Perception Vs. Reality

578,000.

That's how many people watch CNN during primetime.

If you had that number of streams on Spotify, you'd keep your day job. If you only got that number of views on YouTube or TikTok, you might call yourself an influencer, but you wouldn't be that influential. But conventional wisdom is CNN is this monolith that must be abhorred by the left and denigrated by the right.

But it's nearly irrelevant.

Wolf Blitzer... Does anybody under 35 know his name? Even Erin Burnett?

Yet CNN is considered a political powerhouse.

But it is not.

And therefore Mark Thompson is coming in to fix it. The same Mark Thompson who fixed the "New York Times" by expanding the brand into games, cooking...the Wirecutter, the Athletic... And now no other paper can compete. (And let's be clear, for the NYT it isn't truly about money, but influence, which it achieves by reinvesting in the product, i.e. reporting, and not paying its owners exorbitant salaries, like in entertainment...and never forget CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, which is run by poor man David Zaslav...)

Now in truth the major labels have woken up two plus decades later. I wrote years ago that the majors needed to distribute all the records, just not the big ones. And this is what they're finally doing. Sony bought AWAL, Universal is buying Downtown... And other than the indies in England no one is anxious about the latter. I can't say that I'm thrilled either, but it is good business. Even though Universal had to pay $775 billion for something it easily could have done for itself much cheaper.

Then again, the majors get less of a slice for the distribution of independent music than they do for their own. As for "flying up' indies to the big label... The big label can't do much for most indies today. David Gray owns his own records and distributes them as such.

Not that anybody is forcing someone to use Downtown's CD Baby, but in truth these enterprises are always built to be sold, that's the American way of business.

Speaking of the American way of business, are you following the Chinese AI story? For over a year we've heard that NVIDIA is an indomitable megaforce, here for the ages, you could retire on its stock. Well said stock took a double digit hit today, because the Chinese seem to be able to do almost as well with much cheaper chips. In other words, all this fear of the Chinese having American technology... Turns out they can do it on their own.

And so can the acts.

So we've got CNN in the music business. The Weeknd, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar... The scuttlebutt is disproportionate to the market share.

That's what Spotify has been telling us for years, that the market share of the hits is decreasing.

I'm not saying the aforementioned acts are not stars, but I am saying that despite the perception there are great swaths of the public who do not know and do not care about these acts' music. But just like CNN, traditional media keeps talking about them.

The same traditional media the kids are not reading/partaking of.

Wasn't this the story of the last election? The power of Joe Rogan and other podcasters as opposed to traditional media outlets? Kamala Harris was so busy smiling and blanding out on big media that she lost to edgy Donald Trump where the undecided and more active young voters were.

This is a sea change that the Democratic party still has not awoken to. I keep reading that NEXT TIME they'll go on podcasts, play by the hosts' rules. But next time is four years from now, and the landscape will be different.

But one thing is for sure, the audience has moved on from the hit acts, the major acts playing to everybody, reliant on the hype machine. The audience wants something more personal, more edgy, a cornucopia of acts many of whom see recordings primarily as promotional vehicles.

The story isn't the stadium business of the biggies, but the overwhelming business of the acts in general below that level. We're constantly told of acts playing Madison Square Garden whom most people have never even heard of. And granted, that's just one market, but it's not like they do bupkes in the territories.

In other words, the business has changed but perception has not. The stars have never been smaller, have never had less of a reach, but if you paid attention to traditional media and the label hype machine you wouldn't know this.

This is not the MTV 80s, where everybody was tuned in and knew the same acts, where either you were on the channel or an also-ran, where those whose music was ill-fitted for the channel adjusted for it, as opposed to the reverse...can you say HAIRBANDS?

Today, unless you're signed to a major label, and the majority of acts are not, you see no reason to compromise, change for the game, because YOU ARE THE GAME!

And it's confounding if you're a student of the game. You keep being told acts you consider lame are superstars and the great swath of other acts is unfathomable. There is no Top Forty bar, no cutoff, there aren't even gatekeepers. You're on your own both as an act and as a consumer. One can argue it's the brain dead lemmings who are into the major acts, the true musos are into smaller acts, not because they're smaller, but because they appeal to their senses.

Isn't this the story of the internet, the niches, something different for everybody?

Why should it be different in music?

As big as Mr. Beast is, many people have never watched a single one of his videos, and he can still roll in dough. And even scarier, if you're in the music business, Mr. Beast is bigger than most of the acts, because he plays by his own rules, he created his own lane, he's beholden to his audience, not the system.

But we keep hearing people bitch about Spotify payments.

That's antiquated thinking. Today it's all about the software, not the systems. The systems are figured out in music, it's a matter of what you're going to put through the pipeline.

Like Steve Jobs used to say...he was making tools. Spotify, et al, are just tools... What are you going to do with them?

We keep hearing about playlisting, all the edges the majors have, when in truth the active music listener picks and chooses his music.

There's the disinformation once again, the sideshow.

The truth is if you're good, if you can draw an audience, you will grow.

Most acts are not that good, almost all of them are not that good.

But there are more good acts than are signed to major labels.

And if you're good, people will tell everyone they know about you, that's how rare good acts are.

Meanwhile, it's like the seventies... The smaller acts have more hard core fans than the big ones. Well, to be clear, their fans are more dedicated. These acts are not reliant on hits, some haven't had any hits at all, but they can sell out arenas, like Billy Strings.

The music business has already changed, but big time media has not gotten the memo.


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