Excerpts:
In Austin last week, the salty, cheesy wonder of Doritos was brought to you by the sweet, uplifting allure of Lady Gaga. Or was it the other way around?...
In a streamed world where music itself has very little value, selling out is far from looked down upon, it’s the goal...
The consumer wants all the music that he or she desires — on demand, at a cost of zero or close to it — and we now live in that perfect world.
It
doesn’t feel perfect, though. At this year’s festival, historically a
place of artistic idiosyncrasy, music labels were an afterthought and
big brands owned the joint. Venues were decked out with a riot of
corporate logos, and the conference’s legacy as a place where baby bands
played their little hearts out to be discovered seemed quaint in a week
in which Jay Z and Kanye West kicked it for Samsung, Coldplay headlined
for Apple’s iTunes and Tyler, the Creator played a showcase for
Pandora.
This
new order evolved because when music moved into the cloud, not much of
the revenue came with it. CD sales are a fraction of what they once
were, and the micropayments from streaming services have yet to amount
to anything meaningful...Given that Bob Dylan, of all people, recently made a big-money commercial for Chrysler, none of this is surprising, but it still has implications. No one will miss the stranglehold the large music labels had on the industry, but having shoe and snack food companies decide what is worthy could strangle the new, unruly impulses that allow the music business to prosper...
For South by Southwest, Lady Gaga filmed something of an infomercial for Doritos, urging people to use the hashtag #boldstage and submit a video of themselves doing something “bold” to compete for access to her performance...
(You
could say it was a new low, but last year, I saw Public Enemy, musical
heroes of my youth, perform “Fight the Power” inside a mock Doritos
vending machine.)
At
her keynote address on Friday, Lady Gaga thanked Doritos and said
plainly, “Without sponsorships, without all these people supporting us,
we won’t have any more festivals because record labels don’t have any”
money.
Carrie
Brownstein, the star of “Portlandia” who played in the rock band
Sleater-Kinney for years, was in town with her co-star Fred Armisen to
speak on a panel. Like many, she marveled at the number of brands that
wallpapered the festival.
“I
almost felt like I was in festival-land and the bands were there as
part of the theme park,” she said. “Still, it’s good there is a physical
place where people gather to watch music because so much of it seems to
come from nowhere at a cost of nothing”...
“The willingness of artists to partner with brands happened because
revenues dried up from physical discs,” [Peter Gannon] said. “The labels are not
going to get a lot of sympathy because they were not very good to
artists. At least when a brand is involved, there is an understanding
that we are borrowing the cachet that the artist has built and we try to
make high-quality projects that give value to both the client and the
artist. ”
