The biggest paradigm shift in the popular music industry since 1955 has occurred and is now a fait accompli. The previous cultural and musical revolution occurred when greasy long-haired redneck rock-and-rollers from the South knocked corporate crooners from the North off the charts and changed music forever. In 1954 when Bill Haley first poked his head on to the charts, Sinatra and Como, Page and Fisher, Clooney and D. Day (Rosemary and Time) ruled the music sales charts as they had for years. By 1956 they barely retained a toe-hold as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Gene Vincent, all scored big hits, many of them right off the Louisiana Hay Ride as ‘hillbilly’ music become ‘rockabilly’ and ‘race’ music felt its way toward ‘soul.’ They would be joined in 1957 by Sam Cook, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and in 1958 by Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Eddie Cochran. The industry responded by signing its own version of watered-down rebellious youth music, much of it brilliant in its own right, in the form of the Everly Brothers, Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, Pat Boone, and ‘Little Ricky’ Nelson (not to mention Alvin and the Chipmunks), but by then the die was cast and the damage was done. The ‘old guard’ would never return. Pop music belonged to youth.
What does it all mean? It means that people reserve the right to create their own music and have it heard by others, without corporate interference or oversight. Not surprisingly this usually happens at the edges of corporate contentment where dissatisfaction takes root and creates fruit, freed from formula and following the inner cry for expression. That era in the South can hardly be described. Imagine families living in shacks dotting the countryside, with a dozen kids all going to school barefoot, cussing and fighting, never tamed by Church or State. And that’s the white people! The condition of blacks was unspeakable, one room shacks in open pastures, the wind blowing through the walls’ cracks, from which they share-cropped or ‘tenant farmed.’ I saw my first wood stoves there long before it became Foxfire hip, all this in the ‘richest country in the world.’ Whites there were consumed with their own inner demons and so were the blacks. The Civil War had never really ended and the Republican Reconstruction had yet to really begin. You either conformed or rebelled or you got the Hell out of Slidell. Or you sublimated those impulses into your art. That world ended with the Welfare Act of 1965.
Fast-forward fifty years and it’s happening again. It never really stopped happening of course. After the initial rock-and-roll years things settled back into a smug Tin Pan Alley predictability until the edges of the culture began screaming to be noticed by the center again, this time from the UK. Losing its colonies and its preeminent position in the world to the US, the UK was ripe for cultural revolution in the ‘60’s. Taking cues from the US and cross-breeding it with the existential fashions of the Continent, England came up with something truly original and brought it over to the US to remind us of what we had almost forgot, the boogie factor. Cross-breed that again with Beatnik poetry, a Harry Smith-inspired folk revival, ‘soul’ music and an unpopular war (sound familiar?) and the time was right for all Hell to break loose, the Psychedelic ‘60’s, followed in quick succession (and no certain order) by Southern rock, hard rock, soft-rock, and folk-rock. Once again the Industry raised its ugly head in the mid 70’s and incorporated beyond anything ever imagined, sending the Eagles, the BeeGees, John Denver, and disco music out to all corners of the world, all on vinyl and safe for public consumption. The New York ‘new wave’ and British punk rock said ‘fuck all that’ of course, and they were spot-on. So it goes in an endless dialectic between growth and contraction, thesis and antithesis, corporate crap and individual creativity, right up to the current day.
The traditional record industry is dead or dying and something else has come and taken its place. This time the medium is the message, the medium of Internet, and it’s not about stealing songs by download. It’s about choice, supply and demand. The pop music revolution that started in the US and got cross-bred with the UK, has caught fire in the rest of the world as well. Increasingly widespread affluence and its ironic counterparts, discontentment and artistic release, has spread to even the smallest countries. Art is something to be created by the ambitious individual, not handed down from corporate boardrooms. IPod and other MP3 players are but the visible symbols of the change. MySpace and other Internet social networks are at the heart of it. There you can listen to anything, if not everything that’s ever been created, all for free. Some die-hards grumble, but radio was always free, wasn’t it? Just like love, you don’t pay until you want to possess it, or see it performed live.
Sometime around 2005 the word got out that something was going on by Internet that any band could use to its advantage in this cut-throat industry. Those who signed on first might reap the largest benefits, of course, so by 2006 the race was on, ironically many times by the fans themselves, making sure that ‘their’ band was represented with its best songs. It was chaotic of course but fun to watch as it evolved. Chaos slowly organized itself and most bands have an ‘official MySpace site’ by now, sometimes to the exclusion of all others, sometimes to the exclusion of its own website, all this in a medium that barely even existed a decade ago. I got my first e-mail address in 1999, before most of my friends, but not all. Any band that doesn’t have a MySpace site by now just doesn’t care much about its future. It’s not that hard.
So what does it all mean? In short for me it means that ‘plays’ and ‘views’ of a band’s MySpace songs and site are a valuable look at a band’s level of popularity. When I was looking to book bands in Arizona, that’s the first thing I looked at. The numbers of plays and views tend to be similar, rarely one as much as twice the other, but that in itself tells a tale. A band with more views than plays seems to be ‘breaking out,’ with a surge of publicity as cause and effect. A band with more plays than views tends to be stable with long-term fans looking to listen. There is still an element of chaos, of course, multiple sites for many bands, etc., so the figures are somewhat provisional and any conclusions should be approached with caution, but are nonetheless enlightening. So what do the numbers say? Surely they must be skewed toward youth-oriented groups and hip-hop, right? Do country music groups do MySpace? The results are interesting. I see them as a reliable gauge of popularity, not money, but popularity. I’ll tell you next week. Do your own survey if you like, and we’ll compare notes. Stay tuned.
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