explains anything, since it’s unsupported and unsupportable. What am I missing?
