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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Re: Ashlee Simpson Meets Milli Vanilli |
| Date | Mon, 25 Oct 2004 14:58:51 -0400 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Jaimie Vernon" <bullseyecanada@hotmail.com>
>>The problem is that most teenagers latch on to what they're force
>>fed
>>via commercial radio, TV, commercials, the record industry. The
>>industry
>>has a proven record of success with marketing teen singers to
>>teenage
>>audiences.
>>If a big record company pumped millions of dollars into promoting
>>the
>>Shazam, they
>>may or may not make a pay-off...regardless of the music or talent
>>the Shazam may
>>posses. Any label with half a brain wouldn't take that risk...and I
>>don't
>>blame them.
>
> Yeah, I belive this same conversation came up a few years ago about
> Fountains Of Wayne. Funny what can happen when a label DOES get
> behind things.
Well, in that case, what happens is that a band that's on its third
fine album gets tagged a novelty one-hit wonder: "Mexican Wine" and
"Bright Future In Sales" didn't make one-tenth the impact of "Stacy's
Mom," despite being just-as-good, if not better, songs. (Frankly,
"Bright Future" is probably my favorite FoW song of all time.) And
unfortunately, if those stories that started circulating last summer
are true, and Chris is displeased about the band's newfound notoriety
being due to a song he considers a lightweight joke (a deeply odd
statement coming from the man who wrote "Leave the Biker"), then that
might have a serious adverse effect on the band's future development.
All in all, I'm afraid that the Fountains of Wayne story might end up
being a cautionary tale of the "be careful what you wish for" variety.
The Hives, mentioned in Jeff's initial post, may already be feeling
the same effect: unfortunately, my wife seems to have swiped the last
couple issues of Entertianment Weekly to read on the subway, but sales
figures for TYRANNOSAURUS HIVES were quoted a couple weeks back. It
was some number like 24,000 or 36,000 copies, and the implication was
that it was one of the biggest sales disappointments of the summer. I
don't claim to speak for anyone else who has ever released a record,
but I could only dream of a "disappointment" like that. If the Hives
were still on Sympathy for the Record Industry, they and their label
would be over the moon with sales figures like that, but in the
post-consolidation age, that's enough to get their nattily-attired
asses bounced off of Interscope by the end of this year, if the
decision hasn't been made already.
The sad truth is, no matter what kind of public splash individual
songs and individual albums might make every so often -- and let's not
forget, the simple fact that bands like the Hives and Fountains of
Wayne *have* been getting the occasional big splash lately is most
encouraging -- the style of music beloved by Auditeers far and wide is
now and for the foreseeable future will remain a niche market, one no
bigger than the audience for European death metal. The world of
Ashlee and Jessica and their like is as alien to these bands as the
world of SHREK 2 is to those little Asian movies I go to at the
Brattle and the Harvard Film Archive: it's entirely possible to like
both, yes, but the likelihood that any more than a few thousand
moviegoers in the US will be interested in a movie about a bicycle
messenger in Beijing trying to relocate his missing wheels is quite
small. But what's better: complaining endlessly about the horrible
injustice in the world that allows deriviative crap like A SHARK'S
TALE to be the biggest movie in the country when dozens of other,
better, movies can't even get distribution off the festival circuit,
or leaping into the festival circuit and enjoying what's there on its
own smaller-scale terms?
S
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