re: "marketing and promotional strategies of much 'cooler' musicians"

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sez Tom in the Avril thread:

"I don't know. I'm torn between finding these articles very interesting and finding them a bit old - we only ever hear about the marketing plans etc. for stars like Britney, Avril, that wannabe Maura mentioned. What would be just as interesting - more, actually: pieces on the marketing and promotional strategies of much 'cooler' musicians. How is the Bob Dylan brand protected and promoted by Colombia? What exactly did the PR people do to get The Streets so hip? How the fuck do you get noticed if you've got good product and no money? I am 100% keen on biz demystifying but please, less articles about people who pretty much everyone could have guessed the demystification-details of anyway! "

begging for its own thread, but i'm not sure to what end. but a very very good point that completely clicked with me as soon as i read it. seems like there's much more insidious pre-packaging going on outside the pop-idol mechanism.

have any pieces been done with this kind of article, aside from the usual let's-rip-on-anyone-who's-hip-but-under-suspicion rants? (i.e. all the anti-Ryan Adams bile)...brings to mind a thing that was on Pitchfork a while back about how Wilco benefitted from the record company 'controversy' so much that it could easily have been an engineered move to gain attention/sympathy from the press. of course this was all presented in a 'what if' scenario, not actually trying to say that's what happened, but it does make you wonder how much certain artistic/authentic images are engineered on much deeper levels than just sneering for the photo shoot.

― Al (sitcom), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:01 (twenty-three years ago)

first line, 2nd paragraph: article = angle. gah.

― Al (sitcom), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:03 (twenty-three years ago)

Fanatic and Team Clermont to thread!

― James Blount (James Blount), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:04 (twenty-three years ago)

Bob Dylan's creepy moustache to thread.

― hstencil, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:04 (twenty-three years ago)

Somewhere in Kid A's being leaked online in the weeks before it's release and yet appearing at #1 on the Billboard charts with ZERO video/radio airplay contains a lesson that the RIAA desperately needs to learn. mp3 = marketing genius

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:07 (twenty-three years ago)

You're forgetting that it was #1 on a slow week for new releases, too.

I wonder if Bob Dylan buys real or fake Vuitton handbags?

― hstencil, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:08 (twenty-three years ago)

Dig out any of my 10-k rants from about a year and a half ago on the market strategies on the Strokes and just cut and paste them here.

It does bother me that these puppet-string exposing articles focus so much more on female musicians. It just makes me think how much males WANT to see the puppet strings behind talented females, because talented females controlling their own image/career would just be WAY too scary and threatening, wouldn't it?

I mean, what do you think? Are Busted, f'rinstance, a real band? What do you think? And what about that "The Sums" video. "No it's not, your name's SVEN now!" ya don't ever think that happens in real life now, does it?

― kate, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:11 (twenty-three years ago)

~~"It just makes me think how much males WANT to see the puppet strings behind talented females, because talented females controlling their own image/career would just be WAY too scary and threatening, wouldn't it?"~~

Ani DiFranco and her DIY grass-roots marketing ethic to the thread!

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:14 (twenty-three years ago)

Sigh. I would utterly love Ani DiFranco ... if it weren't for the indelicate matter of her UTTERLY SHITE MUSIC. Bring back the puppet strings, I says...

― kate, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:15 (twenty-three years ago)

Ani's music is so bad that most critics/writers focus on "her DIY grass-roots marketing ethic" than the music! Which is kinda brilliant, in a twisted sense.

― hstencil, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:19 (twenty-three years ago)

No likey Ani's music? Bummah. She rocks my casbah! Creative and quirky and funky and fun and pretty and powerful and just about all the things I get out of music all rolled into one little 5'2" freakazoid lovely. Well, sorry y'all don't like it, like I said...BUMMAH.

How 'bout Bjork? I don't see any "puppet strings" there, more like PR/marketing execs constantly struggling to figure out what to do with her extreme eccentricities.

If Bjork DID have "puppet strings", surely those pulling the strings wouldn't have let her get away with that Swan-dress a few years back, no?

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:23 (twenty-three years ago)

...quirky...

Therein lies the problem.

Bjork = "eccentricity" (real or otherwise) as marketing point?

Fuck if I know. This thread is almost as cynical as I am.

― hstencil, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:25 (twenty-three years ago)

'How 'bout Bjork? I don't see any "puppet strings" there' - heh, is this a joke?

― James Blount (James Blount), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:29 (twenty-three years ago)

No it's not a joke, I'm just incredibly naive. Please enlighten me!

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:31 (twenty-three years ago)

Bjork is maybe a strong example of an artist being mostly of their own earnest design (image-wise at least, and probably artistically post-Sugarcubes, or at least after the first 2 solo albums when she seemed to take a bigger role in the writing/production), but taken as 'quirky' and coveted by her fans for those eccentricities, even if they may largely just be a simple matter of her nationality and accent. like i don't know if she goes around thinking "i'll act really weird and cute in this video and my fans will eat it up", or if she simply does and they simply do.

― Al (sitcom), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:32 (twenty-three years ago)

About the Bjork thing, Fiona had a real go about this in the last ish of CTCL. What did she say... let me dig it out, cause she put it better than I ever could:

Female archetypes: The Singer-Songwriter
The Etherial Kook
Kate Bush casts a long shadow. She's sexy in a childlike, waifish sort of way, so she's not too threatening. But the same ethereality that allows her to slip non-threateningly under the male radar also traps her. Because she's a little bit "mad" it's easy to disparage or dismiss her art - press about Tori Amos or Fiona Apple dwells on their trauma, rather than the amount of creative control they exercise.

Thanks, Fiona.

― kate, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:33 (twenty-three years ago)

Most creative artists are pretty easy to sell once theyve reached a fair level of success because you can market their creative excesses as "creative excesses" - this assumes of course that said CEs don't translate into something like giving up live performance entirely or releasing Metal Machine Music.

― Tom (Groke), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:33 (twenty-three years ago)

...this assumes of course that said CEs don't translate into something like giving up live performance entirely...

What about the Beatles, then?

― hstencil, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:37 (twenty-three years ago)

So who's to say that the way we see musicians is actually how they are in real life, and not part of the persona that has been concocted for them to portray by those working the "puppet strings"?

I like that Fiona quote, Kate...it makes me wonder now about the Male Musician Archetypes...the Sensitive Singer/Songwriter, the Guy Whose Troubled Youth Follows Him Into Adulthood, the Lady's Man, etc.

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:39 (twenty-three years ago)

Ssssshhhh, Nickalicious, Fi is busy working on the third in her series of archetypes pieces (Boyband archetypes) and then the male songwriter archetypes piece comes after that... Gah! Die, Fiona, Die! I want her to stop writing, but she just won't go away and every time I see her quoted somewhere else, it just spurs her to keep on writing when I keep trying to suffocate her with a pillow and stuff her back under the bed. Sigh.

― kate, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:42 (twenty-three years ago)

So who's to say that the way we see musicians is actually how they are in real life, and not part of the persona that has been concocted for them to portray by those working the "puppet strings"?

Dude, it's ALL A MASSIVE CONSPIRACY!

Personally, I think Admiral Poindexter and the IAO have something to do with this shadowy "puppet strings" of which you write.

― hstencil, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:45 (twenty-three years ago)

there's nothing shadowy about them, you can even hire them yourself if you want (there's two listed above for instance).

― James Blount (James Blount), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:49 (twenty-three years ago)

Im not saying giving up live performance and releasing MMM are unmarketable, they're just too extreme to fit within an 'eccentricity' marketing template.

Also the Beatles' singles sales (dont know about albums) did slip after they gave up performing, AFAIK. They were just so colossal beforehand that it didnt matter.

― Tom (Groke), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:51 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the creepy Masonic implications of the IAO's new "Eye and the Pyramid" logo. I feel much less like a paranoid conspiracy theory nut.

"Ha! I was right! Insane theories = 1, regular theories = a billion!" - Fry, Futurama

Kate, uh...you're funny and scary at the same time. And you sigh alot. And you seem to hate all my favorite music. Are you one of my ex-girlfriends and I just don't know it? ;-)

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:51 (twenty-three years ago)

Nick, have you ever been in a shit 60s garagepunk band on the lower east side/New Jersey?

Where is this scary eye/pyramid logo, I can't get it to load... is it as good as Paranoid Spice's logo was? Dammit... My tentacles are fucked.

― kate, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 20:55 (twenty-three years ago)

It's on the home page. It's broken up into .gif slices.

What the hell, give Johnny-boy a shizz-out on da email! The bio they have for him is pure genius (and about 1000x more cynical than this thread, even).

― hstencil, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 21:01 (twenty-three years ago)

In fact, I haven't been in any "shit 60s garagepunk" bands evah. All the bands I've ever been in have been infuriatingly obnoxious "quirky" multi-hyphenated-genre-identity-type groups, like a pop/punk/funk/jam band a few years back, or the prog/funk/jazz/rap/metal band I'm in now.

You can see the Eye-and-the-Pyramid logo at the IAO link above, or you can look at the back of any American dollar bill, or on pretty much anything at all related to Freemasonry. It's not really very "scary" or anything on its own, I think it's only scary to nut-jobs like me who have read far too much subversive literature.

I'm curious now if I should consider the "conspiracy theory" angle on marketing my own music, maybe I can unite all the paranoid freaks across the planet under the banner of paranoid freak conspiracy theory music...hm...maybe NO.

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 21:03 (twenty-three years ago)

12-ft-lizard A: "Let's form a secret society, only here's the twist see, we proclaim it on like every unit of money ever, really really clearly..."
12-ft-lizard B: "I notice, A, that you are only 5'8", and that your saurian head is made of latex. Guards, away with this idiot."
*the unfortunate is led away*
12-ft-lizard B: "OK, here is the real plan. It's called 'culture-jamming'..."

― mark s (mark s), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 21:09 (twenty-three years ago)

nickalicious to Ipecac (or vice versa)!

― James Blount (James Blount), Tuesday, 26 November 2002 21:33 (twenty-three years ago)

Hey, that's funny, I'm listening to an Ipecac rekkid right now! (The Fantomas/Melvins Big Band)...

12 Foot Lizards!??!? Robert Anton Wilson to the thread!!!

― nickalicious, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 21:39 (twenty-three years ago)

Lungfish
The Evidence

[guit. riff]
e|------------------------------------------------------------
b|------------------------------------------------------------
g|------------------------------------------------------------
d|-----9-----9-7----------------------------------------------
a|---7-----7--------------------------------------------------
E|-0-----0----------------------------------------------------

Judgement condemnation
Trial and tribulation
Lock + keys + one way streets
Schedules + game plans
Mouth to mouth + hand to hand

These systemativ disciplines
Of expressing understanding
Are all that were offered me

Here are my findings
This is the evidence
This song bears witness
To the total science
Hard to soft or soft to gone

If you're outside the lingo
If you're outside the jargon
You talk beyond a system
You're talking out of turn
I've got my calculus
I've got my calipers
I've got my scopic monitor
I've got my own
I've gone figuring
I've gone ciphering
I've gone recording + reporting

The covered track of an invisible
Regime perhaps they tell me
What to sing

― msp, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 22:38 (twenty-three years ago)

Still won't load... I smell nefarious tentacles at work here. The back of a dollar bill was the Paranoid Spice logo. There are many fnord here who would back up fnord your findings. Sssshhhh! We might have to kick out the JAM's.

Rest assured, Nick, I have never dated you. I don't date anyone who plays anything described as "fusion" or has hyphens in their music genre. (Unless garage-mod-freak-beat counts.)

Don't market the conspiracy freak angle, that works for no one, except maybe Anton Newcombe, and, erm, well... he's not had much fnord luck.

― kate, Tuesday, 26 November 2002 22:53 (twenty-three years ago)

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