The Concept of "Bricking" [AKA: Why are fans and critics concerned with album sales? (Especially in genres like, oh, I dunno, hip-hop? Or, the reverse, internet darlings whose sales are minor?)]

I actually don't have any real answers other than "it is some bullshit".

xpost: this has nothing to do with al. the point nate brought up is exactly what i was talking about too, and why i amended the thread title.

All, definitely, but hip-hop has been his major area of interest for many years now -- the talk was wide-ranging so I'll have to think about what specific examples he named. The largest concern is the one that's been key for a while -- namely that music being seen as strictly free reduces incentive all around. His specific fear is that a tipping point has been clearly reached.

or whatever.

i'm also wondering why i started this thread because people are already misreading and/or restating things i said in the opening post.

like, does the guy who wrote "flagpole sitta" still live ok off it? what's his royalty check like every month? and the rest of the guys in the band, do they still tour, and flog this fucking thing? is it worth it, or did they go back to law school or something? i really really want to know this stuff. and how much is a big hit worth, at an individual level? who else makes what money off it, the mastering people, all that stuff? could pharrell buy a house with "rumpshaker" alone?

we read all that steve albini stuff about how totally unfair and ephemeral the money side of being a musician is, even relatively famous and successful ones. so in a way, my money curiosity is a strange kind of care for the artist. like, when whill amerie have to hang it up and get a teaching job? i hope never. two years? ten?

(x-post)

yeah i think this has EVERYTHING to do with the internet and very little to do with what we think of as "criticism" in the old sense of magazines and newspapers. (the only times sales comes up in most "regular" crit is as a talking point re. the power of the internet or the shrinking market for popular music or whatever.)

i think this is just another facet of me being fed up with/unable to process the current climate of the relationship between the internet and music.

xxpost: maybe i'm just sick of america in 2006, too.

Which would make sense if the fallout was more "what does this mean about the way the industry and marketing attempt to follow up after trying to establish up-and-coming acts" instead of "haha, the people have spoken and vindicated our skepticism!" (I wonder if A-Rod likes M.I.A.; I know he used Missy as his batter-up music this year.) But "Heartbeat" as Pitchfork-luv buzz single and Arular as Pazz & Jop runner-up was def. a factor.

Which reminds me, we're fast coming up on the 10th anniversary of The Year Electronica Was Supposed to Break But Didn't Entirely, At Least Not in the States. We've come so far!

- the "easy snark" beloved of dom et al to dismiss acts which are perceived to be purely "internet music" like MIA, lady sovereign and so on, without having to ever actually engage with the music itself - basically lazy criticism which is only partly a response to over-the-top hyperbole

- with big, commercially successful acts, it's kind of the same impulse but writ much larger - it's almost more like the commercial equivalent of Heat magazine publishing photos of minor celebrities looking spotty or fat, most recently I've noticed it with regards to the new Beyoncé album. there's hardly any engagement with what it's like musically, but a whole load of "it's not doing as well as Dangerously In Love, she's OVER" snark

talking about an album's commercial success can be useful when analysing how certain things are marketed, what marketing techniques succeed, what musical trends are significant at any given time - but I don't think any of this should be confused with commentary on how good the album is, and it often is.

there's the argument that if beyoncé's aim was to make a commercial smash, and she fails to do this, then somehow she's failed artistically, but I don't buy it, because since when have artists' intentions been particularly important &c &c

loads of xps

critics shouldn't care about it really. unless they're writing an article specifically about marketing, commercialism or whatever. if you're just doing a capsule review of the junior boys album it is extraordinarily irrelevant to mention that they sell virtually nothing.

I can see why fans care! everyone wants their favourite popstar/tennis star/football team to win stuff. but whether it succeeds or fails won't be relevant to how much the fan loves the music, really. and most often it's NON-fans who are bringing sales up

This might answer some of your questions. (NB: I've met Evan -- my band's playing with his at the end of this month -- and he seems like a decent guy, just making music 'cause he loves it.)

It's an odd thing and mostly the issue is with discourse on this and similar e-fora. I think you answered yr own question way above w/r/t hip hop.

I can't believe I'm posting to ILM again.

This is the more interesting part of the initial post to me. I guess the question is sort of like if this keeps up (and I certainly don't think we've seen the worst of the dive yet - rap sales might be down but they're still relatively high compared to plenty of other genres and when compared to the genre's sales for more than half of its history) how will this change rap and its values.

How do rappers measure popularity other than sales

and, this might be hypocritical or pretentious of me, but I kind of seperate my critical facilities from my sensibility as a hip hop head, as far as yeah, I'll clown someone for saying they'll sell a mil in a week and then not selling a mil at all, but if I'm writing about the album obviously I'm going to listen to it and probably like it for some of the same reasons it was a commercial failure.

what I mean here is that someone like Beyoncé is perceived to be so unstoppably massive that any chinks in the armour are exploited as much as possible

(I think Angus B was being overly pessimistic but I need to think about why exactly.)

Oh man, it'll be that back-to-the-'80s "you gotta bring skillz!" apocalypse people have been threatening! Or maybe the focus'll just be consolidated towards regional success (again).

and no, it's not hypocritical to poke fun of someone's sales on a message board and take the album seriously if you have to write about it.

Sorry that wasn't aimed at you Jess, the sentiment had been expressed a few times upthread?

xpost

it seemed like she was going to do well when she was all over MTV before the album dropped, but she debuted on Billboard at #48 and is out of the top 100 completely this week, so unless she taps into the Gnarls Barkley audience and ends up with a sleeper hit I don't think she's going to be an 'exception to the rule' case study after all.

the money-love and materialism in rap has always read to me like a fantasy of security, not dominance. like, i'm sure jay-z is a very rich man but i'm equally sure that on the scale of real actual CEOs he's at the bottom of that barrel.

the real issue underneath it is freedom from the bullshit stresses of poverty, and the ability to handle with ease the crises that upper middle class white people have resources and connections to handle ("private school, day care, shit medical bills, i'll pay that"). buying out the bar in vip is just a little sexier image than having a secure diversified portfolio or land in development or...

in a constricted commercial environment (rod stewart! wtf) i guess the level of worry comes up all around. al otm, as an insult it kind of magnifies a depressing situation for everyone involved

I think Hstencil has a really good point about people overinflating their expectations of certain acts' ability to catch on in the marketplace, but I think that has as much to do with the way radio is formatted in the US -- there are plenty of acts who likely have audiences beyond the internet, but radio et al are not ready to accomodate them. I think people forget that even a lot of the most conservative outlets for music on the internet tend to be a LOT more open and loosely playlisted than terrestrial radio or video channels, and those things still drive the marketplace.

ouch! well, at least artists make money on tour. for now.

Hip-hop's focus on flashy displays of wealth kinda infuriates me, because based on, you know, real life it just strikes me as aggressively stupid. Yeah, you bought those fucking fronts and I'm sure someone's really impressed by seeing them in your video, but if your career path is anything like that of, say, all but about a dozen rappers throughout all of hip-hop history, you'll be pawning them for rent money in a year.

As far as the audience talking about sales figures, why do people give a shit what the #1 movie was at the box office last weekend? Because it's a capitalist economy that has taught us that others' material success is a spectator sport, and we choose sides/take bets. How does it affect me as a writer? I make the conscious choice not to write about massive, million-dollar pop acts, because they don't need my help - they've got huge marketing budgets to get their message out for 'em, effectively rendering critical voices moot, never mind the effect of leaks, file sharing, etc. Instead, I view my purpose as a writer to talk about smaller albums/bands that do sort of need writers' help to transcend their cult status and get the herd's attention. Plus, I tend to not like pop, at least not the stuff I see/hear on MTV.

I find it really distasteful when people get weirdly triumphalist about the severe musical conservatism of the record industry as a whole and/or the record-buying public.

xpost -- A lot of artists tour at a loss, so there's certainly a lot of artists who are getting screwed both ways.

Dan, no one said that in this thread but believe me when I tell you that I've heard several arguments that boil down to that, especially in relationship to blogs/Pitchfork.

I guess I just write about whatever I like, whether that's huge mainstream acts, tiny indie outfits, or bands that broke up years ago. Is that selfish?

I think I know what article you mean, but either way, I'm not sure if that really hit the mark. Obviously, the fact that hip hop is singles-driven is a no-brainer, but it was that way even when album sales were booming. Yeah, it's gonna be harder to sell copies of an album if there's only one hit single that people can download or buy for 99 cents, but I think mixtapes (and advance leaks for entire albums) are as much to blame or more. Hip hop always valued the "first around the block" thing and early word of mouth, but that used to mean the guys who hit the record store on Tuesday morning, not tastemakers who get a leaked copy days/weeks ahead of time and make up their mind about whether it's trash or a classic within 2 listens. Part of the reason hip hop sales aren't healthy is that sometimes the biggest hits are sleepers, stuff that takes a few months to really get heard and peaks around the 3rd single (the last real example of this that I can remember is Trap Muzik or arguably the Chamillionaire album), but because no self-respecting hip hop fanatic is going to buy an album that's been out for 6 months and admit they slept on it, that barely ever happens anymore. Some of the blame for that goes to the labels that slash the promotional budget if the 1st week sales aren't great or pull the plug on putting out a 2nd or 3rd single that could've been the breakthrough hit, but it's also in the mentality of the fans.

#1 on TRL didn't seem like bricking to me. But I just checked Billboard, and Al's right -- after cracking the top 50 last week, she's out of it entirely this week. So I dunno.

man this thread has depressed me at lightning speed.

It may be less important in these days, with the arrival of good home studios and the improved possibilities to release yourself a few thousand items of an album rather than have a major label finance it.

But still, the aid of the major label is very useful, particularly in some genres where you need a more sizable budget to be able to create the kind of sound that is part of the genre.

Plus, for non-musicians, sure one may use the Net and all and search for good stuff that may not have the attention of the mainstream, but it is still likely that you miss out on a lot of good stuff. If something you like is in the hitlists, however, you are very likely to discover it.

So sales are important, not as a factor that has anything to do with quality, but because they decide a) what kind of genres the major labels will be looking for for the next couple of years and b)what kind of music is more likely to get more media attention, and as such catch the attention of several fants that would otherwise have been unaware.

While pretending sales are unimportant, one cannot ignore those factors.

the ghost of milton friedman sez: what can you say about a new method of distribution that only works because people don't pay? all those resources going in and NONE coming back, laughable man! destined for the grave.

Like I went to Jury Duty the other day and sat in a room of 200 people and I thought "How many people in here know who the Decemberists are? If these people could see the energy that people (self-included) expended talking about an article about the Decemberists..."

Basically sales figs are a good reality check.

Also, take into account how retail albums used to be the 'complete' picture of the artist, and being a fan meant you owned that album, or all their albums. Now, a rapper's latest album makes for maybe 50% or less of the music they put out and the image they cultivate; the rest is in mixtape freestyles, diss tracks, collaborations, remixes, and that's not even taking into account videos and interviews and merchandising. I could call someone my favorite rapper and cop mixtape after mixtape and memorize every guest verse, but if everyone says the album sucks 2 weeks before it's even out, I might not even bother buying it out of artist loyalty, and that kind of thing wouldn't have happened 5-10 years ago.

-- geoff (gffcnn...), November 17th, 2006 7:14 PM. (gcannon) (later)

dude get in the industry! i can write off purchases now on my 2006 taxes! woot!

:(

hahaha no way when all the petroleum runs out, i'll have hoarded a bunch of records and will be YOUR NEW OVERLORD. gonna melt down some mogwai for fuel, boo.

i still maintain that my inability to go to the record store and buy all the hit singles that i want to hear is what killed the record industry(that and high cd prices). the demise of the cd single helped to invent napster.

anyway, as far as album sales talk, it's everywhere, isn't it. i mean, for years. entertainment tonight. movie grosses in every newspaper. i just think it's a capitalism thing.

i just miss scanning the top 40 list and telling the clerk what number i want. um, in 1979.

xpost what crack are y'all smokin'? nobody buys eps, even when they're cheap.

It's probably too late now, but there was an opportunity when the single was phased out to replace it with SOMETHING rather than making music purchases an end sum you buy $18 CD or NOTHING game.

but like i said, they are idiots. and really really slooooooooow.

hahahaha no they could not get the song otherwise, for free.

but anyway, people are just fascinated by money, success, and failure. or what they deem to be success and failure.

okay, jess?

but yeah it's pretty stupid.

x-post they hear it on the radio and then go look for it!

ps. apparently lady sov broke down in l.a. last night.

no shit? that's sad

The PFM item said she had a respiratory infection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g83tUJnNfTU

well there ya go. that's what i said. you answered your own thread.

I keep meaning to gather the numbers and do a fact-filled post on this, but bascially going off what Al said, it seems from looking at the album charts that largely the album purchasing population is probably older and listen to either Rock or Country. That's probably not suprising, but what is suprising is that an artist like Chris Brown, who now has 4 top 15 (3 top 10) singles from one album is still only 1x platinum. I think cases like this reflect the greatest impact of the downloading culture.

Which leads to my wondering about an artist like him and just how much he makes if, say, the core audience of 10 to 30 year olds just purchase his four hit singles from Itunes, etc. Can he make a career out of that? I mean, I would think 4 top 15 tunes in decades past would have album sales in the multi-platinum range and a situation where an artist could potentially live off of the success of one major album (see, say Hootie and the Blowfish or Alanis Morissette). Basically, will Chris Brown be able to start planning for his retirement at the age of 17 or whatever? Cause I think if this was 1996 he would be able to but in 2006 he's sold fewer than 2 million albums and I wanna know if the Itunes sales are gonna take care of him.

-- matt2 (iloveokra...), November 3rd, 2006.

I kind of assume that in general teen R&B sensations have a limited but incredibly rabid audience, basically same as white boy bands but with less crossover/pop radio potential. They might have only a million or two record-buying fans, but they all call radio stations requesting the single all day and make sure the Scream Tour fills arenas. Now and then one of these guys keeps their career momentum going well into adulthood, which if Usher is any indication means graduating to superstardom, but more often than not they have the typical 3 album arc of success. Chris Brown still sings like a eunich, so how he handles the inevitable voice change on the 2nd or 3rd album will probably determine whether he can hang in there for the long haul.

-- Alex in Baltimore (shipley.a...), November 3rd, 2006.

I'm betting on Omarion

-- deej.. (clublonel...), November 3rd, 2006.

I used to hate Omarion as much as I hate Chris Brown now (I live in a city where the urban station's playlist is ruled by middle schoolers with an iron fist), and his voice still grates on me but I admit he's used it in service of some pretty good singles.

-- Alex in Baltimore (shipley.a...), November 3rd, 2006.

But Chris Brown is at least 17 now, right? Maybe he'll have the MJ 11-year-old voice for life. And "Say Goodbye" has convinced me he could have a real future, even though I really didn't like "Run It" and "Gimme That" in the least.

But I think the point of my question was missed by focusing on Chris Brown. The real question, I guess, is what does it mean to be a superstar in the era of downloads? Cause album sales clearly aren't a good indication of popularity, but can an artist make a "superstar's living" off of download success. I mean Nelly Furtado had a #1 for six straight weeks and has only gone gold. Fergie hasn't even gone gold yet. So album sales won't make you a monetary superstar anymore, so will musicians just make less money overall or is the money made from downloads commensurate?

Part of what lead to think about this stuff is that interview with Timbaland that was going around a couple months ago (I can't even remember where it was from) where he said he used to make up to $300,000 per track and he'd make a few tracks per week back when the music business was doing well in the late 90's, but that he can't charge nearly that now. So I guess less money is to be made in music, but I wonder just how much less given that the industry has now embraced paid downloads.

-- matt2 (iloveokra...), November 3rd, 2006.

CB was 15 when his album dropped, I think he's 16 now. So, yeah, obviously he's hit puberty already, but there's still a pretty significant difference between a guy's voice at that age and after 18 or so.

I think there's a big misunderstood distortion between artists who top the singles charts and artists who top the album charts, and it was there long before iTunes entered the picture. For every superstar who tops both charts, there's a ton who either have a #1 song but can barely get a plaque for their album, or sell millions without ever cracking the top 40. There are a lot of variables that depend on the genre and other factors, but there are also some pretty dependable patterns (i.e. it's a lot easier to sell an album with 2 or 3 hits than with 1, and artists may have dedicated fanbases who give them big numbers the first week, but they'll slip right off the charts in a month if there's no radio hit to keep momentum going). As for how much money is made off of album sales or download sales and how many units equal a "superstar's living," that kind of number crunching is way too involved for me to pretend I could predict or understand.

re: the Timbaland thing, a lot of hip hop producers went and priced themselves out of the game, to the point that only the top tier of artists can afford them. I think that's a big part of why a lot of producers are following Dre's lead and starting labels and/or taking artists under their wing, so they can make tracks without charging huge amounts per song because they'll be getting a big percentage of the profit on the back end (except, of course, Beat Club was an utter failure so Tim's sticking with pop singers that can afford his beats more easily than rookie rappers).

-- Alex in Baltimore (shipley.a...), November 3rd, 2006.

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: November 16, 2006

Maybe you’ve seen the trailer. A guy in a cheap suit jacket, brandishing a big microphone, approaches some unsuspecting young women after a concert. He is making a documentary, allegedly. His manner is naïve, but the questions he asks are plainly insulting. Still, the women are kind enough to play along. He says something weird about bra-burning. They respond politely. Nice.

But this isn’t that fake documentary “Borat.� It’s a real documentary, or at any rate an earnest one: “Before the Music Dies.� The interviewer, eager to make a point about the idiocy of popular music, has found these enthusiastic young women outside an Ashlee Simpson concert. He asks them if they are familiar with Bob Dylan. (At least a few of them aren’t.) He explains Mr. Dylan’s appeal, or tries to: “He used to inspire people to, like, drive to Washington and burn their bras.� Apparently Ms. Simpson has no such incendiary effect. Case closed.

“Before the Music Dies� is the work of a couple of concerned music fans, Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen, who set out to document the decline of “raw, undeniable talent,� as Mr. Shapter puts it, “the kind that doesn’t seem to be around as much in these days of instant pop stars.� The satellite radio network XM is broadcasting the film as an audio documentary. (For more information, visit beforethemusicdies.com.) And the film is touring the country in do-it-yourself style; it is being shown in clubs, at colleges, and in private homes; tomorrow night a guy named Ryan in Minneapolis is inviting people over to watch it.

This is a passionate film, but not a very convincing one. Doyle Bramhall II, a blues-rock guitarist and singer, talks about his frustrating years in the music industry. Unnamed fans wonder why radio isn’t as good as it used to be. Insiders and critics (including Jon Pareles, of The New York Times) talk about how the musical marketplace has changed over the last few decades.

Trying to corral these differing opinions, the voice-of-God narrator asks, “As the torchbearers of America’s rich musical heritage fight for survival amidst the wreckage of what was once the record industry, what does the future hold?� (Objection! Leading the witness!)

You’ve heard this story before, maybe from an overserved guy at a party who’s eager to explain why they don’t make ’em — blues musicians? sitcoms? stained glass windows? parties? — like they used to.

For as long as there has been a music industry, there have been music lovers criticizing it. What’s new is that, as CD sales continue to decline, slowly but steadily, the insiders’ critique has come to resemble the outsiders’ critique. Bob Lefsetz, the longtime music-industry gadfly, publishes a splenetic e-mail newsletter (archived online at lefsetz.com) that is, if anything, even angrier than the film; one typical recent riff began, “This business is so rotten, it’s unbelievable.� (Full disclosure: You’re reading a writer whom Mr. Lefsetz seems to like.) Even Alain Levy, the head of EMI Music, recently announced, “The CD as it is right now is dead,� adding, “We have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content.�

This is what’s truly odd about the current music-industry slump: it has created an unexpected consensus among people who usually disagree. From do-it-yourself pioneers like Jenny Toomey (an indie rocker and activist who is interviewed in the film) to former executives; from unsigned hopefuls to arena-filling stars like Dave Matthews (who is also interviewed), everyone thinks something is wrong with the music industry. And so long as the discussion doesn’t go much further than that, it seems as if all these people agree.

Look closer, though, and you’ll see that this story isn’t quite so simple. Take Mr. Bramhall, the guitarist and singer: he was actually signed twice, by Geffen and then by RCA. If you love his music, you may wonder why major labels couldn’t make him a success; if you don’t, you may wonder why on earth major labels kept signing him.

Bonnie Raitt hints at some of these complexities when she reminisces about the good old days at Warner Brothers in the 1970s. She says, “Their big sellers, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, would pay for Ry Cooder and Randy Newman and me and Little Feat.� That sounds like a great system, unless of course you’re a member of Deep Purple or Black Sabbath, in which case it might be time to negotiate a better contract.

Unlike some of the more sentimental commentators in the film, Mr. Lefsetz is obsessed with numbers: Nielsen SoundScan sales figures, PollStar concert statistics and the like. And because his is an industry perspective (albeit a dissident one), he respects just about any act that really sells records.

Lots of the folks in “Before the Music Dies� might think the hugely popular Canadian neogrunge band Nickelback is a sign of all that’s wrong with the world. But when the most recent Nickelback album hit 3.7 million copies sold in America, Mr. Lefsetz could scarcely contain his glee, writing: “Could it be that Nickelback is now the leader because they’re the only one with any values? And the rest of the acts are sold-out whores purveying music that has the fading taste and longevity of bubble gum?� Hmm. Don’t answer that question. Or rather, don’t try to answer it without addressing the simple but slippery issue of taste. We can argue all day about bubble gum and CD sales and microformatted radio and major-label artist development. But none of that makes much sense unless we’re also willing to discuss what music we like, and why. (For the record Nickelback’s current hit, “Far Away,� is a first-rate power ballad.)

“Before the Music Dies� is incoherent because it doesn’t examine its own taste. The filmmakers advance a particular musical vision — a world full of bluesy guitarists, rootsy jam bands, old-fashioned soul singers and quirky fusionists — while pretending they’re merely diagnosing the music industry.

It’s clear that something is happening. The CD is certainly dying (though it’s not dead yet), and the power of major labels and big radio stations is clearly under siege. But how you feel about all this probably depends on whether you have a vested interest in the current system, and on what kind of music you like. It’s nice to imagine we’re all in this together. But we ain’t.

xpost: haha man al is not wrong about this (I live in a city where the urban station's playlist is ruled by middle schoolers with an iron fist)

what the fuck?? who is this

Sam Goody flashback... I'll take #3, "Ring My Bell"...

Wait, people DON'T actually talk about box offices grosses???

(talk abt movie grosses, that is)

Where do you get those on a weekly basis, though? Linky?

Morning-radio show DJs talk about TV show ratings. I've always thought that was weird, like whothefuckcares.

deej, what are you talking about? What's the station that plays disco and house? And are the two 70s/80s R&B stations, what, V103 and 100.3?

Maybe it's worth bringing up at this point that music's share of the entertainment market is pretty small. High-earning album=$90,000,000.00 high earning movie=$300,000,000.00. And what does the Super Bowl bring in in terms of money? Lotsa matzoh.

However, decreasing media interest due to poor sales figures will mean that future generations will be less likely to be into those genres. Simply because other genres will get more media attention due to bigger sales.

This goes for "pop" as well as rap, with the concerns as complex. I think what it may boil down to is the recent (past 5-10 years) blurring (in America) of the line between "indie" and "mainstream" and the (similar but not identical) line between "real music" (catchall for rock, folk, punk, alt-country, whatever) and "pop music." Theoretically, the only judge of a "pop" musician's success is how popular he or she is (and this would certainly be true in the eyes of those labels whose jobs it is to make money), whereas a "real" musician's success comes from how many year-end Top 10s it ends up on (or whatever: it does, in the end, lead back to sales, but the raw figures [I would think] are less important than they would be in the "pop" sphere). But as "pop" and "real" and "indie" and "mainstream" becoming increasingly conflated (see especially: M.I.A. and Annie), that model is problematic--Annie, no doubt, makes "pop" music, but it's not "popular": Annie thus is "indie pop," and all of a sudden we need to ask: do her album sales matter? (This point, I think, has been sort-of addressed above).

The concerns with rap mirror this, I think, although the model may be slightly different; the real problem here is the creation of "underground rap" (as we know it today) over the last 10+ years (starting, I guess, with Rawkus) as a semi-specific genre with its own lyrical concerns and musical sensibilities. So someone like Ghostface--whose aesthetic and lyrical concerns are more similar to "mainstream"/"pop" rap--is placed in an awkward position when his sales aren't huge--but who cares, right? Except that Ghostface can't go to Rhymesayers or Def Jux or, like, Epitaph. There's no (structured) "third way" in rap, for acts like Ghostface or the Clipse or Joe Budden (the problem, I realize as I type this, may be that there's no huge fan base for acts like these besides the hardcore messageboard heads [side question: is the message board the contemporary equivalent of the backpack as type-of-rap-fan signifier?]). (I realize that this is an oversimplified and reductive view of rap music, and these categories bleed into and over one another way more often than we'd like to think, but from where I'm standing in terms of the industry/sales/fanbase/&c. this is close enough to how it works).

So if the question is: why do people care about album sales? Maybe the answer is "because they don't want to see their favorite acts shoved to the side."

“Westy works as a stone mason”

o rly?

xpost

al's right. also, the problem is not that there "isn't a 3rd way." the problem is pride, too. a rapper could go to epitaph or koch or whomever and make a decent amount of money. but they could never afford a stretch whatever. and for multiple reasons there is a certain prestige still associated with being on a major (or one of the big rap labels) for a rapper. but yeah, as sales continue to drop and the entire corporation-level end of the industry is reshuffled, that's probably going to fall away.

Yeah, I forgot about Koch.

l's right. also, the problem is not that there "isn't a 3rd way." the problem is pride, too. a rapper could go to epitaph or koch or whomever and make a decent amount of money.

Well, that's sort of what I mean by "there isn't a 3rd way"--not so much that one doesn't exist, or couldn't be created, but that the way the "game" works everyone's got too much pride.

Anyway, I saw Talib Kweli talk at my school (that's right, talk, not rap) last week and asked him a question about this--he pointed out that he could care less about the way majors are selling, that in fact the major-label sales lag results in part from indies selling much better. There's a book out called "the Long Tail," abt. the "death" of the blockbuster--how huge blockbuster movies and albums are becoming rarer and rarer w/ the rise of the internet and niche marketing and whatever else, such that as many records are being sold, total, just that smaller releases are selling more and bigger releases are selling less--eventually, I suppose, it will all even out.

this might be hypocritical or pretentious of me, but I kind of seperate my critical facilities from my sensibility as a hip hop head, as far as yeah, I'll clown someone for saying they'll sell a mil in a week and then not selling a mil at all, but if I'm writing about the album obviously I'm going to listen to it and probably like it for some of the same reasons it was a commercial failure.

-- Alex in Baltimore (Alex in Baltimore), Friday, November 17, 2006 6:26 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark Link

good post

good thread! I forgot about this one.