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| Lady Gaga performing in Austin, Tex., during the South by Southwest festival, in a show presented by Doritos. The music festival’s venues were decked out in a riot of corporate logos. Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press |
The hype surrounding this years SXSW from varying accounts was either an awesome party to see friends and get loose or you felt violated from the amount of corporate brands being stuffed in your face. Let's face it, making money in the music industry is a tough row to hoe. Any true profit is being made from playing to a live audience and for those that just want to sit on a couch and lament as to why they are not selling a ton of albums, get off your lazy asses and get to work. The equation is damn simple.
Tomorrow will be a new app created with a flying bird or a tetris style game play that you will be competing against, along with every news source speaking on potential cold war relations, so where does your music come into play?
This couldn't be a better time to be a musician. Here is why. Forget all the competition and bands that are already better on their gear or more skilled at networking. You are only a few clicks away from a billion people and never forget that. If you are in this to make a living from the start, well you best have a Plan B, as the wisest man I know has always told me. Anyone without a Plan B is an absolute idiot and is truly not playing this chess board called life with any real strategy.
Dive into this great article below about a reporter's view of SXSW. Yes, we know that large corporate brands are dominating the landscape, but true art will always break down walls and burn the landscape. If you are an artist that needs to be heard, what are you waiting for? Make life happen and get off the damn couch and Facebook espousing rhetoric about what is solid and real. In this time and place we need Chieftains as we already are overrun with replicants.
"I
like Doritos as much as the next guy. More, probably. And I admire Lady
Gaga for her handcrafted rise to the top of pop culture. In Austin last
week, the salty, cheesy wonder of Doritos was brought to you by the
sweet, uplifting allure of Lady Gaga. Or was it the other way around?
That blend of sweet and savory, corporate and personal, commerce and art at this year’s South by Southwest
festival, also known as SXSW, was a reminder that music can no longer
pay its own way. In a streamed world where music itself has very little
value, selling out is far from looked down upon, it’s the goal.
Don’t
blame Lady Gaga, SXSW or even Doritos. The consumer wants all the music
that he or she desires — on demand, at a cost of zero or close to it —
and we now live in that perfect world.
It
doesn’t feel perfect, though. At this year’s festival, historically a
place of artistic idiosyncrasy, music labels were an afterthought and
big brands owned the joint. Venues were decked out with a riot of
corporate logos, and the conference’s legacy as a place where baby bands
played their little hearts out to be discovered seemed quaint in a week
in which Jay Z and Kanye West kicked it for Samsung, Coldplay headlined
for Apple’s iTunes and Tyler, the Creator played a showcase for
Pandora.
This
new order evolved because when music moved into the cloud, not much of
the revenue came with it. CD sales are a fraction of what they once
were, and the micropayments from streaming services have yet to amount
to anything meaningful. It’s a grim state of affairs, but corporate
America, in search of an elusive demographic, has been more than willing
to fill the breach.
Given that Bob Dylan, of all people, recently made a big-money commercial
for Chrysler, none of this is surprising, but it still has
implications. No one will miss the stranglehold the large music labels
had on the industry, but having shoe and snack food companies decide
what is worthy could strangle the new, unruly impulses that allow the
music business to prosper.
You
hear a lot of the Ramones on commercials these days, but if the suits
were in charge when the band was first playing, you never would have
heard of them at all. (Anybody who wonders about the impact of big
companies as cultural gatekeepers need only go see a studio
blockbuster.)
For
South by Southwest, Lady Gaga filmed something of an infomercial for
Doritos, urging people to use the hashtag #boldstage and submit a video
of themselves doing something “bold” to compete for access to her
performance. (In fact, any journalist covering the event was required
to do the same thing, which explains why I — and my colleague Jon
Pareles — were not there. If we had done so, we would have consented to
“give sponsor a royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, nonexclusive
license” to use our social media efforts to sell corn chips.)
We
missed quite a spectacle, from what I can see in video clips and news
reports. Lady Gaga was smeared in barbecue sauce and mock-roasted like a
pig and then, with the ink on the check from Doritos barely dry — and
with millions destined for her charity — she bit the tortilla chip that
fed her. “I won’t play by your” — insert street-cred adjective —
“rules,” she said.
She
then wagged a crooked finger at her fans who were shooting pictures on
their phone and had tweeted their way in at her instruction: “When you
leave this earth, no one is going to care what you tweeted. Don’t let
the machine and don’t let technology take you from this earth.”
And
in a move that might seem redundant given the irony that she had
already coated herself with, Lady Gaga invited the performance artist
Millie Brown on stage to drink a bottle of neon green liquid and vomit
all over her. Her actions — to happily shill for Doritos, then deliver a
lecture on the importance of independent thought — perfectly
encapsulate the conflicted state of the industry.
(You
could say it was a new low, but last year, I saw Public Enemy, musical
heroes of my youth, perform “Fight the Power” inside a mock Doritos
vending machine.)
At
her keynote address on Friday, Lady Gaga thanked Doritos and said
plainly, “Without sponsorships, without all these people supporting us,
we won’t have any more festivals because record labels don’t have any”
money.
Carrie
Brownstein, the star of “Portlandia” who played in the rock band
Sleater-Kinney for years, was in town with her co-star Fred Armisen to
speak on a panel. Like many, she marveled at the number of brands that
wallpapered the festival.
“I
almost felt like I was in festival-land and the bands were there as
part of the theme park,” she said. “Still, it’s good there is a physical
place where people gather to watch music because so much of it seems to
come from nowhere at a cost of nothing.”
With
record sales a thing of the past, she said, “everyone in music is
trying to figure it out and there is no algorithm for that. It’s very
treacherous.”
Peter
Gannon, a former rocker in a band called Calla, is now a senior vice
president at the advertising agency McCann Erickson and was searching
for new talent at SXSW. He smiles at the turn of events, but says he is
playing the game that is on the table. He wants collaborations to go
beyond putting a brand logo on a performance, pointing to a recent campaign on behalf of the national parks by Nature Valley that included Andrew Bird and Tift Merritt.
“The
willingness of artists to partner with brands happened because revenues
dried up from physical discs,” he said. “The labels are not going to
get a lot of sympathy because they were not very good to artists. At
least when a brand is involved, there is an understanding that we are
borrowing the cachet that the artist has built and we try to make
high-quality projects that give value to both the client and the artist.
”
There
is another way, albeit much tinier. While Lady Gaga was doing her thing
for Doritos, I was down the street at a showcase for Merge Records.
Founded in Durham, N.C., 25 years ago by Mac McCaughan and Laura
Ballance, Merge persists by carefully picking the bands that it works
with, keeping costs low and producing almost artisanal merchandise —
CDs, vinyl records, T-shirts and posters — that fans want to buy. Every
once in a while, a small success becomes a giant one, as it did with
Arcade Fire, the label’s biggest seller by far.
Mr. McCaughan, whose band Superchunk still records and tours, says he is still in the business of selling music, not chips.
“You
can’t guilt people into buying records or get them to stop just
grabbing MP3s, you have to give them something they want to support,” he
said over breakfast on Thursday. “We have to sell records to make money
and to do that, we have to work within people’s short attention span
for music. Doritos is trying to get you to look at one thing, and we are
trying to get you to look at another thing.”
It
is, he points out, a great time to be a music fan. Obscure reissues,
B-sides, live performances are all there in friction-free and sometimes
plain-old-free formats. But for bands, it is attention amid the clutter
that has become expensive, especially at SXSW, where 2,000 acts are
looking for love in all the same places.
But
for all the mania, South by Southwest can still amaze. One night, I
went to see a very accomplished band on the back patio of a bar near Red
River Street. As I made my way through the dark, sweaty room in front, I
noticed an insistent sound and turned to see Team Spirit, a beery
collection of punkish rockers having the musical time of their lives. I
made a mental note and when I got back to my hotel, I downloaded some of
its music. Given that bands survive partly from the sales of actual
physical artifacts, I may even buy a T-shirt." - David Carr
