village voice music editor, nyu adjunct, accidental blogging pioneer. i like loud music and room-temperature seltzer, and my dream job is to be chief fact-checker of the internet.In an essay that seems to go nowhere — fast, Kevin Maney’s short-sightedness is ridiculous. How, exactly, are labels going to grow artists who can then get “sponsorships” or sell hundred-dollar concert tickets.
Supposedly, Myspace and blogs and music-focused social networking sites will do that for us, right? But in a day and age when bands are chewed up and swallowed whole and shat out before they can even put out an album, why isn’t anyone asking the right questions about artist development? I understand that it’s all about the bottom line, but as with nearly every industry these days, quantity is blowing quality out of the water.
Not to be crass, but you can’t create brand loyalty without a product.
i find myself asking these same questions all the time, but i think the problem is that a lot of the punditry just assumes that bands—and, most crucially, bands that will have an audience—will appear out of whole cloth. after all, radiohead and the raconteurs and coldplay and nine inch nails all did it, so why can’t everyone else? never mind that those bands wouldn’t be anywhere without the major-label system that so many of these people want to dismantle ASAP. not that it isn’t without its own major structural problems, but the shortsightedness is kind of amazing in the way that it’s so self-perpetuating and based on assumptions about what type of music people want to consume.
