Do you ever get the sense that many of the so-called mainstream pop stars whose images you unwittingly encounter dozens of times a day aren’t as “mainstream” or “popular” as you’re told they are? Do you give one eighth of a fuck about Dua Lipa, Zara Larsson, Childish Gambino, Bebe Rexha, or Shawn Mendes? Does your mother? Your little cousin? Your boss? The person delivering your mail? Your barista? Have you (or has anyone close to you) ever spent real money on anything these artists are selling? Do you, or anyone around you, follow them with any interest in what they make or do?...
And Spelman said: “In the past, a label and management team would do a great job getting their artist on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J, post it, and then kind of wait, and the comments would come in: terrible cover choice, voice sounds terrible, all that. What we do at Chaotic Good with our management clients is this: the second the SNL performance drops at midnight, you should post one hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year. The question is how you do that at scale. It takes a lot of work and infrastructure, but controlling the narrative is really, really important.”...This is precisely how contemporary digital-music marketing operates, less as targeted exposure or coercion and more as the quiet reconstruction of the conditions under which discovery appears to occur. Not by introducing music to listeners but by staging the conditions in which it feels as though it arrived on its own.
More details in the "Getting Shilled" article in the June issue of Harper's Magazine.
Maybe I'm being manipulated, but, his examples include a number of artists that I actually like. Both musically and, in one case, his acting.
ReplyDeleteDua Lipa and Childish Gambino (who I bet you were talking about) I know and appreciate their work. I don't think the examples are any more honest than the methods being advertised.
DeleteOr look at it another way. I can think of quite a few pop stars who were everywhere for fifteen minutes and I never hear about them now. Appearing on all the popular Youtube shows, traditional chat shows, music played everywhere and then it just went away and if you look really hard you might see them on some struggle "celebrity" reality show.
Even if everyone was using services like this, only the great artistes are going to have the chops to build a legacy.
Like most things these days, it's a lot of smoke and mirrors as far as how effective it is. Instead of being discovered at a mall by a talent agent, everyone at the mall is pushed to the front, so the front become the new crowd and somehow talent still bobs up to the surface.
A long time ago I read a short story in... I wanna say "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" (It was because I remembered another story from the magazine, "Thor Meets Captain America" by David Brin, which is not an official Marvel story - funny what sticks with you. Wasn't in the same issue, but must have been what I was subscribed to at the time because, trust me, I did not have multiple subs back then) about a vampire hunting a human only to have his victim turn on him, revealing itself to be not a human but a thing that feeds only on vampires. The implication being that even parasites can have parasites on their back. Apt, I think.
Interesting twist with the vampire story.
DeleteFinally, real Fake News.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know why - maybe it is because of the prime time address about nothing - this one witty comment made my day - thank you
Deletehttps://allaboutlawyer.com/drake-hit-with-federal-rico-lawsuit-update-100-million-from-crypto-casino-allegedly-funded-bot-farms-to-fake-his-spotify-streams/ - Hey Mr. DJ, I thought we had a deal.
ReplyDeleteI thought you said, "You scratch my back and I'll scratch your record"
And I thought we had a deal.