Making True Blue Fans

So how DO you make fans today?  By making something so creative or good that people pay attention.  That's the major label formula.  They want to sign you AFTER you've gotten everybody to pay attention.  But if you make that deal you're shortsighted, because all the label can do is get you on radio and TV, two dying media, meanwhile taking too much of the upside and paying very little in advance.

In other words, one Funny Or Die clip is better than hours spent working with Dr. Luke. That's the secret of OK Go.  The videos were so creative, they were passed from hand to hand via e-mail, IM and the Facebook wall.

Yes, the words of the poets are written on the Facebook wall, the subway's passe.

So instead of handing out fliers, e-mailing everybody you know to listen to your music, the game is to stay home and create something so good, so interesting, that when it's posted online, people won't be able to stop sending it to their friends.

It's not even about genres.  There are no limits online.

And catchy is catchy.  I may have only heard Rebecca Black's "Friday" one time through, but the chorus is stuck in my head.

So stand back, take a deep breath and change direction.  Don't play by the old rules. Today you've got to be really good or really creative or both.  Your song must connect in one listen.

That doesn't mean you can't keep trying, you can't keep uploading songs and videos, but the sheer mass, just staying in the game, won't help.  You're now an inventor, looking for that one breakthrough product.  When you succeed, your history is unlocked and your fans can wallow in your past.  This is the opposite of the major label paradigm.  There's the hit and..?

THE MAGIC Bullet

The music business is about relationships. And now it’s the artist’s turn to have one. Success in the music business once hinged on only a handful of relationships: a publicist and a magazine, a salesman and a bookstore, a radio promoter and a radio station, a booking guy and a promoter, an artist and a manager, a writer and a publisher. If all these relationships were working, if all parties’ interests were respected and pursued, if no personalities collided to the point of impeding progress, then the project or artist they were tied to would succeed (from a business standpoint.) Relationship is still king. Starting a blog, hopping on Twitter, launching a Facebook fan page - these are not cure-alls because they aren’t a relationship. These technologies can foster relationships. But not without a lot of personal investment and intentionality from an artist. This is a big shift in thinking for artists, especially at the top levels of this industry. Artists aren’t accustomed to being so accessible, accountable and out of control. Artists are accustomed to being in front of audiences that care about what they do, audiences they know are fans and they keep in the seats for a couple hours by charging a ticket price. But on-line, where spending time with an artist is free, anybody can wander into the crowd, boo, change the subject, or walk out. And they will. Also, artists are used to hiring people to handle their relationships for them. That’s at least 90% of what a manager does. Labels congratulate and critique through a manager, for instance, who adds his own diplomatic spin to every word so the artist’s feelings aren’t hurt and the relationship is preserved. Not so on-line. Someone can be hired to hit the “publish” button on a blog post that gets e-mailed over, invite people to a Facebook event and even write to people for an artist and signed their name (it happens), but no one can convincingly be the artist every day in post after post or interact with commenters regularly. Artists can’t hire anyone to be them 24/7 and the internet demands those kind of hours. Lastly, labels are used to creating and maintaining the image of an artist: focusing and filtering, controlling who can and can’t have access, and how much, when and where. There’s one official bio and one fact sheet carefully crafted in a record company office and then parroted by every media outlet. That’s not possible on-line. And that’s distressing, fatal even, if an artist has nothing to say or, worse, has lots to say about things that don’t matter to anyone but them. Hair products, high priced jeans and guitar pedals aren’t all that interesting to folks with real jobs. The public is now discovering through an artist’s blog what publicists have known for quite some time and expertly covered up: This guy’s just a singer. And that’s no basis for a relationship. If the music industry dies it won’t be because everything changed. It will be because artists didn’t. Artists today have to - no, we get to - do what the rest of the industry and human race has been doing for eons: We get to be real human beings spending time with other real human beings. There’s no shortcut for that. Labels was afraid to tell us artists this before: It was never about our music. And it’s not about new technology now. It’s always been about people/true blue fans.