With Crazed Hits' captain, Alex Wilhelm, now as well busy or as well shy to reveal the untold bounty of pushing new pop music acts on-line it really is time for a pause.
A time to play some Joni Mitchell. And to reflect.
When Joni felt herself "a cog in something turning", she was, naturally, singing about a much more cosmic condition than that on the record biz. Not to reprise, then, may asylum be identified inside melodies and truths of Court and Spark.
Technology has, obviously, advanced plenty because the 1970s. Just as plainly, the blueprint for pop music marketing has not.
"It's an insane business," Mitchell told Rolling Stone magazine in 2002. "Now, this is all calculated music. It really is calculated for sales, it is sonically calculated, it is rudely calculated."
A top assembly-line schematic for today's mainstream record sector, offered in, both, domestic, and import, models, is the "viral" or "web" sensation that converts into a pop-star.
An early template was 25-year-old Scottish-born singer Sandi Thom who rolled out in the manufacturer's showroom in Spring 2006. Thom's team crafted a number one UK chart-hit while using song "I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)" - their campaign propelled by reports of Thom's enormous "viral" success generated by performances webcast from her flat in Tooting, South London.
(This mythic web page was described memorably by then-manager Ian Brown as a "piss-stained basement". Thom's reputation went inside the tank after the ruse was exposed, but the canny Brown, one-time former pig-farmer from Devon who knows the secret to getting airplay, has since floated an additional charting money-spinner, The Priests. This musical combo, consisting of three Roman Catholic priests from Northern Ireland, scaled Euro pop charts in 2008 and 2009, even grabbing a Guinness Globe Record for 'Fastest-selling UK debut for a classical act'.)
European newspapers, radio, and television - common media outlets including the BBC and other, generally credible, news agencies - repeated as fact the trumped-up legend from the Tooting webcasts, and built the framework of a Cinderella story ~ Thom's discovery by the RCA Label Group (Sony) and requisite "record deal". The PR vehicle back-fired messily when the nature and extent of various, much-hyped, claims of a "viral" organism were exposed as misleading and/or false.
Blogs, led by Prince Campbell's then-active chartreuse internet site, uncovered significantly on the truth from the Sandi Thom case. My own series of posts on the topic can be found @:
Just Like Tom Thumb's News (08/04/06)
The Not-so-Basement Tapes: Open the Door, Homer (09/04/06)
Sandi Thom tops U2. Take That. (12/04/06)
Ian Brown Scores Hat Trick with Sandi Thom (13/04/06)
MySpace Flames Out + (15/04/06)
Postscript: Spinning a silk purse out of your sow's ear (23/06/06)
In 2010, the web hosts a twilight globe of "gossip blogs" and pseudo-news sites. Standard news outlets come across themselves on shaky ground as their audiences and ad revenues shrink. It really is a synergy that's formed an ideal tool for the report and entertainment market machine.
Posting to the Velvet Rope (music biz) discussion forum this week, one industry veteran noted: "With the ubiquity on the celebrity/gossip blog culture we are living in its having much easier and easier to dupe the public if you have the connections and money."
MOG
A time to play some Joni Mitchell. And to reflect.
When Joni felt herself "a cog in something turning", she was, naturally, singing about a much more cosmic condition than that on the record biz. Not to reprise, then, may asylum be identified inside melodies and truths of Court and Spark.
Technology has, obviously, advanced plenty because the 1970s. Just as plainly, the blueprint for pop music marketing has not.
"It's an insane business," Mitchell told Rolling Stone magazine in 2002. "Now, this is all calculated music. It really is calculated for sales, it is sonically calculated, it is rudely calculated."
A top assembly-line schematic for today's mainstream record sector, offered in, both, domestic, and import, models, is the "viral" or "web" sensation that converts into a pop-star.
An early template was 25-year-old Scottish-born singer Sandi Thom who rolled out in the manufacturer's showroom in Spring 2006. Thom's team crafted a number one UK chart-hit while using song "I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)" - their campaign propelled by reports of Thom's enormous "viral" success generated by performances webcast from her flat in Tooting, South London.
(This mythic web page was described memorably by then-manager Ian Brown as a "piss-stained basement". Thom's reputation went inside the tank after the ruse was exposed, but the canny Brown, one-time former pig-farmer from Devon who knows the secret to getting airplay, has since floated an additional charting money-spinner, The Priests. This musical combo, consisting of three Roman Catholic priests from Northern Ireland, scaled Euro pop charts in 2008 and 2009, even grabbing a Guinness Globe Record for 'Fastest-selling UK debut for a classical act'.)
European newspapers, radio, and television - common media outlets including the BBC and other, generally credible, news agencies - repeated as fact the trumped-up legend from the Tooting webcasts, and built the framework of a Cinderella story ~ Thom's discovery by the RCA Label Group (Sony) and requisite "record deal". The PR vehicle back-fired messily when the nature and extent of various, much-hyped, claims of a "viral" organism were exposed as misleading and/or false.
Blogs, led by Prince Campbell's then-active chartreuse internet site, uncovered significantly on the truth from the Sandi Thom case. My own series of posts on the topic can be found @:
Just Like Tom Thumb's News (08/04/06)
The Not-so-Basement Tapes: Open the Door, Homer (09/04/06)
Sandi Thom tops U2. Take That. (12/04/06)
Ian Brown Scores Hat Trick with Sandi Thom (13/04/06)
MySpace Flames Out + (15/04/06)
Postscript: Spinning a silk purse out of your sow's ear (23/06/06)
In 2010, the web hosts a twilight globe of "gossip blogs" and pseudo-news sites. Standard news outlets come across themselves on shaky ground as their audiences and ad revenues shrink. It really is a synergy that's formed an ideal tool for the report and entertainment market machine.
Posting to the Velvet Rope (music biz) discussion forum this week, one industry veteran noted: "With the ubiquity on the celebrity/gossip blog culture we are living in its having much easier and easier to dupe the public if you have the connections and money."
MOG
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments