Music Super (Hero) Fans Wanted
Who are the music super hero fans?
They’re music listeners who don’t just throw on some random playlist at the gym, on the bike or in the car —they are the type of people who deeply crave music just like any other element.
Food, water, shelter, clothing. Music.
Music is the fifth fundamental element for you and without it, you would literally cease to exist.
Why does that make them a super hero fan? Because without them, most of the music industry wouldn’t be here.
Startups like to talk about “early adopters” but I think the dedicated music fan is the one who created this unique cultural phenomenon to begin with.
While it’s easy to conjure up recent examples of social media stalkers who obsess over the various channels of their favorite artists, or the outright insanity that was Beatlemania, the fact is that we’ve had early adopters among music lovers for a long, long time.
These were the elite patrons of old who were haunted by the great composers and subsequently bankrolled their existences. Stretching even farther back, one can easily imagine the earliest of human musical experiences where the listener played as fundamental a role as the creator, for within the original forms of call and response built in to so many musical anthropologies lies the underlying craving that makes music a primary human element… for music is nothing less than proof of the elusive “Other” spoken of in countless spiritual traditions.
While I could wax on endlessly about this elusive phenomenon, I must force myself to circle back to the main point — that without Music Super Hero Fans, a massive chunk of the modern music industry wouldn’t exist. For all of the massive resources dumped into glitzy marketing campaigns, the only real thing that makes music viral is when it speaks to the soul and inspires a need to share, to further this intimate form of communion with another.
You’re the ones who felt an electric connection to our dearly departed David and made sure that others paid attention, in spite of their initial reaction to the “man who fell to earth” being just a little bit too weird for them.
You’re the ones that listened tirelessly to Boy, October and War on your Walkman long before the mainstream ever heard The Joshua Tree.
You’re the ones that made sure that countless bands never gave up during their hard early years, because you were tormented at the thought of missing even ONE of their local shows, dragging countless friends along in your wake.
You’re the ones that got so inspired by Amanda Palmer’s crowd-funding pitch that you posted about it over and over again until it finally went viral.
You’re the ones who, in hundreds (if not thousands) of moments, turned to someone and said “you need to hear this” and thereby by converted someone into the cult of [insert band name here].
Why the World Needs Music Super (Hero) Fans
Now that your identity as a super fan has been revealed, a Challenge is now laid down before you… because the battle for the hearts and minds of the music world is being waged and quite frankly, our side is losing.
It may not seem so at first glance, lest we too easily confuse Access with Availability.
While these two words are obvious synonyms, I use them with great distinction. For Access to music is everywhere… through countless online portals to incessant blaring through speakers in virtually every public environment. We can easily be over-saturated with musical noise and lose site of something more fundamental — Availability.
By Available, I mean the fact that an individual or a small group sat in a room for hours into days into weeks crafting a song until it reached their definition of perfection and forever embossed their vision into magnetic tape and/or ones and zeroes. The Availability of this very process is being threatened, in many ways by the oversupply of Access itself.
The reasons are complex and could easily spawn even lengthier essays. As simple as possible…
The human phenomenon that permits power and wealth to aggregate into fewer and fewer hands threatens to forever undermine the foundations of a business that has always relied on the strength and variety of its middle class, a class that is being eroded daily by the systems that provide listeners with never-ending Access, but threaten to remove the very sustenance that makes music Available in the first place.
Countless stories detail this phenomenon. How powerful corporations are dictating terms that benefit themselves, their partners and only the richest of rock stars. I won’t repeat their salient points, but rather just provide a few links here, here, here, here, here, and here.
If there is any lingering doubt about the ways power and wealth is exercising its influence over music, consider that while we have more Access than ever, we’re actually receiving it through fewer and fewer portals through which music production can be squeezed.
Fewer major record labels and radio stations thanks to massive corporate consolidation.
Fewer sustainable independent venues thanks to increasing production costs, often driven by exorbitant mass-marketed music events that siphon consumer dollars from more grassroots-oriented experiences.
Fewer local music shops where discovery was a much more meaningful experience than random tweets and likes.
And even more insidious still is how all many of the systems that have become the veins and arteries of the industry (from Spotify to the major performance-rights organizations collecting fees from countless sources) are well known for their inefficient and in-equal royalty distributions, in which the top 1% of performers and songwriters rake in wildly disproportionate revenues, essentially vacuuming up funds which should be going towards their middle class colleagues. (No surprise in some sense that the music world is simply mirroring a larger societal trend in the inequitable re-distribution of wealth.)
Where Your Super Powers Are Needed
As much as your role as early adopter has assured the successful careers of numerous artists, now your passion is needed to help secure the health and well-being of the middle class music industry itself.
I’ve compiled a short list of ways in which you can help counter-act the trends that threaten to undermine the fabric of the heart and soul of the music business. This list is by no means complete and I honestly hope for comments and feedback to help it expand. (And in the spirit of full disclosure, the final point is for a project I’m involved with.)
1. Support the Future of Music Coalition. Everything in Washington centers around lobbying and this organization is doing great work on behalf of musicians.
2. Lend aid to David Lowery in his class action lawsuit against Spotify. (Whether it’s encouraging other musicians to join in, spread the story or drop him a note of support.)
3. Avoid the major streamers, even if it’s inconvenient. (Fact is that revenues from YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, et al are so diluted that artists receive a pittance of their dues.)
4. Go back to vinyl. The sound is better, the experience is more human and a higher portion of royalties reaches the artists than any of the existing streaming companies.
5. Check out the Rethink Music project which is looking at radical new ways to organize the industry.
6. Get educated via some of the links above. Share the memes, spread the word.
7. Join our efforts to build a cooperatively-owned streaming service, with a one play, one pay model that is fair to artists. (Full disclosure — that’s the project I’m involved with.)
While I feel a bit immodest dropping in our project in the list, I do so only out of a deep yearning to reform the music business. (So much so that I’ve personally invested a massive amount of time building a startup that I don’t own, that will have no investors taking 40% of the company away, that will never have stock and is owned by everyone that uses it… fans, musicians, indie labels and the workers who build it.)
This list of ways to affect change within the music industry is nowhere near complete. After all, the issues are much larger than any single individual can comprehend. The question might even be raised, “why does it really matter so much?”
The answer lies in a basic truth… artists lead.
Just look back at the last 50 years or so. A great deal of the social and cultural shifts that took place in the West occurred because influential artists broke new ground, pushing boundaries through their art (and their very lives) to show us a different path.
Bowie’s gender-bending, the Beatles preaching love as the ultimate purpose of life, punk rock’s rebellion against mindless consumerism, early hip hop’s rage against injustice and institutionalized racism. The examples are numerous.
Perhaps, just perhaps, if the Music Super Hero Fans among us keep blasting out the message over and over again that radical change is needed, maybe the meme will spread and morph in ways no one can imagine.
It’s hard at times to see this as a real “movement” (and I shudder to use the obvious “R” word which has been co-opted a ridiculous number of times). But it’s there. The need for real change in the music industry is the same as the need for real change in society as a whole. Maybe if we can inspire musicians to bring real change in their world, it will reverberate back out to ours.
Let them hear from you.
And together we’ll dance in the streets when we’ve won.
