The New Music Age

One of things that we stress to S&E Entertainment clients is that you need to be accessible to as many people as possible, both in person and online. The bottom-line: have a presence where your fans are and provide them the ability to interact with that presence. it is no longer enough to simply put the information out there and hope that someone enjoys it and spends their time and money following your musical career.

A recent article by Kyle Bylin highlights this advice:

"I was ten when I recorded "The Rockafeller Skank" by Fatboy Slim off the radio onto cassette tape. Twelve when “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem premiered on TRL. The idea that I could reach out and connect with the artists that I liked didn’t exist yet or at least wasn’t familiar to me. MySpace didn’t become popular where I grew up – almost no one that I knew had it. Artists were perceived as unreachable. What you knew about them was based on the lyrics in their songs or maybe a brief interview segment in Rolling Stone. Even the concept of sending traditional fan mail was of no interest, because there was no expectation of the artist reading it or writing back. It was basically the equivalent of trying to actually send your Christmas list to Santa at the North Pole.

In the truest form, I, along with everyone I knew, were passive consumers of music and thought nothing of tuning into the radio and not getting to choose what songs were playing. Waiting through a few terrible videos on MTV in order to hear something good was commonplace and seen as a way to pass the time. Today that’s just not the case anymore. Music fans have set different expectations for artists and insist that they are met. While not everyone has interest in messaging their favorite artist, those that do, anticipate a reply back. Of course, no one is shedding tears when old hats like Metallica or Def Leppard don’t reply, but for Making April or Owl City, fans have come accustomed to the idea that they are able to reach out to these artists and make a real connection.

What does this mean for an artist? Think about it as the blurring of the line between the public artist and the private individual, at a time, when the boundary between home and studio has largely disappeared. On tour, thanks, by and large, to advances in digital technologies, the ability to stay in touch with their fans has become delocalized for many artists, so that it can be done at all hours from almost anywhere. Leisure time once spent doing creative things — where an artist could take time away from it all — has turned into work that ranges from learning how to market themselves online and off, answering an endless barrage of messages from fans, bloggers, and managers, and trying to keep all of their profiles, blogs, and social media tools relevant and up-to-date.

“It’s that the once disparate spheres have now collided and interpenetrated each other, creating a sense of “elsewhere” at all times,” writes Sociologist Dalton Conley in Elsewhere, U.S.A. He continues, “It is the plethora of economic opportunities created by technology that creates a dogging sense of loss, of needing to be elsewhere, doing something different.”1 Whether you liken elsewhere to the next social networking site that seems to have more promising opportunities or the idea that instead of making more music you should be figuring out how to better market the music that you’ve already made — the message is clear — that what it means to be an artist in the twenty-first century will be drastically different from what previous generations have experienced."