The current issue of Word has a good sceptical article by Peter Robinson on the promotion of new music through the Net in general and MySpace in particular. He concludes:
if you look at Sandi Thom's new twist on a promotional stunt, Arctic Monkeys' modern take on fans swapping tapes with each other, and Lily Allen's use of a personally administered MySpace page to get her personality across, three pop laws, each dating back into the middle of last century, leap out: people will buy music if they hear it and like it; people enjoy and are taken in by exciting stories about pop stars; and people like pop stars with whom they can emotionally engage. An exciting year for pop then, but hardly a revolutionary one.
Robinson dubs the people who claim a revolution is afoot as "web evangelists", and he clearly thinks that they're overstating their case. I agree with most of the well-researched article, but then I wondered, "Would he count me as a web evangelist?"
I think some things about the current era are unprecedented, and even revolutionary in their potential. I make this case at some length, early in the book — as my publisher said, you've got to give people a reason to read the book, and saying that the laws that applied in the middle of last century still hold isn't much of a reason…
One of the main differences from then is the accessibility of all kinds of music on demand. Take an obscure band like Aphrodite's Child, for example. Now you can find out their members, their development and their discography in moments, via search engines. You can hear samples of most of their work on the iTunes Store, and probably hear full tracks for free on Napster (or Spiral Frog, when it launches). Twenty five years ago, if you wanted to find out more about Aphrodite's Child, you just couldn't find anything, no way, no how (unless you were prepared to Tommy Vance's radio show for a couple of years, waiting for the one or two times he played a song by them). I know; I tried.
Another key difference is the scope to find other people with the same tastes as you, whether those tastes are for Aphrodite's Child or Abba, and exchange gossip and recommendations with them.
My variation on Robinson's "three pop laws" is three means of discovering new music:
- associative links — the scope to follow lines of influence and similarity between artists;
- audition — being able to try out music (or video, or games etc) to see if you might like it;
- community — word-of-mouth recommendations.
None of these were created for the first time by the internet, MySpace, blogs or wikis, but they are all significantly transformed. That's what I'm evangelising, and the nature of the transformations is what the book maps out.
One other thing in Robinson's article made me think. He writes,
the truth is that the power of a site like MySpace will only really be proved when it propels a terrible record by a terrible artist into the charts, in the way that Pop Idol's power was evident in, say, a No. 1 single for Michelle McManus.
I'm not sure that this will happen, but I'm also not sure whether that's an appropriate way to prove anything. The way that Pop Idol and blitz-advertising campaigns like Crazy Frog work is to hit a large mass of people in a short space of time, get them worked up about something, and get them to buy the song before they notice that it's crap. Internet time works differently. Even the most infectious viral content takes some time to spread round the net. (Does anyone know how long it took the OK Go treadmill video to propagate to its first 10 million people? Perhaps some people are still discovering it for the first time?) So, by the time, the later people are clicking on it, the first people have got bored with it. The mass hysteria is less concentrated, and less hysterical as a result.
As Robinson points out, the OK Go single only go to No. 36 in the (UK) charts. The video was the best bit. Once you've got access to the video, who needs the audio on its own? It's like buying the cake without the icing. I'm sure there's potential for something as terrible as Crazy Frog to spread like wildfire through MySpace. But translating that spread from a clip of an animated frog into sales of an animation-free CD or audio download would be difficult.
Then there's another question about whether the charts that we will count on in the future will continue to be charts of weekly sales, which are prone to being 'gamed' by Pop Idol hysteria effects. If subscription services, and other means of accessing music like Last.fm, ever really take off, then sales charts will seem an increasingly poor index of what's hot at the moment. The glacial pace of change in charts based on actual listening (see Last.fm's and MyStrands') is not a suitable alternative — but it would almost rule out terrible novelty hits.
Recent Comments