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The “new marketing” is the “old sellout”

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Submitted By: JohnMC | Added On: 5/17/2007 | Total Views (854) | Total Downloads: (0)

I see a lot of music industry press and get a lot of advice from people saying that there’s a new music market out there, I just have to tap into it. Commercials, video games, TV show placement, ringtones, anywhere you can get your music played, it’s a good thing, as long as you’re getting paid. Agree? Then you’re probably under 30. See, I just turned 40. I grew up in arguably the heyday of rock music. Born in ’67, I can remember the deaths of Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Allman, Bonham, Moon, and others. I remember how “larger than life” the artists were back then, always battling the labels, not to mention conventional society!… refusing to be sold or marketed in a way that cheapened the exclusivity and the coolness of it all. You just weren’t going to get Led Zeppelin to do a song for a soda commercial, for any amount of money. I remember the day all restraint was truly gone as far as music marketing, the day I heard a Beatles song on a Nike commercial. Of course, I knew the day Michael Jackson acquired the Beatles catalog that it was only a matter of time before he opened the floodgates for every band on Earth that ever had any credibility to sell their songs for whatever use the buyer, or renter, saw fit. Every time I hear the Who’s Who Are You as some cop drama’s theme song it makes me wonder if they did it for the money? What’s the motivation? Several weeks ago I read an exchange in an industry guy’s blog, and John Mellencamp’s manager or marketing guy or something was complaining that they didn’t time the song on the truck commercial close enough to the album release to sell as many albums upon release as they should have! Is this really how the suits running the major labels plan record releases today? Have any of you ever once heard a song on a commercial and felt the need to rush out and buy the album? Doesn’t it have the opposite affect? I still see it today for what it was 25 years ago, a sellout. Most music fans have an understanding with rock bands they love; we make them rich, they give us good albums. That should be enough. We don’t want to turn around and hear a song we bought at some point in our past, that we love, attached to a product and rammed down our throats. As far as most new bands, there’s no restraint of any kind, most labels are employing people to find products, TV shows, publicity stunts, or any other way to get their bands exposure. It’s like running around with your pants down sucking your thumb begging anyone to pay attention, you may get their attention, but you’ll look like an idiot doing it, and the public will reject you. Remember the old fashioned way? Playing great shows, writing great songs, producing great albums? Building a fanbase from town to town? It can take years, but there are bands out there doing it all the time, I’m proud to be a part of a similar effort that I chronicle in my other articles for NR.net, Backyard Tire Fire. It’s a slow burn, but other than through some cyber-promo efforts on social sites, and of course selling our stuff in every digital outlet there is, we largely ignore the “new marketing.” We’re very deliberate what crowds we target for BTF, never letting them get labeled with a certain genre, so they get booked with a huge variety of bands, most bands could never jump from genre to genre that way, but when it’s just rock & roll, good songs, with great albums recorded entirely in analog to 2” tape so they sound old, it becomes something big over time, because new friends the band makes every night tell their friends, and it spreads across the globe. People love to hear a whisper about a band, then a year later maybe catch a show and pick up a CD, then a year later hear of them again when they’re in town, get the new CD, love it, then they’re fans. It doesn’t happen because MTV told them to like it, or because they recorded their album in a bio-dome, or because they get the cover of Rolling Stone because some hipsters think it’s cool this week, it happens organically and honestly, or it doesn’t happen. No matter how important The Who’s TOMMY album will always be to me, I’ll never feel the same about them knowing that they “sold out.” (pun intended, but you’ll have to be a real fan to get it!!) Call me old fashioned.

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