The Null Device Blog

I’ve been following the twitter feeds and the blogs and the RSS and all that for various “music marketing” sites.

In the past week alone I’ve seen three heavily buzzed digital music marketing handbooks come along.  These handbooks are spreading more virally than anybody’s music, that’s for sure.

They all say pretty much the same thing.  Leverage online tools, start a blog/twitter feed/facebook, generate tons of content, something something long tail, no economies of scarcity, etc.  That’s all very well and good, and there’s an element of truth to everything they say.  The problem is, if these things all worked so flawlessly, everyone would be a megastar by now.

There is no silver bullet.  As a musician, there is no golden solution to breaking the band.  It’s easy enough to say the old models don’t work anymore – the big label system is crumbling under the weight of downloading and a million indie artists – but what nobody seems to want to admit is that the “new” models don’t really work that great either.   Oh, sure, having a facebook page and a twitter feed is not likely to hurt, and a few artists have managed to use these sorts of things to keep buzz going about themselves.  But something like Facebook or Twitter or MySpace will not, in and of itself, guarantee success.  Sending mp3’s to every music blog on the planet will not either.  Having 5000 accounts on every music network service from last.fm to OurStage to Reverbnation won’t either.   All these things in concert may help with your promotional effort, but they will not replace a promotional effort.

And of course, there’s the key thing that none of these how-to’s ever want to mention: you need a product people want. You may not suck, you may be the most skilled musician in the world on your instrument or in your genre, but if you release an album of 1930’s-style ukelele music, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that you won’t ever become much beyond a very, very niche sensation, much less a household name.  Given that most of the bands I know, myself included, labor in sub-sub-sub genres with at most a few thousand adherents worldwide, there are economies of scale to take into account.  Unfortunately, a good number of musicians I’ve come across over the years are still waiting for the old-school major-label discovery, hoping that their genre will come into vogue (in some cases, again) and a whole new bucket of fans will appear.

Those days are long gone.  That is one thing the how-to’s do tell you, although, it’s often couched in don’t-give-up kinds of language.  The market has changed, and we’re never going to see another “Thriller” or “Joshua Tree” or “Frampton Comes Alive” again, simply because there’s just not the scarcity of releases there once was.

This is not to say that  no indie band out there will ever achieve that coveted quit-your-day-job success.  It could happen.  But “success” really also needs to be redefined.  The days of Rick Astley moving from studio tea boy to worldwide megastar are behind us, and I think we’re going to see a lot more “really good weekend artists.