Bands Have An Official Life Span Of Nine Months
"As of '09, bands have an official life span of about nine months dating from the launch of their MySpace pages, thanks to the comically accelerated, DSL-enhanced hype cycle. Faster than you can tweet "Serena Maneesh," entire genres of music are "discovered" by attention-starved writers; bloggers engage in hilarious slap-fights about who was there first; magazines feel pressured into writing clueless, hackazoid, late-pass trend pieces; bands get elevated to a critical mass of attention they can't possibly handle; and the phenomenon is promptly abandoned once we find a newer, shinier toy to play with."
– Christopher R. Weingarten, Village Voice
How are you going to last longer?
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AMAZING PIECE OF INFO!
Yup, that’s probably just about the right timeframe. Look out Susan Boyle …. 2010 won’t be 2009.
I think the lesson here is: if you blow up because of some sort of novelty/cleverness, capitalize on your fifteen minutes before you’re totally forgotten. Today’s press raves and a six-figure youtube playcount are not any guarantee that you’ll be able to sell a dozen copies of next year’s album…
^well said Neil!
wow, someone is quite negative and cynical. (Not you, Bruce, I mean Chris from the VV.) To me the bands and people who ignore the cynicism and negativity and just focus on being the best at their own thing are the ones who build lasting careers.
The important thing is not “how are you going to last longer…” it’s “what are you going to do differently?”
Isn’t this sort of hyper-accelerated cycle the way the British scene used to work? In the days of the weekly “inkies” — Melody Maker and NME — there was always a great push to find the New Thing, and to rubbish the previous New Thing. The US was spared that, to some degree, because Rolling Stone was biweekly (and prone to veneration), and any other music mags were monthlies.
…Press raves and a quarter million Youtube plays equal about 25 people paid in most major cities these days…
My hunch is that this is another example of the old industry desperately trying to grab for attention but only succeeding in dissapearing up it’s own arse.
Honestly this simply isn’t true. I see HUNDREDS of artists who are making their money well beyond this time frame. Many even accelerate. I don’t know where the VV got their data, but I can see just from TuneCore’s millions of songs, enormous swaths of them don’t follow this end-of-life model.
We need the world to recognize that the data they’re working with may be behind the new realities of selling music online.
–Peter
peter@tunecore.com
Mr. Weingarten understands that by making sensational statements, lots of people will debate what he’s saying, he’ll get his name out there, it will generate publicity. He doesn’t really have to validate this statement in any substantive manner, people will repeat it and it will take on a life of it’s own. He understand this very well.
When it comes to developing and maintaining a career in music? He obviously doesn’t know much about that.
If your songs are good, if you can play live, if you understand and cultivate your audience, and most importantly, IF YOU STICK WITH IT, then his statement doesn’t apply.