The Periodic Label

The terms “honesty” and “image” are interchangeable if artists are using Internet confessionals and personal messages strictly for the purpose of marketing. At least as Thompson’s conveyed it.

I do think fans want to see the real thing when it comes to music. But I also think people have enough web-savvy these days to understand the implication that Internet communication has certain limits. The Internet is a valuable tool to get the word out—the trick is to bridge the gap between the online image of an artist (or band), and the hands and hearts behind the music. The real, real thing. 

The true commitment is the city-to-city tour, first to find out who the fans really are (not just the online image of them), and second, to hit them where it counts; right in their hometown. The tour, now combined with the Web, is the best marketing tool going, at least according to my own observations.

Understandably, the fan/artist relationship gets tricky, too. But we’re all trying to establish the parameters of our relationships every day; perhaps the artist just has do it more often, using the same techniques?

Thanks for the comment, Keyna. From a purists standpoint, I agree with you—connecting with fans in a live setting is absolutely where it’s at. But I think one of Thompson’s points was that musicians can now, to an extent, skip the “hit every city between Tampa and Boston and hope people dig it” strategy. I really liked his concept of surgical strikes on cities where the fans are, or at least where they probably are. Since I’m not a musician, I’ve never been on tour, so I may be off base here, but it always seemed to me that one of the hardest parts of trying to make it was playing to 13 people in Omaha, most of whom just want you to get off the stage so the band they came to see can get on.

I’m probably being overly cynical, and I agree that the Web is just a tool in the musician’s belt, but I like the idea of using the right tool for the right job. And I love that saying “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Maybe we need to look at the Web as a screwdriver.

I really like your point of the artist having to establish the parameters of [her] relationships every day. When you start looking at fans as individual relationships, I would imagine it can be overwhelming. But in a good way.

The one good thing about the 13 people in Omaha, is that they’re a manageable collective.

That is, the band (artist) can handle running the show for the most part.

A good plan for growth might be the most valuable tool. What happens when 11 out of the 13 people end up flipping the numbers into 3,000, 10,000, or 342,657 fans, practically overnight?  At some point in between, you’ve got yourself a job running a fairly major indie label, screwdrivers and all.

As Thompson also points out, Coulton’s music seems to have become incidental to the business of selling it. Not that I’d undermine the task of writing a song a week. I’m not a musician, either, but I’m a writer and I know about deadlines.

Maybe the Internet (namely mySpace) makes it harder to control the size of the collective?  Businesses that grow too quickly don’t always fare well, particularly if they’re not ready for it.

I guess it’s a fine balance.

I also wanted to mention that I do think people will pay for music when they can get it for free. On the other hand, the small-town newspaper I write for has free Web access. We’re down several pages, and circulation plus ad sales can’t grow fast enough. Still, they are coming up…

Cheers.

In response to “the death of the rock star”, I think that we’re starting to see the emergence of a new, more equal relationship between artists/fans because that line has become so blurry.  Everyone now has access to the same tools of creativity and the same access to distribution for their creative products.  I’m a musician, but I’m also a fan of others’ music, and now when I play a show, I’ve started to assume that everyone I meet afterwards is a creator.  Yes, we must balance relationships every day, including what might seem to become an overwhelming number of relationships with fans as their numbers (hopefully!) grow… I think that artists are challenged now more than ever with the task of reimagining ourselves, not as the disempowered, drugged-out, too-sensitive-for-the-real-world receivers of crowds’ adulation (a myth perhaps passed on to us by our cultural ancestors), but as participators in a shared experience, serving as reflections of freedom and powerful self-expression for an audience who have every access to their creativity and every right to be on stage as we do.  As far as the www goes, I use it to connect more easily and with more people, but for me the great-feeling energy is actual human contact-- whatever I can do via the web to encourage more human contact in the form of a rock show (the shared experience), the better-- I’d rather stare at a tree than at my computer all day, fans or no fans.  My aim is to find more and more efficient ways of using the web to support live experiences.