How does a media storm gather (and why does it work)?

Consider this the naive utopian indie pipedream:

1) an indie record comes out in the shops
2) some people take a chance on it and really, really like it
3) they tell their friends, play em some songs
4) word spreads
5) more people buy it
6) it builds slowly over the course of a year
7) distributors start ordering more
8) articles start getting written
9) more copies sell and the cycle continues

Consider this the paranoid critic-bashing fantasy:

1) 3 months in advance record company hooks up critics
2) critics chat with each other online about what is likely to be big
3) critics write reviews about records as if their bigness was already a fait accompli
4) people read hype articles that treat record as if it was the second coming of Jesus Christ
5) articles are timed in synch with ad campaigns
6) the record hits the shops cresting on reviews that have already enshrined it as a success artistically, but in terms of a fantasy projection of its success financially/in the marketplace
7) people trust the reviews/buy the hype and purchase the record
8)confirming that this is the way to sell stuff

Both stories fit the facts as I have experienced them firsthand in my own life. I self released a record and had incredible luck. I have also witnessed upclose the build up and marketing of major pop records. I know I have a typical indie ethic affection for the first model and a consumer feeling of distrust in the second model because it strikes me as "rigged" and undemocratic. But as a critic I also find the second model a bit too paranoid to quite believe. Hurting, is any of this similar to what you're wondering about? What do other people think of these as models for how the art can be said to "succeed". (note: neither story says anything either way about whether these are *actually* good records or not, it's about how we find out about them, and who is making them show up for us as worth paying attention to)

Model 2, on the other hand, seems partly right, but there must be more to it. Otherwise, like I said, anyone could become a phenomenon.

My band also self-released, with mixed results. We got press here and there, but not in a consistent way. We'd start to get offered bigger shows, then momentum would die down again, then start, then die down again. We have a pretty major booker working for us on an informal basis now, but it's not clear where it's going to go.

5) premature overexposure -> premature backlash -> next-big-thingness dwindles somewhat
6) the records will get on some store clerk's "recommendation" shelf for two weeks and maybe someone'll even go home and download it
7) kanye will win p&j anyway

As for story #2, the only galling thing is the way that something must already be perceived as "going to be big" in order to "become big"- which is totally cynical and circular, and ignores the possibility that actual realworld consumers, if they liked something enough, could MAKE it big. Because of the chokehold of payola/Clear Channel on US radio, this seems utterly impossible if we're talking about charting etc.. But with college radio in the US it still does seem possible, at least to me in my most idealistic models, that something could just trickle up from self-release to pervading college radio (ala Daniel Johnson in the late 80s).

On the other hand, yesterday I heard a Bright Eyes song on an AAA radio station without knowing what it was, and I did sort of prick up my ears and say "Hmm, this isn't as bad/cheesy as most AAA stuff," but it didn't bowl me over either.

This is my experience 100%. As it is tho, it doesn't bother me. I take the long view. At this rate in 20 years I'll have a pretty substantial back catalog of material, all 100% owned and released by me and my friends, with a small cadre of devoted loyalists. I can't really think of asking for more.

Instantly.

Instantly, Insanely Catchy.

Now Now Now!!!
Yummy Yummy Yummy!!!
Gimme Gimme Gimme!!!

So other records that are more secretive, or humble, or which don't frontload the strongest track as track one, or which hide the amazing change three minutes into the fourth song after the long crackling drone intro, etc. etc. just don't seem to quite make it onto the page. This isn't ALWAYS true, obviously. Sometimes a record being hard to pin down is EXACTLY why a critic decides to keep listening to it until they have a handle on what it's doing.

I tend to think that when people go insane about how "warm" something is, it's because there's something in the artwork that seems to press itself up against your ear, that solicits your attention, that wants to let you in. This is true for some great pop music, but there's plenty of amazing art that is esoteric, resistant, cryptic, self-concealing, layered, or oblique, and which correspondingly gets ignored or critiqued simply because it isn't making the "warm"-signifying moves.

And both have failed to prove themselves commercially with their releases to date.

I think people get overexcited about ILM's importance.

I think model #1 is probably not as unusual as you might think, putting the critic in the eye of the media storm seems obvious but I thank that is probably overstating their/our importance. So you probably have a lot more stories beeing written about The Shins because they changed someones life in "Garden State" rather than because every critic wanted to write about The Shins.

As far as relevancy goes, and how "Marketing forecasts get shuffled into the critical equation", it is the critics' job to put things in context. And that can vary from its artistic context as well as its place in pop culture as a whole. Claiming that M.I.A. will be huge as in kids downloading the Bucky Done Gone ringtone is probably wrong, claiming that she's catering to a narrow circuit, like Kelefa Sanneh did in his NYTimes review, might be prejudicial and cynical but not completely off the mark.

sorry about all the incoherency, i'm stuck with the flu
S.

well, i think for most print critics trying to make a buck it makes it easier to pitch stuff if the stuff they are pitching already has that buzz/hype/internet drool all over it. speaking for myself, i mostly write for the village voice and the editor there is a weirdo who likes tons of below-the-radar stuff. he SENDS me tons of below-the-radar stuff that I would probably NEVER hear otherwise cuz a lot of it is tiny label/band-produced music that just doesn't fit comfortably in any easy-to-sell niche(and thus, is harder to find on my own). And I'm grateful for this cuz i love the dusty corners of the attic and the crawlspaces in the basement.

I just feel that there's some kind of structural circularity or "rigged" quality to how the 3 month-in-advance press campaign works to create hype, and the more I see it up close the more "rigged" it looks. What's cool about ILM (or downloading music that isn't out yet, for that matter, or talking about music that isn't out yet on blogs, for that matter) is that it is driven by curiosity and appetite for music- what's weird about it is that it leads people to announce ahead of time that X is "going to be huge" or "is not going to be huge" before any realworld listeners have had a chance to make up their minds for themselves. (yeah, that assumes that if you have a blog or dl unreleased stuff that you are not a realworld listener, which is kind of circular itself).

I guess my point (sorry this is so torturously long and hard for me to spit out) is this:

1) the consumer in me feels spooked by discussions of records that aren't out yet by people who are In the Know who talk about the success or failure *in the marketplace* of an artwork that nobody's heard yet.

2) the musician in me is double spooked, because it starts to look like the kind of Evil Media Conspiracy that rightwing talkradio nutjobs fulminate about to their tractor driving faithful, ie. a bunch of people in New York have checked out your art and they already know that it's gonna be a HUGE success or A TOTAL FAILURE, even though Joe Consumer in Kentucky hasn't heard it yet. But because those folks in NYC think it's A TOTAL FAILURE they won't hype it, so teetering record clerk buyer for Smalltown USA doesn't order any copies so Joe Consumer never gets the chance to decide for himself if it's good or not, and the circular logic of "we didn't think it would be big so it wasn't, and this proves how right we are" prevails.

3) The critic in me thinks its no big deal, and inevitable anyway, and that this idea is all a fantasy, as ILM only proves that critics never agree with each other anyway.

Ah, OK. I mentioned ILM because:

a) your second point in model #2 ("critics chat with each other online about what is likely to be big") suggested it. Apologies if you meant other online forums.

and

b) Annie and M.I.A. are the two artists that, more than any others, still seem to me to be far, far bigger on ILM than in any other media outlet I'm aware of, so I thought by picking them as examples, you meant to implicate ILM in all this.

Why is that? How does a Clear Channel station decide its playlists? Anybody know?

Hold on -- where on ILM or even in whatever reviews you read (online or in print) do you find a lot of people predicting something is "going to be huge"? You're talking about critics and music geeks here, not marketers. Did anyone ever predict Dizzee was gonna sell 10 million records? Is anyone predicting that for M.I.A.? That doesn't even really seem like it's an important part of the conversation. Maybe there's an implicit assumption about what's cool or hip (or going to be), but that's mostly inside baseball. I mean, there was a ton of talk about microhouse on ILM, and a rash of microhouse write-ups in some of the music press, but I don't think anyone ever thought Michael Mayer was going to be John Mayer.

You seem to be conflating two different things: buzz, of the sort that someone like M.I.A. can generate among critics and music geeks; and "hugeness," of the sort that Switchfoot or Hoobastank can generate via other channels. The two occasionally coincide (OutKast, Kanye, Eminem), but not often (compare the top 40 Billboard albums of 2004 with the P&J top 40).

Your model #1 I think does actually happen -- Bright Eyes is an example, and White Stripes too (they weren't "the next big thing" until album #3). You model #2 is, yeah, paranoid.

In general, though, I don't think you'd see this if he had only released Digital Ash, or if he hadn't gone three years without a record (that's a lot of stories to tell - Bright Eyes tours with REM and Springsteen! Bright Eyes moves to NYC! Bright Eyes smooches Winona!). Paste wouldn't have put him on the cover if he had only released Digital Ash. And y'know, people genuinely liked I'm Wide Awake, and had a reasonable idea that it would be huge with a wide swath of listeners.

Sometimes you know that an album will excite a lot of people, it just becomes obvious, like a statistical chart where you keep plotting points until the data becomes irrefutable. I don't think any one set of tastemakers or businesspeople can fully create or stem that.

Ya lucky dog. (No, seriously, I'm envious!)

They appear to be not even close to being what sells in LA County. And the Times also pays great lip service to publicizing things which consumers have indicated a preference for. It religiously publishes sales rankings every Thursday.

So if your perception is that Bright Eyes or Arcade Fire are big -- it has more to do with the channels through which your news travels, than what is actually big.

Look, the Times broke down the sales slices of records by category in the US a couple weeks back. Heavy metal and country both get about 12 percent of the pie, the leaders of the pack by far being hip-hop and r&b. The Times almost never covers metal or hard rock, except after the fact hot-wash-ups on concerts that came through the area. It covers country OK.

It's a fact of life that there's an incredible amount of "me-to-ism" also in journalism. Editors see someone doing one thing, they want to have their own in house piece done on it. Often it snowballs. Sometimes the determined work of p.r. and a conglomerate is work; sometimes it happens irrespective of that.
Bright Eyes and Arcade Fire are virtually non-existent in the slices taken from sales figures. However, there's more at work. The old word for it is groupthink. And it comes from staring at the monitor all day long, sifting the wires and Internet and whatever source of content is your favorite, and being influenced by it. However, what attains critical mass in this sphere is not necessarily reality.

So Arcade Fire, for example, would be a lot better off if they got a dollar for every word in the Times, instead of a guarantee or part of the door at Spaceland in Silver Lake.

I was gonna say. "Not to be"?

I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's got something to do with a butterfly beating it's wings.