Discovery
Last week’s post on the word “pitchy” got a little bit of a discussion going on American Idol which was an excellent segue into one of the many topics I had hoped to address in my series on re-thinking record labels. It’s a little bit out of order from the schedule I had originally planned, but when the public demands something I oblige myself to deliver!
However, despite my original outline it seems more appropriate for this post to lead off our discussion on how record labels have changed in the past few years because today’s topic deals with the discovery of new artists—the very beginning of the whole music business process.
By “discovering new artists” I mean finding those artists who are worthy to be put in the great music apparatus that, through the alchemy of the industry, churns out radio hits and gold records. Note: this is not the process by which the general populace discovers new music for consumption. That is something I call avataring and I will delve further into that in a later post.
Now, discovering new artists to feed the music machine presents a paradox in our discussion. Because we are trying to think of how the industry has evolved from the classic paradigm, some may surmise that we don’t need to feed the machine anymore because the machine is dying/dead anyway. In other words, is it worth discussing how we find new music to put into the industry works if the industry is no longer necessary? Chicken or egg, etc…
Well, for the time being anyway record labels are still around and for the sake of compartmentalizing this aspect for discussion, let’s assume that there is a machine to feed.
So let’s say I’m a record label executive and I need to find some new talent to make my quota for this quarter. In the 1970s, I’d have an army of A&R scouts scouring local clubs and local radio nationwide trying to find that one group that had that certain something that might make them a hit. Maybe they don’t need to produce a hit record right away, but the right chemistry in the band might mean that with some development a hit might be in the future.
Fast-forward to the 2000s. Record labels are losing money year over year and downsizing considerably. A&R scouting departments no longer have nearly as many feet on the ground combing nearly as wide of an area looking for the next big thing. Furthermore, the places where they would go if they had the personnel are disappearing too. Small local clubs that support local musicians and undiscovered artists are disappearing by the boatload. Forget about local radio, how many Jack/Bob/other friendly neighborhood syndicated satellite radio programs are there now? When’s the last time you heard a local act on your radio? Instead it’s a 40-minute loop of Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and Kanye.
Also, the record labels are not in the mood to sit and wait for hits to develop. They need results and they need them fast. That means that they are looking for pre-packaged artists that come with their own prefab audience.
Enter American Idol, this is the template for how new music has and will come to the great machine of the music business. Television pseudo-celebrity creates a readymade national market for the consumption of music. America’s appetite for celebrity is insatiable and everyday we lower our standards for what makes someone a celebrity (when all else fails, lower your standards). I was watching TV the other night and there is this show called “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.” They did a run-down of everybody in that show and I turned to my girlfriend and said, “Who the hell are any of those people?” A celebrity used to have to do something worth celebrating to become a celebrity, not just be a media whore on some ridiculous “reality show” making out with another chick in the hot tub or losing 40 pounds in a week.
But I digress. If Americans see a celebrity on TV and they have a CD out, by god somebody is going to buy it! At least the chances are higher that some Suit at a record label will give a talent-less hack a shot over a decently talented band who maybe a hundred people had actually been able to see when they opened for the Bodines at Main Street Days.
That’s why Warner Bros. took a chance on Paris Hilton’s atrocious debut album Paris, Casablanca took a chance on Lindsay Lohan’s equally atrocious debut Speak, and why Koch Entertainment (affiliated with Universal for distribution) took a chance on Idol reject William Hung. All of these people got airplay on radio stations world-wide because “Hey guys, you saw them on TV last night! Check out their new single!!”
Television is great because it buys into the cult of celebrity and brings new music passively to record label decision-makers. They can sit in their office or eat dinner in front of the TV, catch a song or two by some pretty face on Idol and know that if they signed them to a deal, they’d have something that could promote itself. And that’s the key: these are actions to reduce costs in discovery and promotion.
Of course TV isn’t the only medium where decision-makers can find musicians with built in audiences. The Internet (did you really think I was going to make an entire article about this without addressing the Internet?) has its own ways of getting music to the powers-that-be with its own specious ways of inferring a built in audience.
The new movie Funny People has this great bit in it where Adam Sandler’s character is doing stand-up at a MySpace convention and says something like “I have 10,000 friends on MySpace…that equates to how many in the real world?” It couldn’t be more true, just because your site is heavily trafficked and you have thousands of MySpace fans, how many of them actually translate into real ticket-buying, CD-collecting, T-shirt-wearing bona fide fans. Anybody heard anything from The Arctic Monkeys recently? Because Billboard surely hasn’t…Still labels have interns who do nothing all day but scour MySpace looking for bands with a decent sound and a good following.
All of these are ways of managing costs: cutting A&R scouts, reducing national travel and show expenses, minimizing promotion expense, and dismissing development expenses.
Despite all of this, nobody has the ability to discover new music to bring to a national audience like the record labels. Regardless of how bad they are at their jobs, there are still people being paid to do nothing but “discover” new music. What we have is a serious misallocation of resources and a steadfast refusal for a dying industry to invest in its own future. Rather than looking for the next Beatles who can still move records 40 years after they break up or the next Rolling Stones who have spent 40 years performing sold-out tours (and probably will continue for 40 more), the labels are content with forgettable fill-ins plucked straight from Best Week Ever who then fade into afterthoughts with a good night’s sleep.
The technological revolution still has not produced a certified way for anyone to bring great new music to the attention of major labels. Perhaps that’s due in part to willful ignorance on the part of labels themselves, but labels could still have the market cornered on discovering worthwhile music that will stand the test of time if they’d simply shift their focus away from yesterday’s losses and today’s easy dollars.
Perhaps you have more discussion planned, but I don’t think you’ve delved deeply enough into what makes AI so insidious. What they’ve essentially done is shifted the focus from creatively-talented musicians and focused on physically-talented musicians. Beatles, to use your example, weren’t the greatest musicians, but they wrote great songs and were able performed them competently. Idol finalists might be able to sing the hell out of anything written in the last 50 years of pop music, but are any of them able to write anything that even holds a candle to “Let It Be” or “Hard Days Night”? I certainly haven’t seen any evidence any of them could.
Idol represents the second salvo of the new post-modern approach to making money from music. The first was the recent “work” of Rod Stewart, Paul Anka, and their ilk; past-it rock stars singing covers of beloved singles in there own particular idiom. The William Hung CD pictured above is the dark future where Idol winners produce record after record of cover versions.
This is actually preferable to breaking new talent for the simple fact that my generation is a bit more media savvy and less likely to get screwed out of publishing rights. As everyone this side of the moon knows, most of the publishing rights of music recorded prior to the turn of the century was retained solely by the labels. Because they paid themselves for the publishing rights, I’d be willing to bet that William Hung’s “debut” (there were two others!) made more than Arctic Monkeys’.
I wonder where I could look that up?
@John:
You’re right, I will be delving further into the creation of Performance Artists as opposed to Original Artists. These will come as I try and compartmentalize various parts of the industry.
One issue that is difficult in this argument, though, is that many more songwriters are benefitted these days by an industry comprised of great performing artists who perform other people’s songs. I actually worked for a few writers and producers who write songs for American Idol winners and that business isn’t bad. Many people have one or two great songs in them, but it’s difficult to find someone who can write 40 hits themselves.
It also brings up issues of art by committee, art by business, nepotism, and the ability to attach yourself to someone who is already established rather than bringing in someone from out of nowhere.
But remember, the emphasis on great performers is not unique to the modern era. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Elvis, all kinds of people throughout music history had relied on songwriters. George Strait is probably the biggest certified hit-maker these days and is a performer who relies on other people’s music.
I don’t want to go too far into this without a fleshed out article, but it is important to remember that our views of chart-toppers are colored by what stands out in our memories. Led Zepplin NEVER had a #1 hit single. Meanwhile Conway Twitty had more #1 hit records than the Beatles and Frank Sinatra (55).
William Hung sold around 40,000 CDs on debut week for “Inspiration.” It peaked at #34 in Billboard’s Top 200 and spent 10 weeks there. It was also #1 on the Independent Charts
Arctic Monkeys peaked at 24 in the Billboard Top 200 and spent 18 weeks there. It was also #1 on the Independents. Haven’t found the sales figures for it yet.
Either way though, it is telling that there haven’t been a big wave of MySpace sensation bands since Arctic Monkeys debuted in 2006–perhaps tacitly indicating that MySpace was not the best way of forecasting an artists’ success.
More in the future and keep the comments coming! Discussion is what we like.
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