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How do you break a band today? If you're a great new band with great music, how do you get anybody to listen to you?
There are mechanisms for rappers and producers to break out — just get a feature on or sell a beat to a big rapper but
There are mechanisms for rappers and producers to break out — just get a feature on or sell a beat to a big rapper but
that's not an option for any other genre of music. A new rock band can't just play their own song for 16 bars halfway through a new track on McCartney III.
When I was working in commercial radio, I was flabbergasted by how little power the music directors had. They're on a very very very tight leash. They exclusively follow success. Something has to be a hit before they play it. They can magnify something, but not create it. Sad.
When I was working in music journalism, it was similarly grim how little power was in that room. People by and large just will not click on a story/interview/link to a song by an artist they don't know.
I suspect this is because most music is shit, and shit music isn't just unpleasant but spiritually draining, and you have to be a very specific kind of person to spend hours listening to shit music on the off chance you'll find something good
(Who goes to lots of gigs? Who is involved in community radio? Who runs and reads music blogs? The young, the childless, the unemployed, the pretentious, the men with social disorders,)
( @theneedledrop quickly became the single most powerful man in music— because he's just about the only person who listens to an absurdly large amount of music and is capable of speaking about it with real umpf and charisma)
Apart from spontaneously getting a fantano review, if you're a great band, do you just have to throw the music out there and hope that the Spotify algorithm gets your music to the right people and that the enormity of your greatness gets the job done?
All of which is to say, Spotify threw this album at me weeks ago and it has virtually no listens: https://open.spotify.com/album/3stBRGnjQhfzzNABNw7IOZ?si=aoFQpf6HRdeMNY_d6M6C4w
Very unsuccessful in terms of popularity. But it is extremely good.
With my comedy, I've spent the last six months just recording sets and throwing them on the internet, because I believe that if a thing is good and it moves people, it will find an audience, money and the industry and tech barons be damned
But then I think about this album. It is sensational, and came out almost a year ago, and has virtually no audience.
So maybe excellence can loiter in obscurity, and there's no real hope for anybody trying to do something new or good. https://open.spotify.com/album/3stBRGnjQhfzzNABNw7IOZ?si=CqSKq4yEScS3N5ZqE5mYOQ
So maybe excellence can loiter in obscurity, and there's no real hope for anybody trying to do something new or good. https://open.spotify.com/album/3stBRGnjQhfzzNABNw7IOZ?si=CqSKq4yEScS3N5ZqE5mYOQ
That album having the numbers it has makes me feel like I've turned up to a country footy game and watched a young buddy Franklin kick thirteen goals and there are no plans to tell the AFL that he exists
