29 Sep 2008, Written by Paul M Davis in music

Internet Rock Stars Don’t Exist

Tech news site Ars Technica offers yet another breathless article about the meteoric Internet success of some musician or another—in this case, Jonathan Coulton, a Jonathan Richman-meets-They Might Be Giants songwriter who quit his job coding to make a living writing songs about Flickr. Inspiring, I know, </sarcasm>, but it’s all bullshit.

All the cliches and misconceptions of online articles about the new music business model are in evidence in this piece—there’s no business model! He’s just like us (meaning, a former coder with what is most likely a healthy savings account, unlike most musicians, who eke out a living working minimum-wage customer service jobs in-between tours.) Label inherently means major label! Labels are dead! Don’t pay attention to those old systems that have worked for decades—touring, um, working night and day to support your passion—the future of music is in, um, sidebar widgets! A badly managed segment of an outdated business model (that’s the major label music business) is going under, so therefore it’s all bullshit! Right! Right?

This is coming from the same people, time and again, who think there is a viable business in making useless apps that zombie-bite your Facebook friends. I wouldn’t put these people in a management position at the local 7-11, much less expect them to plot the next stage of the faltering music business. Still, these arguments are pervasive, because they are inherently optimistic and appeal to the dimwitted libertarianism that drives the Web 2.0 economy and discourse—meaning, the have no basis in reality.

Why Internet-driven success is an unsustainable business model for musicians:

1. Novelty

The Internet lives and breathes novelty. “Internet Famous” is as much a term of derision as respect, referring to what Gawker has come to describe has “fameballs”—here today, gone later today. It’s a dodgy proposition for anyone trying to create a sustainable career to court the Internet hype cycle. Musicians should offer themselves to the capricious god of Internet fame hesitantly, lest they become the next Tay Zonday or Ok-Go—and they will, because everything thrown into the meme-grinder are merely fads. You’re not building a career, you’re turning out Pet Rocks 2.0.

2. The Web 2.0 Community (and Economy) Has No Respect for Musicians, Artists, or Skilled Laborers

The craft of music has no inherent value in the Web 2.0 community, just as the craft of writing, reporting, recording, or any other creative skill that lies outside of the realm of wrangling PHP/SQL tables is dismissed as irrelevant. Any discussion of the music industry on tech-centric blogs like TechCrunch or Metafilter quickly expose the seedy underbelly of the “all content should be free” argument: the bloggerati have absolutely no respect for content creators, see any non-code or design-related content creation business as being an over-glorified, overpaid hobby, and have no appreciation of the time or labor that go into creation of said “content”. Ironically, if one suggests that web coders or video game designers or Second Life developers similarly donate their content to the greater good, the same circles will lose their shit.

3. There is No Art, No Skill, Only “Content”

The reduction of artistic production and highly skilled professional creative production to the bloodless term “content”, an empty banner whose marketing-language vapidity encompasses everything from music and literature to advertising copy, only underscores this absolute lack of respect for creative production.

4. It’s an Impossibly Small Sample Group

The simple fact of the matter is that the people so often fueling debate constitute an impossibly small sample group of modern culture. If your favorite massive blog—Techcrunch, Gawker, BoingBoing—was a network TV show, it would be cancelled in a week. Your garden variety music lover, who attends shows and loves new music, is still getting turned on to music the same way they always have—from friends. They’re hearing music at parties, at work, on their friends’ Myspace and iLike profiles. Some are getting it from mp3 blogs—recommended to them, no doubt, by their one tech-savvy friend.

Most of these people have never heard of Brooklyn Vegan or Techcrunch or Metafilter or Last.fm, and could care less about the debates on the Internets about these issues. Mostly, they just like free music, which most people have been getting for decades primarily from friends in some shape or form—mix tapes, dubbed tapes, burned CD’s, mp3 trading parties. These folks still are the majority—they might have an iLike app on their Facebook profile, tried Pandora a few times, but the people holding forth in the Internet echo chamber are largely tech industry professionals and would-be tech professionals—engineering school students, laid-off journalists boning up on the new media, wannabe pro bloggers, and the like. Not only does this create an incredibly small pool of perspectives, but the aggregate musical taste of this pool borders on atrocious. Witness the Digg community’s inexplicable obsession with the music and actions of Trent Reznor, a washed-up rock star 18 years past his creative prime. I mean, was anyone looking to Roger Waters in 1986 for new ideas about music distribution? Are we really going to let a bunch of aging goths dominate the debate of where music is going?

5.Novelty 2.0

What is successful once online is old hat the second. Auctioning custom songs on Ebay is clever the first time, played the second. When Radiohead told its fans to pay what they want, there was a lot of noise. When Saul Williams did the same a few months later, no one gave a shit. It doesn’t bode well for the sustainability of this brave new world of musical progress when the person who has succeeded the most has done so selling songs about Flickr and coding to geeks.

6. The Infrastructure

In the Ars-Technica article, Coulton says “There are all sorts of services that do services like a label. CDBaby warehouses my CDs and they send it out when people order it, and they keep $4 a disc.” This is ridiculous. I use CDBaby for the release by my old band Mule Train, and they provide a great service. They do three things that are hard for unsigned musicians to do, and do it well: they make selling online via credit card easy, they fulfill orders, and they use their leverage to get unsigned bands on mp3 services like iTunes and Rhapsody.

Here’s a list of things that they don’t do: they don’t offer tour support, they don’t write or send out press releases, they don’t pitch coverage to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. They don’t get your music in brick and mortar stores. They don’t get your music on radio, they don’t redundantly post your promotional content on the 1,001 music-related social networking sites out there. They don’t print posters and send them out to venues, they don’t call promoters and booking agents to make sure that the clubs your band is playing at is actively promoting the show—flyering around town, running advertisements, etc. They don’t submit your band to summer festival bookers for consideration. They don’t loan bands $500 to get a new transmission when the van breaks down in the snow in Waukegan.

Sure, there are freelance services that offer these services—but rare is the band that can afford to fund this sort of infrastructure.

The thing is, the infrastructure as it exists is a necessary reality for 99% of the artists out there. Playing geek-friendly venues in SF and corporate events doesn’t mean shit to the established nationwide network that has developed through hard work over decades. Playing a Wired meet-‘n’-greet in the Sunset doesn’t mean a damn thing to the booking agent at the Exit/In in Nashville or the Black Cat in DC. The people who want to tear down the infrastructure don’t understand the first thing about the infrastructure. They’re the music equivalents of vein-bulging late-night pundits who rail on big government without any attention to the fact that government is big and complex, because governing 305 million people is a big and complex job. Of course, this is the same community that exalted phantasmagorical gnome and pretend-politian Ron Paul to national attention.

An infrastructure already exists—true, an unwieldy infrastructure that will change by necessity in years to come. This infrastructure is decades in the making, however, and for every inefficient, dated element that weighs it down, there are five systems that still work because they’re proven to work.

7. Albini’s Essay is 15 Years Old

Many of the things Steve Albini says in his seminal essay “Some of Your Friends May Already Be This Fucked” are still relevant. Indeed, the contract most major label bands are signed into consign them to mountains of debt even if they sell millions. The thing is, this essay is 15 years old, and even though it is constantly cited by the “content should be free” crowd, it is outdated and doesn’t really address the economic concerns of 90% of non-major-label artists working in 2008. It appears in the Ars Technica piece, as it does about every six months when some blogger who doesn’t have the slightest idea of who Albini is stumbles across it on StumbleUpon and parades it online as if it was new information. “Some of Your Friends…” is the “United Airlines Declares Bankruptcy” of the music business, apparently.

When Albini wrote the essay, independent labels that split profits 50/50 with artists were an aberration that sold albums in the thousands, not tens or hundreds of thousands. Indie labels weren’t a viable career choice, as they have come to be with their emergence in recent years. The success of an Arcade Fire or Shins or Neko Case—selling in the tens or hundreds of thousands — on indies like Merge, Sub Pop or Anti/Epitaph was unthinkable. The essay was written before the Internet—before unsigned artists could tour the nation and make a decent living selling self-pressed CD’s out of their van. It was also written long before gas was $4.50 a gallon. The essay is an interesting historical document, worth forwarding to a friend if they’re one of the rare .5% out there considering signing to a major. But other than that, it’s merely a well-argued historical document.

If this piece gets picked up on one of the news aggregators, I expect a line of fulminating commenters to arrive, and I can guarantee they’ll all be talking out of their ass. The guy who claims to have once been in a “successful touring indie band” (read: went on a five-city tour once or twice) will show up and drop his sage knowledge. Someone will point to the sputtering ad-supported RCRD LBL (I don’t know a single person who uses it—why would you when there’s the far more intuitive, simple, and Flash-free Hype Machine) or now the DOA Myspace Music (Imeem was already there, and no one cares.) Someone else might pull out Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes’ bullshit essay about how awesome it is for musicians to subsidize themselves by turning their songs into ad jingles, and how people who believe music should be something more than a way to sell cell phones are relics. I’ll be attacked as a pro RIAA reactionary who is fearful of the Internet or living in the past, which couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Whatever. If a single person with any real experience in the music business shows up to defend the Ars Technica piece—or this general line of thought—I will be absolutely shocked.

Instead, this is a realist perspective, from someone with admittedly limited, but actual, experience around this stuff. I know actual established musicians and bands and labels, who make a (paltry) living doing what they do. Sure, these musicians have come to enjoy a much larger audience through the democratizing blah blah blah of the Internet, but that doesn’t mean a goddamn thing when gas keeps on going up every year, all while they sell less and less CD’s at shows to increasingly larger crowds for decreasing ticket prices (since the concert venue market is in an economy-driven slump.)

I don’t know how the hell the Web 2.0-erati expect to make money with Facebook widgets, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out, right? Let’s make a deal Web 2.0-ers: stop telling musicians how to make a living, and we won’t tell you that your business model is patently absurd and doomed to fail when we’re working among you during the midnight shift at 7-11. No one has any real answers about what is going to happen to the music business or musicians, least of all you.

Paul M Davis is a Chicago-based freelance writer obsessed with the media, class and arcade-style video golf. He is also the editor of Is Greater Than. His personal site can be found at www.paulmdavis.com.

View all articles by Paul M Davis.

Tags: music business