The Hits Keep on Coming

The ability to sell your music online and distribute it widely without the help of a label is a rallying point for many independent and do it yourself artists.

A lot of artists and online label start-ups all seem to say the same thing: "Now that distribution costs are practically zero and the cost of making a record is practically nothing, major labels will wither away and have no reason to exist, all thanks to the glorious rise of the internet." Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Nevermind that making a good record still costs money...I could go on for days about that...

But my curiosity was piqued when I read a recent Harvard Business study that confirmed something rather obvious: people still gravitate towards hits. Audiences might be able to buy all the tiny bits along the long tail, but they don't necessarily want to. And just because you CAN put your music up on a website, doesn't mean anyone will want to buy it or listen to it. Most people who buy entertainment, buy things that their friends have bought and that are relevant to popular culture.

The most powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal is perceived success. If you can sell your album to a lot of people, then you can sell more albums to a lot of people. Conversely, if no one has heard of you and a potential buyer doesn't believe that anyone else they trust likes you, they are unlikely to spend money on your music.

Why do people like hits so much?

I think it has a lot do with culture. People congregate around a small number of ideas. These may vary locally and within subcultures, but to have conversations, we all need to be talking about the same thing. Teenagers in high school don't define their cliques by how unique each person's taste is, they all love a certain band together. People like to talk about the same TV show they watched, the same movies and the same books. We may not like them all, but we all have an opinion and these items become part of popular culture.


SO, the next question is, what makes a hit?

There's more than one music business

I don't really care much for super-pop. I can identify a few artists from this genre of music to make it easier to understand what I'm talking about...
Usher, Kelis, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Jay-Z... etc.
I looked at the top 50 songs on imeem last week and did not recognize any of them, but I recognized the names of the artists. Most of them were signing high profile branding agreements or 360 deals with mammoth corporations in the last few months

CD sales for this type of music have gone monumentally down the toilet.

Meanwhile, I have several new bands that I have discovered over the last year or so while reading the top 100 albums chart of eMusic.
This would include,
The National, Andrew Bird, Chris Letcher, Cold War Kids, Spoon, Thomas Dybdahl and a great many other artists that you may or may not be familiar with.

The point is, that I think these artists are not losing millions of dollars (they probably didn't have them to begin with) and they are most likely making more money from their music than ever before. And they are selling ALBUMS. They are selling collections of songs to customers like me because I don't really buy singles. The album is not a dead format. The CD is not a dead format. At least not for independent songwriters who write from the heart and take the time (or have the luck) to make really great sounding records.

What I Wish Someone Would Do for Artists Online

This should probably be a more thoughtful post than what I have time to write... but that's the whole point of this post anyway.

I have a band that I really love to work with. Playing music, writing, performing, recording... it's all great fun and I love being an artist and creator again.

What I don't love is dealing with promotion and maintaining a presence on at least 15 different sites.

So here's what I'm wishing for...

A service that would have a real person evaluate the type of music my band makes, that can then put the music in the appropriate social networks, and perhaps more importantly, tell me what blogs to contact. That's step one.

Step two would be a timely way to help me update all these sites, let blogs know about my latest happenings and keep them current.

I enjoy writing things and can email and so forth. But to put a blog up on the 5 or 6 blog sites the band has (plus this one, plus my own web site, etc) is time consuming. It would be great if I could just have someone email me and say "Please write a 1 paragraph description of what's going on with your band last week and the upcoming month." Please attach a new photo as well.

I would reply to the email and then it would be parsed out to imeem, iLike, facebook, myspace, garageband, secondlife and whatever else needs to be serviced.

Because it feels like my biggest obstacles are
1. prioritizing my time to know what's important to get out in the world (show updates, emails to fans?)
2. Prioritizing the places to put this information.
3. Taking the time to do all this.

If somebody could help me figure out what's effective (in terms of what I need to create) and then where it goes (in terms of where I need to publish it) then I could probably hire somebody else or automate the last bit.