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.

(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.