Some friends came through town on tour, and sitting around in the dressing room backstage at House of Blues during the opening act, we started talking about the most epic-est, rock-’n'-rollingest backstages we wished we could have gotten to been a part of. Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, The Rolling Stones. You know, the usual acts that had come to represent the platonic ideal of the Rock Star. This conversation was instigated by an admission from the main act himself about how boring it was backstage. Thinking back on the venues and the bands I’ve worked with, and even the vaudeville circus I used to manage, it occurred to me that (aside from a few exceptions working with music festivals — notably, on the production rather than the performance side — which only served to prove the rule) almost all the backstages I’ve ever been in were basically boring. Sure, there was always the inevitable adrenaline of last-minute chaos and ego trips and personality clashes and whatnot, but the debauched excess of the truly rock ‘n’ roll antics of yore? Even the folks on the tour, who would, that night, go on to rock the faces off twelve hundred screaming fans, noticed that all the examples of the epitomized backstages we were listing off had had their heyday before we were even old enough to get into any of their shows. This was not what MTV (back when MTV, actually stood for Music Television) or even Vice Magazine had promised us backstage would be like when we grew up. It looked increasingly less like the photo above.

It looked a lot more like this:

Mike Gallagher of the band Isis, backstage at the Trocadero  – Philadelphia, 2007 / Image: Markphoto.net

And that’s when it dawned on me: the Internet had killed the rock star.

Well, first off, is there anything the Internet hasn’t already killed yet? Back in May, The Atlantic featured a piece about the Internet’s ongoing assassination of the music industry — a crime story a decade old now, but, like the JonBenét Ramsey of disruptive technology, undyingly over-covered. Other casualties in the Internet’s Edward Gorey-like murder spree have included music journalism, killed by mp3 blogs, pirate radio, killed by general redundancy, and even the mystique of the radio star (which, hadn’t video already confessed to killing like 30 years prior?) killed by too much exposure. At this point, to say the Internet’s done away with anything else when it comes to music is, admittedly, a cliché, but, nevertheless, I do think there’s one more, less-publicized casualty.

In an interview with NME earlier this year, Kasabian singer Tom Meighan was on to part of it:

It’s not like what it used to be like in rock ‘n’ roll. In the ’60s and ’70s you had the likes of David Bowie and Marc Bolan, and then in the ’80s you even had shit acts that were rock stars.

I think – especially in the last three or four years – the internet’s taken a stranglehold and killed off the myth of the rock star now. You know when you used to buy the records and there was the myth behind them? There’s too much on blogs now and I think it’s killed it off. Nobody’s surprised by an interview anymore or anything. It’s quite tragic.

There are so many rock stars writing these self pitying blogs and it’s not in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s like ‘Wow, what rubbish’.

That’s the victim no one talks about when they’re focusing instead on how much money the RIAA’s member organizations are losing due to the Internet: the “spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.” Cuz you know what those acts in the 60′s and 70′s and 80′s and, to a large extent, the 90′s didn’t have backstage? Email. Or Facebook or Twitter. There were no urgent texts that needed immediate replies, no forums of endless fan comments to be compulsively monitored, no hundreds of images from the previous night’s show to be sorted through and uploaded, no online profiles for potentially competing or collaborating artists to be stalked, no blog posts that needed to be written, or  livestreams set up. Hell, there weren’t even any cell phones with which to call anyone during those hours and hours on the tour bus. Not to mention any of the normal things that even non-rock stars do on their computers, like instant message with their friends or watch the entire last season of Mad Men. Millennials — the generation whose older members are now of rock star age — spend almost 10 hours a day online. Add to that the three more hours per day that Americans now spend using the web on their mobile phones, and then factor in the completely-absurd-even-to-this-millennial FOUR THOUSAND texts that the average (AVERAGE!!) teenager sends per month — that’s six texts every waking hour — and all of that compounds into a LOT of time that the typical touring act in 2010 is spending doing shit that simply wasn’t there to have been done back in the day. Before we all developed these new digital compulsions there used to be a lot more time for, and a lot fewer pressing distractions from, the analog ones, namely the sex + drugs that = the “spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Of course, being a rock star back in the 20th century, you could also get away with a lot more than you can now. Your drug-addled, sex-addicted, minor-fucking ways were not gonna end up on Twitter three seconds after some groupie snapped a photo on her cell phone, let alone on TMZ. To a large extent, truly rock star behavior used to be a lot easier to contain. Now, there’s really no buffer. And that increasingly permeable line cuts in both directions. Much as self-pitying blog posts are a definite cramp in the rock ‘n’ roll style, so is not being able to avoid your hate mail. In the past, your handlers would have simply made sure you never saw it. Now, not only does it take some herculean willpower to avoid the known hubs of haterade — and rock stars aren’t famous for their self-restraint — but even for the most disciplined musicians, messages letting you know you suck are like online porn: one in three of us has ended up with it in our face even when we weren’t looking for it. It’s why Trent Reznor quit Twitter last year…. Twice. The first time around, Reznor posted the following on the Nine Inch Nails forum by way of explanation:

When Twitter made it’s way to my radar…. I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between artist and fan is changing if you haven’t noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music and even communicate since the internet arrived.

….But some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on nin.com, there’s 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 – 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again. Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.

Rock ‘n’ roll has never been scared of confrontation, but in the past it’s always been in-person, and visceral. Being able to settle things with a fistfight or a blunt and / or glass object is incredibly more rock ‘n’ roll-y than this new equation:

Image: John Gabriel

Of course, it’s undeniable there are significant advantages that all this new technology has afforded artists as well. From those just starting out to the ones with Stadium Status, the Internet has put a lot of new tools and resources directly into artists’ hands, allowing them unprecedented control over their own careers and their relationship with their fans. But it also means that handling much of what a label was once responsible for — and even more that they still haven’t even figured out how to do — is now part of the job requirement of being a successful musician. You have to be an expert in marketing, branding, community strategy, and user engagement; knowing how to write code, the meaning of the term “information architecture,” and a good web designer also help. “Engaging your fans” the old fashioned way meant spraying them with champagne in the green room. Now, replying to messages on Facebook is your second job. A couple of decades ago you wouldn’t have had to be giving a shit about anything called a website; now you have to anticipate you’ll be redoing yours every few years just to keep up with the rapid pace of change on the web. A friend of mine who’s in a band that just finished a tour of the U.S. followed by Australia, told me in the wake of the band’s website redesign to incorporate the StageBloc platform, a process that spanned several months, “At the time, I didn’t think that working at an internet startup was going to be helpful to my music career.” Which also speaks to the kind of personality the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll is selecting for these days.

Think about the best concert you’ve seen in the past five years. You know what the band did after the show? They checked a bunch of email, sent a bunch of texts, possibly also a bunch of Tweets, and generally stared at screens for a while. Cracked.com’s list of the 7 Most Impossible Rock Stars to Deal With, which features the likes of DMX, Keith Moon, Iggy Pop, Nikki Sixx, Ozzy Osbourne, and Eric Clapton — all people who were wreaking havoc by the time they were my age — includes absolutely no one who is my age now. (And aren’t we, Millennials, supposed to be the over-entitled spoiled-brat “Generation Me”?) While the barrier to entry into rockstarhood may have never been as porous (getting discovered on YouTube, anyone?), the competition has arguably never been more intense. Just being a talented performer and charismatic entertainer is not enough anymore. The same tools that are giving artists more control are also saddling them with more responsibility. The business savvy and marketing aptitude that once made Madonna an anomalous success are now prerequisite just to stay in the game. You simply couldn’t keep up if you are the kind of mess that the emblematic rock stars who defined the term got to be. Or, perhaps, as Cracked suggests, all the drug addiction and general nihilism were so rampant among rock stars in the olden days “possibly because no one had invented the Internet yet, [and] they got bored.”

Of course, there’s still bands like Justice, whose trouble-making, euro-hipster decadence is entertaining enough for an hour-long tour documentary. But as you’ll realize if you watch the “A Cross The Universe” DVD, chronicling the band’s 2008 U.S. tour, the duo hardly spend time at their computers, aside from when they’re performing. And there’s no mystery why. The band doesn’t have a website, or Twitter. Their Facebook is a UGC Community Page created by fans. They basically just have a Myspace, which is maintained by their French label, Ed Banger Records. In a sense, Justice isn’t so much an exception as an appropriately ironic throwback. The documentary, hearkening back to when rock stars were legitimately so, effectively paints the laptop rocker duo in those nostalgically familiar colors.

When asked during the promo tour for his latest book, Imperial Bedrooms, whether contemporary book launches are more or less fun than when he started in the late 80′s, Bret Easton Ellis — arguably the closest equivalent that the literary world has to a rock star, and a writer who has expertly articulated the unbridled excess that is the trope’s defining characteristic (“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never ‘Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal’ … It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore—publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour.”) — laughed, “Oh, it’s less fun. It’s much less fun. Because we’re in the ‘post-Empire’ world now. Book publishing,” he added, “flourished in the ‘Empire,’” a term which Ellis uses to refer to the period from 1945 until 2005 — the era that defined the 20th century, and a time when, not coincidentally, the rock star flourished, too.

There’s a reason that Aldous Snow — the rock ‘n’ roll MacGuffin played by Russell Brand in this summer’s Get Him To The Greek, the latest installment “From the Director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the Producer of Knocked Up and Superbad” — is referred to in the movie as “one of the last remaining rock stars.” When it comes to this 20th century Dionysian archetype, there really aren’t that many left. The Internet is making sure of it.

I’m super excited to share the launch of the first in Espresso‘s series of thought leadership pieces I’m helping research and co-write: “Connect or Die: How to survive in a Music 2.0 world.”

Having worked in the music industry for the better part of my career, with concert promoters, music festivals, and musicians, this is a topic very near to my heart — you may even recognize a few passages in the deck from my recent All Your Music Are Belong To Us post – but the trends and ideas presented below are as relevant to the biggest consumer brands, or the indiest creative capital producers as they are to music acts. So without further ado, here’s how you Connect or Die:

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PS. There’s more of these to come! Stay tuned!

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“They say the music business is in trouble. No! The business of selling CDs is in trouble; this is a religion.”
- Michael Rapino, CEO, Live Nation

I was in the weekly Southern California marketing meeting at House of Blues the morning it was announced that Tower Records was going out of business. It was a Friday in 2006, and the marketing departments from LA, Anaheim, and San Diego were all on the conference line. The moment I heard the news I wanted to get up and cheer, but as I looked around I saw only fallen faces. The other cities on the call were silent. A mourning pall had fallen over the rest of the room, but all I felt was a complete excitement. I was the youngest person there.

When I was in high school my friends started burning CDs with mp3s. In June of 1999, same time as I was walking up in my cap and gown to accept my high school diploma, a kid at Northeastern University unleashed Napster into the world. It was a few months later, when I got to college at Boston University, just a few miles up the road from Northeastern, when I first heard about this program everyone was using to find and share music. College has always been the setting for waves of new discoveries, from drugs, to new perspectives. At the fin de siècle, what most of us encountered for the first time in the dorms was high-speed internet, the gateway drug to more hardcore file downloading. Napster spread like wildfire across Boston campuses, and then beyond. At first it never occurred to us that there could be anything wrong about using it. The arrival and adoption of Shawn Fanning’s creation was so inextricably linked with my and my cohort’s transition from high school to college, it seemed like just another new thing that being 18 gave you access to, like nightclubs, or cigarettes. It felt like such a natural technological progression that when Napster was ultimately forced to shut down in 2001 it was hard not to see it as a devolution. That a fellow student’s invention had been deliberately destroyed was a lot easier to understand than the reasoning of the faraway, suddenly ominous music industry. It had the feeling of repression, an attack on innovation itself, let alone on the access it offered, and it left a bad aftertaste.

By the time I was out of college and working in the concert industry it had long become clear that shutting down the iceberg had not saved the Titanic. Things had vastly deteriorated. In the depths of the music industry’s despair, the October 2006 issue of Wired Magazine dared boldly proclaim that “The Rebirth of Music” was nigh:

Record labels have always been the center of gravity in the industry – the locus of power, ideas, and money. Labels discovered the talent, pushed the songs, and got the product on the air and into stores. The goal: move records, and later, CDs. “The labels were never in the business of selling music,” says David Kusek, vice president of Boston’s Berklee College of Music and coauthor of The Future of Music. “They were in the business of selling plastic discs.”

The articulation of this concept of music that could exist on its own, liberated from CDs, or any other physical medium, expressed how I, and my generation, had already understood music to be. When Tower Records announced it was going out of business that Friday morning, the first thing I could think was:

The Future is here!

It was the same month as the “Rebirth of Music” issue came out.

Of course, my desire to celebrate upon discovering music was, indeed, about to be reborn out of the ashes of CD stores was completely out of sync. For everyone else in the room — even though we, ourselves, were in the business of selling something that didn’t come on a plastic disc — it was like the day the music died.

But wait, let’s back up a few months. In the Summer of 2006 Live Nation bought House of Blues. After separating from parent company Clear Channel the year before, the concerts division was rebranded Live Nation, and went on a shopping spree like it was Google. From fan club operator Musictoday, to music merchandising company Trunk LTD, to, seriously, countless concert promotion companies and music festivals around the world, if you were sitting still for too long, Live Nation would buy you. Towards the end of the year, on the eve of the House of Blues merger approval, we gathered for a series of company-wide conference calls with Michael Rapino, the CEO steering the company in this new direction, and it was on these calls that I heard, for the first time, someone in our business who not only saw the same future that I (and Wired) expected, he understood exactly what it meant.

In October 2007, a year after Wired’s augury, and after 25 years at Warner Brothers Records, which had release all of her albums up till then, Madonna left the label to sign a $120 million “360 degree” deal with Live Nation. In addition to operating the world’s highest-earning female singer’s tours, which it had already been doing, Live Nation would now also be handling her albums, merchandising, film and TV projects, DVD releases, music-licensing agreements and more, and getting a cut of all of it, hence “360.” This move was so revolutionary that most people didn’t even get it. According to a Fortune article, in November 2007, Live Nation’s stock sagged 30% after news of the Madonna deal. The myopic reaction — based on an understanding of the music industry as defined solely by the already broken record label model in which dumping dollars into artists was nothing but a sure loss — prompted an emergency presentation to analysts and investors, with Rapino having to actually explain how this was an entirely different approach, and why it made sense. “Of course [analysts] have to go out and tell the world we overpaid,” Rapino said in the article, “And we did overpay, if you’re just buying the record. But when you’re buying all those rights, it’s a beautiful deal.” If Madonna does four tours and three albums with revenues comparable to her recent output, it was projected the contract would pay for itself in 10 years with profits from merchandise, sponsorships, DVDs, and on and on.

In a statement issued at the time of the deal, Madonna said: “The paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and a business woman, I have to move with that shift. For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited. I’ve never wanted to think in a limited way and with this new partnership, the possibilities are endless. Who knows how my albums will be distributed in the future?”

But you know what? Who cares how? How had stopped mattering anymore. Under this model, every downloaded song would become not an act of theft, but a process of promotion for all the other things that couldn’t be copied online. As Madonna’s manager, Guy Oseary said in the Wall Street Journal, “In the past, people would tour to promote their albums; today they put out albums to promote their tours. The pendulum has swung, and Live Nation is at the forefront of touring.”

Unlike so much else in the music industry, this arrangement actually works in both the suits’ and the artists’ favor. To a large extent, the interests of artists and their concert promoters are already far more closely aligned than with their labels, and to drive this point home, as part of the deal, Madonna got equity in Live Nation to the tune of 1.7 million shares. A mutual investment between artist and industry is a complete turnaround from the label relationship, which has generally consisted of record companies tossing artists onto the sacrificial fire, hoping to gain favor with the gods. By now, three years later, U2, Jay-Z,  Shakira, and Nickelback have also eschewed the traditional record label route for similar kinds of deals with Live Nation, and no doubt more are to come.

But record labels aren’t the only middlemen Live Nation has sought to remove from the equation. On those company-wide calls in 2006, Rapino talked about the importance of owning the relationship with music fans directly, which included the ticket purchase process itself.  The contracts with Ticketmaster for both Live Nation and House of Blues were to be up within a couple of years at the time of the merge, and they would not be renewed. The idea was for concertgoers to start buying tickets directly from livenation.com, but from the very beginning there was a much greater goal as well. In 2007, Live Nation began experimenting with a program called OPEL — Open Platform Event Listings. Promoters for venues not operated by Live Nation, i.e. its competitors, were invited to have their events listed on livenation.com as well. The program never got too far off the ground (no doubt, for reasons that will become obvious below), but by the time the contract with Ticketmaster finally expired last year, it was already clear that Live Nation’s moves were about far more than even just owning its own vertical ecosystem.

The schism between Ticketmaster’s largest account by far, and Live Nation’s relationship with a company that already had the massive ticketing infrastructure it needed, made it a no-brainer that within just two months of this trial separation Live Nation would seek to buy Ticketmaster outright. Last week, the Department of Justice finally approved, with some concessions, the first big merger of the Obama administration.

Todd Martens writes on the LA Times Music Blog:

In the wake of the Department of Justice giving the green light to a merger between promoter/venue owner Live Nation and ticketing agency/management firm Ticketmaster Entertainment, Mitchell Frank, [owner of  Spaceland Productions, which promotes events at three independent LA venues] suddenly finds himself in the unenviable position of making money for the competitor.

Spaceland Productions has 15 months, Frank said, remaining on an exclusive contract with TicketWeb, the once-indie ticket seller now owned by Ticketmaster. “To make money for that behemoth, it turns my stomach,” Frank said. “I’m an indie promoter, and that’s what I do. So it’s kind of tough to give money to the mother ship.”

Frank was interviewed by the Justice Department and expressed concerns that he said appear to have gone unheard, largely that an approved partnership would have him working — and potentially providing information for — his competitor.

The newly formed Live Nation Entertainment… has the ability to book concerts, sell tickets and merchandise, and, with management company Front Line, direct access to such name acts as the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett, Neil Diamond, Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac, Christina Aguilera and more.

“That’s where the concern is,” said Jordan Kurland, whose Zeitgeist Management represents Death Cab for Cutie, She & Him, Grizzly Bear and more. “When you look at the intersection of Ticketmaster, Live Nation and Front Line? Information is power, and they will have a lot of it.”

Addressing the company’s vertical integration powers would have been a near impossibility, said one Washington, D.C.-based antitrust expert familiar with the proceedings. Many, including Mickelson in the Tribune, have cited the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court antitrust decision against Paramount Pictures, which essentially stated that Hollywood studios could not also own the theaters that had exclusive rights to show their films.

“The courts have been very favorable to vertical integration for 40 years,” said the antitrust expert, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. “I like going back to Paramount vs. U.S. also, but that’s a very old case, and there have not been any vertical mergers blocked in about 40 years.”

In 2008, Ticketmaster had a market share of more than 83% for major venues, according to concert-industry tracking publication Pollstar. Its nearest competitor’s share was just under 4%. The Department of Justice said that breaking up prior contracts with Ticketmaster and TicketWeb would have done little to preserve competition in the ticketing space, adding that “a lot of the [venues] would not have wanted that.” The department estimates that 20% of Ticketmaster’s exclusive arrangements will expire each year and intends for venues and promoters to have more options when they do. In the meantime, however, Ticketmaster already retains information such as emails used to make purchases. Many of those emails came in through tickets bought to Live Nation events, but, then again, others did not. Now that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are one, who do all those ticket-buyer emails belong to? Live Nation Entertainment now has access to an enormous share of not only the concert industry, but of the actual concert-going population. Perhaps not 83%, when all is said and done, but still, through its competitors, it’s inevitably larger than what it actually even owns itself.

In the olden days, when labels dominated the system, they still had to share power with one another. The upheaval in the music business over the past decade, however, as the recording industry more or less tried to stick their fingers in their ears and go lalalalaalalalala hoping to ignore it into going away — oh, wait, they DID try experimenting with suing their own fans to see if that might be a viable way to make money — left the industry vulnerable to someone, anyone, with a clear understanding of changing consumer behavior, and the unclouded vision to see where the game was going. Not that it’s exactly the same, but after the Soviet system collapsed in the 1990′s, Russian organized crime exploded because basic government functions — such as social security, the pension system, some electrical grids, dispute settlement and the distribution and protection of property — either disappeared or were hopelessly inefficient. Organized crime had the impunity to take advantage of the general chaos, but just as importantly, if not more so, in the void left behind by the state, it had the actual organization.

Though, thankfully, this isn’t post-collapse Russia. The Justice Department said in legal filings that the merger, as initially proposed, would eliminate competition in the market for ticket sales, creating less pressure on the fees charged and potentially less innovation. No existing player, they said, would have the resources to compete. So in order for the $889-million deal to proceed, the two companies had to agree to make room for a couple of rivals. Under the agreement,  Ticketmaster will give Anschutz Entertainment Group access to its technology so that AEG — which owns and manages nearly 100 venues including Staples Center — can create its own ticketing service. Additionally, Ticketmaster agreed to divest a subsidiary that provides software for venue operators to sell their own tickets. But for Live Nation, ticket sales are just the tip of the iceberg. Even as tour revenues are rising, the margins in the concert industry are, as they have always been, anemic. According to Fortune, Live Nation’s cash-flow margins were 4.3% in 2007. Which is why what Live Nation is really after isn’t just being the iTunes of tickets but something that the other players in the music industry never understood they should have been after all along — or at least not until it was too late.

If you were to remove selling plastic discs from the entire music equation, the most profitable thing on the table becomes not just concerts, but the larger relationship between artists and fans. It’s why labels are pushing their own “360 degree” deals now (not that they really had any other choice, seeing as their primary revenue stream dried up like a fossil fuel) but inevitably, since labels don’t own or operate their own venues, it’s a smaller circumference. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about the notable example of Lady Gaga, whose merchandise, touring, and Polaroid, Estée Lauder, and MAC contracts revenue is basically the tent-pole holding up all of Interscope. It’s the relationship artists have with their fans that drives the sales for everything else their brand is connected with, and owning that relationship is what the rebirth of music…. of the music business is really about. Right now, with the ability to book its own concerts, sell its own tickets and merchandise, and manage its exclusive artists all under one roof, Live Nation Entertainment has an entirely unprecedented model for owning the complete fan relationship from tickets to trinkets. A decade after Napster, the relationship with music fans IS the music business, and Live Nation is after owning that business on a massive scale. After the B.C. / AD digital changeover, control of the music business has shifted from the recording to the performing side of the industry, and Live Nation isn’t so much a monopoly in the music industry as it actually IS the music industry. If not yet fully in application, then in its model.

Jenka Gurfinkel Interview on the Podcast Asylum

If, sometime circa 2004, you were out and about at certain underground parties in the Los Angeles Circus scene, and saw someone wearing a particularly striking pair of pants (male or female), created from asymmetrical strips of leather sewn in a twisted, impeccably tailored way, like the trappings of some Mad Max forest nymph biker gang escapee, and were compelled by this post-apocalyptic hipness to inquire of the wearer as to where these pants had come from, the answer you would inevitably receive is that they were made by someone named Cassidy. This would happen so often, in fact, that by the time I finally met Cassidy, out one night at a club on the shady side of La Brea, I actually recognized him by his trousers.

At the time, Cassidy was part of the Ernte design team, but soon thereafter co-founded SkinGraft Designs with partner Jonny Cota, and later Katie Kay. Even as the SkinGraft operation was growing with each year, headlining LA fashion week, opening the doors to a flagship store in Downtown LA this spring (no small feat for an indie fashion label in a recession!), and getting their sartorial grafts onto an ever-expanding assortment of celebrity skins, what Cassidy kept yearning to do was sing.

I discovered very quickly after we met that in addition to his fashion career, Cassidy is also a songwriter and performer. At one point, there were even a couple of production meetings held at my house for a show he was thinking of putting together around his music, and involving various performance-oriented friends. That show never came to pass, but after years of false starts, Cassidy finally revived his music focus from back-burner exile and 10 days ago self-released his debut album, Little Boys and Dinosaurs. What happened next is straight out of the viral phenomenon playbook.

On Sunday afternoon, August 15th, Adam Lambert, longtime SkinGraft friend (he’s currently wearing a custom SkinGraft jacket on the American Idol tour, and sported numerous other SG pieces during the show’s run) tweeted to his followers: “My friend Cassidy just shot this great video… http://bit.ly/18FvaM.” Within days, the video shot up to over 36,000 views, and Little Boys and Dinosaurs, sans label, marketing push, or pr strategy, rose to #3 on the iTunes electronic chart, between LMFAO’s “Party Rock” and Imogen Heap’s “Ellipse.”  It didn’t hurt that the video was glam-rock pretty and sexually controversial, featuring some simulated sexual behavior, and a pair of undies slung Sports Illustrated-low. Within hours of Lambert’s tweet, a bonafide minor scandal had erupted over his linking the video, which was, by some contingent, considered inappropriate for his underage following. If you’re thinking this sort of outrage over music video explicitness seems strangely anachronistic in the post-Lil’ Kim / Britney Spears / Lady Gaga era, it should probably be mentioned that the dirty dancing in question here is exclusively male. In any case, the controversy only helped to generate further attention for the music, and by Thursday, Lyndsey Parker, was writing for Yahoo! Music’s The New Now blog:

At this point, Adam Lambert is pretty much like Oprah, in terms of his all-encompassing influence over his devoted fanbase. Just like any Oprah Book Club selection is certain to become a New York Times best-seller, in the pop music world there is perhaps no more ringing endorsement these days than a black-fingernailed thumbs up from the tastemaking Glamerican Idol.

So far the public response to Cassidy’s music, at least among diehard and very vocal Adam Lambert fans, has been hugely enthusiastic. Will record labels take notice? That remains to be seen, but if so, then Cassidy Haley may be the first artist to get signed out of American Idol without ever having appeared on the show.

If you’re a social media strategist, and your friend just so happens to become an overnight internet phenomenon, you’ve basically got no choice but to find the whole thing incredibly fascinating. On Tuesday, as Little Boys and Dinosaurs was climbing the chart, I got a call from Cassidy, and the question on his mind was, “What do I do now? What next?”

Which is a great question for any marketer in the digital age to think about as well.  All too often I think marketers have blinders on, criminally overusing the word “viral” (still!) in the frenzy for buzz and fans and word of mouth and all that. But what if you could get all of it overnight? What if all the promotional initiatives and exposure efforts paid off just like they were supposed to? Is that the extent of your strategy? Or would you be prepared for What Next?

My advice to Cassidy was to take his questions straight to his new-found fans; involve them directly in helping to shape and define the answers together, and keep the momentum going. And he did. The outpouring of ideas that came back to him from this nascent, yet incredibly dedicated, army included everything from ad hoc twitterstorms that got the attention of various media folks, to online community resources created by fans to connect to one another, and to Cassidy’s music. The troops even came up with a seriously cute name for themselves, Comets, (as in Haley’s).

Overnight, Cassidy was handed the sort of opportunity that many marketers and brands are tirelessly chasing after, and yet the most powerful move he made was the one AFTER that happened. He opened up to his fans and offered them the opportunity to be  directly involved with him in the creation of what comes next.

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1. Mos Def Sells New Album on T-shirt

About a year and a half ago I wrote a post called Sell Music On ANYTHING! where I suggested that since digital technology had recently liberated music from its previously contrived confinement on things like tape and plastic and vinyl, the really exciting thing wasn’t that it was no longer necessary to sell music on something, but that it was now possible to sell music on ANYTHING!

It turns out Mos Def had the same exact notion. Case in point:

Mos Def’s New Album Available as T-Shirt

Here’s a new one: Mos Def‘s BNM’ed new album The Ecstatic is available as a T-shirt. As in: You can buy a shirt that has The Ecstatic‘s Killer of Sheep-interpolating cover art on the front, its tracklist on the back, and a download code for the album on a hang tag.

Selling albums these days is hard! So the music/fashion company Invisible DJ, working with the fashion designer LnA, has come up with this idea called the Music Tee.

The Ecstatic is the first album available in the Music Tee format. Mos Def’s Downtown Music labelmates Santigold and Miike Snow also have Music Tees on the way.

One prophecy down.

As companies such as Invisible DJ and Dropcards spring up to corner the various new mediums that music can be sold on, it’s time for brands to start paying attention to what’s going on here. After all, why start a new shoe company to sell music on, when you could just sell new music on the shoes you’re already producing if you’re, say, Nike? I’ve written before about how brands are behaving more and more like record labels by teaming with music acts in various ways in order to create relevance and cultural salience — and in the process bands are benefiting from the partnership by taking advantage of the brand’s marketing reach to access an even greater audience for their music. Perhaps the new incarnation for “record labels” is in the guise of marketing agencies. In the aftermath of Vibe Magazine’s recent demise, Jeff Chang, music journalist and author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation spurred a discussion on Twitter (which he re-posted on his blog) musing on the future of magazines, especially those focusing on urban culture. Chang writes:

For what it’s worth, most of the mags I know in the high 10,000 – low 100,000 circulation realm have become quasi- or real marketing agencies. I think of magazines like URB, The Fader, and Juxtapoz, and Swindle as businesses that are working. But there are a number of ancillary units working there aside from the content work. All of them have massive marketing arms. Juxtapoz is part of the Upper Playground clothing/street art business. Swindle is part of Shepard Fairey’s empire.

But yeah, media qua media? Not so much…

Alan Light, a music journalist and editor who’s worked with Vibe, Spin, and Rolling Stone, among others added that the magazine parts of the marketing companies are “A good investment in terms of visibility. As a kind of calling card for the rest of the operation where the profits are.” Since the music industry is in pretty much the same shape as magazines perhaps it might be time for labels to start exploring this sort of culture creation / marketing agency model as well? One prophecy to go.

2. The Glitch Mob’s Summer Tour: “More Voltage”

I helped out with refining the tour concept and now I’m all bummed none of the dates are gonna be on the East Coast. Boo.

3. New music I’ve been listening to on repeat: Beats Antique

Their new album, “Contraption” is some seriously awesome shit. Have a listen:

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And Bandcamp, the service they’re using to release the music, is definitely looking like something to keep an eye on.

Right after writing about how cool I thought it would be to bring fictional characters to life on social media, I discovered that the employees of Sterling Cooper, the Madison Ave. advertising agency where the characters on AMC’s series Mad Men work, were all up on Twitter. For anyone unfamiliar, Twitter.com is a social networking site that allows users to communicate with their friends online and via text messages using posts of up to 140 characters in length (a.k.a. micro-blogging.) The characters’ profiles linked back to the AMC site, and they communicated with one another, and with their followers, “in character” and even in speech true to the show’s 1960′s-era time-period. So while it was never explicitly evident, it seemed only logical to assume, as many did, that AMC was behind this progressive and endearing move to use social media to enable its show’s characters to communicate and coexist with its fans. And then, not two weeks after first discovering their appearance on Twitter, the Mad Men characters’ profiles began being systematically suspended.

AMC, it turned out, had in no way authorized their existence on Twitter, and their very presence there apparently constituted a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, so Twitter was forced to comply with a take-down notice, and suspended the accounts. This, of course, instigated a major online backlash, fueled by both the personal disappointment (“Why has Twitter hijacked my beloved @don_draper (and friends)? Looks like i’ll be drinking alone 2nite.”) and professional indignation (“thinking that AMC using the DMCA to kill off the Twitter characters is a huge FAIL.”) of people who related enough to a show about communications professionals to befriend its characters — wOOOPSIE!!

At the urging of Deep Focus, AMC’s marketing group, the profiles were un-suspended. “Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts,” said a Deep Focus spokesman. (Not to mention all that free, fan-generated promotion.) To the legal dept. these actions were perceived as a hostile menace, and yet to the marketing side, this was exactly the kind of fan behavior AMC should support. The manifesto on wearesterlingcooper.com, which came into existence shortly after the reinstatement of the profiles, speaks to the this kind of emergent disconnect:

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it’s not going away. We’re your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we’ll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don’t treat us like criminals.

All along, whenever fans have climbed a little too far, or gotten a little too close, or somehow managed to gain an unauthorized degree of power, they have always been treated like criminals. The difference in the digital age is that this kind of power is now within reach to more and more fans. Our capacity to affect that which we fancy is now, in many ways, as accessible as the internet, and suddenly it means that the rules that once applied to the dangerously overzealous can now be a response to all fans. This contention in the line between fans and criminals is perhaps nowhere more heated than around music.

A few days after the Mad Men Twitter profiles were back in action, the LA Times business section headline read: “Blogger Kevin Cogill charged with felony in leak of Guns N’ Roses songs.” Having “waited half his life for a new album,” Cogill posted nine not-yet-released tracks from the 15-years-in-the-making album, Chinese Democracy, streaming (not for download) on his website. Because of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 he now faces felony (vs. civil) charges, which if he is convicted mean $250,000 in fines and three years in prison. Asked for comment, Slash, former Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist, said, “I hope he rots in jail.“

I mean, “I hope he rots in jail,” is an epithet more applicable to, like, a rapist or something, but here it is, nevertheless, being flung at someone motivated by a desire to share his love for a band, and increase that love for more people. Even just in writing this post I am noticing that it’s gotten kind of hard to say pretty much anything sympathetic about the actions of music fans these days without it sounding like a defense of music piracy. Which is more than a little problematic, because what does it mean for any entity that thrives on the support of an engaged fan-base, when its most avid enthusiasts can be just a matter of perspective away from its greatest threat?

The Wall Street Journal just published an article about how various companies are dealing with negative domain names such as ihatestarbucks.com or boycottwalmart.org. Some companies, like xerox, pre-emptively buy up negative domains before some disgruntled customer can, and then leave sites like ihatexerox.net and ihatexerox.org blank. Southwestsucks.com, on the other hand, redirects to a customer service page on the actual Southwest Airlines site, where people can then submit their complaints. And Bank of America apparently even goes so far as to solicit feedback and address consumer concerns on bankofamericasucks.com–which it does not own. None of the strategies mentioned in the post involved pursuing any kind of take-down notice or legal action. God bless the haters, and all, but when fans’ freedom to express themselves is considered a bigger threat, seems like maybe it’s time to reexamine the situation.

For the US government–which has no plans to stop using taxpayer money to bring more cases like Cogill’s in the future–there isn’t really a difference in the way that it would go about treating individual music fans vs. big commercial piracy rings. Craig Missakian, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said, “Prosecution like this makes others think twice.” I’m thinking, anyone for whom success and fan support are inextricably linked (governments need not apply) could stand to think twice, or three times even, about the changing nature of this relationship.

“Every record for the last four—including my solo record—has been leaked,” Thom Yorke said in a Wired piece on The Real Value of Music. Talking about the motivation behind Radiohead’s groundbreaking release strategy for their latest album, In Rainbows, he continued, “So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then.” Months before the CD was available in stores, fans were able to download the tracks online via Radiohead’s site, and pay what they wanted for them–even if it was nothing. There are different ways to interpret the results and successes of this, the first experiment of its kind, but what it was unequivocally effective at is making strides to address the new dynamic between fans and music. Rather than dictating that “you are not our fan unless you’re one like WE say you can be,” this approach was designed to give fans, as Pitchfork put it, “the freedom to pay actual money for what amount[ed] to an album leak.”

Whether you’re a cable network or a music act, or anything else that develops content whose success depends on your relationship with your fans, understanding the freedoms that your fans now demand is the key. You might even discover you can appreciate their involvement.

And on that note, check out the youtube response video that Electronic Arts and Tiger Woods came up with a few days after a fan named Levinator25 posted a video of a glitch he’d found in EA’s new golf game:

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