Top trends 2010: Twitter bug, android chic, and the feds are coming
It’s been a tumultuous decade-plus for the music industry, with technology enabling more bands than ever to create and distribute their recordings, and more fans to listen to more music than at any time in history. With that as a backdrop, a number of trends emerged in 2010 that could have a major bearing on what comes next. Here are a few of the most prominent:
The Twitter bug: Increasingly, artists are usurping traditional media and going direct to their fans to break news, and you can’t get much more direct than Twitter. In 2010, artists ranging from Kanye West to the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne opened accounts and immediately attracted tens of thousands of followers. Rhymefest used the instant messaging network to announce his candidacy for 20th Ward alderman in Chicago. From behind his drum kit at “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” the Roots’ Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson punched out quips, critiques and behind-the-scenes details of daily tapings. And West turned tweeting into his own 140-character art form, whether providing blow-by-blow descriptions of the studio sessions for his latest album; musing about fashion, women and art; or venting his instant reaction to controversies such as his “Today Show” interview about former President George W. Bush.
Android chic: Futurism is in and pop entertainers are up to their bionic eyeballs in it. Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Janelle Monae, Robyn and Christina Aguilera all did variations on sci-fi themes and sexy robot characters on recent albums and tours. Black Eyed Peas hopped around like outer-space invaders on their latest arena jaunt. The trend goes hand-in-hand with the continued prominence of Auto-Tune on countless pop hits, which turns human voices into Hal, the robot from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For many of these entertainers, it’s just an opportunity to play dress-up. But for Janelle Monae, the concept of “The ArchAndroid” has been part of her creative thinking for several years. “The android to me represents ‘the other’ in our society,” she says. “I can connect to the other, because it has so many parallels to my own life – just by being a female, African-American artist in today’s music industry. I have gone to predominately white or black schools, and tried to represent individuality, whereas some of the people around me were not. Whether you’re called weird or different, all those things we do to make people uncomfortable with themselves, I’ve always tried to break out of those boundaries. The android represents the new other to me.”
Here come the feds: With France, Sweden and England seeing deeper involvement by their governments in trying to control file-sharing of copyrighted music and other material on the Internet, the U.S. government took its first tentative steps in that direction this year with the appointment of Victoria Espinel as the nation’s first-ever U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator. She introduced a strategy for dealing with Internet file-sharing (or “smash and grab” as it was described by Vice President Joe Biden), which has been linked to a 50 percent decline in music-industry revenue over the last decade. Espinel notes that 95 percent of file-sharers consume music "illegally" -- that is, they traffic in copyrighted music files that are readily available on the Internet. Does that mean tens of millions of Americans are technically "criminals" by federal standards? We may find out in the next few years.
The Internet backlash: Artists have been anxiously ambivalent about digital culture for years, embracing the new possibilities it offered them to distribute music and communicate with fans, but worried about how the new distribution models would impact their ability to actually get paid for recording music. Now, a number of artists, from Stevie Nicks to Elton John, are speaking out in more forceful terms. John Mellencamp called the Internet “the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb.” Prince declared the worldwide Web “completely over.” T Bone Burnett advised aspiring artists to stay off it completely. Though these artists may come off as just a bunch of aging curmudgeons out of touch with the way listeners want to access music, their gripes center on a number of key issues: the way the Internet’s fast-food culture has undercut artist and career development, and how digital technology has eroded audio fidelity.
The Live Nation-Ticketmaster mega-merger and its after-shocks: After approving a merger between the nation’s top concert promoter (Live Nation) and ticketing agency (Ticketmaster), the Department of Justice justified its decision by saying that creation of the behemoth might actually benefit artists and fans and kick-start the slumping music industry. Instead, the arena and amphitheater-level concert industry – a cornerstone of rock touring since the ‘60s – slumped during the summer, normally the most profitable time of year for the touring business. Could it be that music fans fed up with rising ticket prices and service fees have had enough? If so, the new Live Nation Entertainment conglomerate could be in serious trouble.
greg@gregkot.com
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