Modern payola. Fascinating but not entirely unpredictable. I’m excited by the focus on hyper-local, authenticity is the scarce resource. Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. No amount of algorithmic magic can create that experience.

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girvo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”.

Agreed 100%, which is why my local city's (Brisbane) post-rock scene of the 2000s-2010s was so important to me

But it's also why despite being phenomenal musicians, they all worked normal jobs (even those related bands who were indie-rock enough to be played on Triple J even though they weren't) and they've all stopped playing because touring loses money.

I will always have the music and the years of amazing experiences and the photos of the shows I took, but hyper-local means niche and niche means unsustainable, I think.

	▲	cobbzilla 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah art is art, it’s never paid well generally. You do it because you love it, and your audience loves it. And that is awesome. And then commerce is commerce, and you make money and more money means you did something good. And then you put the two together and it’s the same shit we’ve seen for thousands of years. tbh no surprises! This is all as expected. There’s still phenomenal live music in every city I’ve ever visited, to the present day. Just go out and find it, it’s not hard! Support live local music

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jfengel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have found that the great artists you've heard of tend to also be great marketers, or at the very least found great marketers.

I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has ever heard of them. Even local fame requires a fair bit of hustle. Talent alone doesn't get you there.

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cobbzilla 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Could this be confirmation bias?

Isn’t this the point of the unique & real discovery process that actual connoisseurs of an art form participate in? We find you (great artist), because you are brilliant at your art but terrible at marketing.

Then you might become popular because 1) we (the finders, the influencers) talk about you (I mean personally here, friend to friend, in person, not social media) and 2) if your art has broad appeal, it just needed the marketing. word of mouth marketing is the most authentic kind so of course it’s being faked!

There are many artists that I love that “no one has ever heard of” and that’s fine! At some point, some of them will make something with broad appeal and it’ll catch on.

There’s money at stake so of course people are trying to juice the process, but that’s been going on for a very long time, hence my original reference to payola (pay to play on radio) which started in the 1930s!

None of this payola bullshit takes anything away from the true talent producing amazing art today! It just means, as it always has, that if you want the good stuff you have to do your own research. Most are too lazy and that’s fine! They have other interests. But the art form itself does not suffer because there exist grifters who distort mass perception. Connoisseurs are less interested in mass perception.

	▲	cobbzilla 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As a counterpoint to my own argument above — the Ramones made more money selling T-shirts; every artist must market somehow; so yeah it’s definitely more complicated, I am presenting an oversimplified view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673

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mbb70 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Reminds me of "a terrible project with a great slide deck might end up decent. A great project with a terrible slide deck won't even exist."

In the real world there is no If You Build It They Will Come, you've got to get the word out

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doctorpangloss 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not at all. Saying something like that is the loudest signal for how out of touch you are with how audiences are made.

From the article:

> "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH".

Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.

	▲	cobbzilla 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Likes = truth sounds like pop culture = art which is obviously not true