The Internet Hates You...

The Internet Hates You And Everything You Do. James Cole.
You used to be a little band, playing a few gigs locally, building up fans, working on your material. You were aiming for bigger gigs in bigger cities. You wanted to get noticed, first by journalists, then by the record labels. Maybe not the big ones, but you thought you had a fair shot at a credible indie label. You were a growing fish in a small pond and you had every intention of being in the right place at the right time to upgrade to a bigger pond, with gravel, and bitches. Then you posted your music on the internet.
It seemed like a good idea, didn’t it? The Arctic Monkeys did it and went straight to number one. Besides, it can’t hurt to let people hear what you do. Maybe a few more people will come check you out live. Perhaps even a journalist or label scout will come across you and accelerate your rise to that coveted third slot on the Rhombus Stage at Glastonbury. You never know your chances, right?
True. And it’s entirely possible that these things could happen. However, let’s have a closer look at those chances. Roughly 1.8 billion people have access to the internet at this moment in time. Even acknowledging that the bulk of those come from Westernised democratic countries (sorry Somalia, you can have broadband when the last man standing lets us know it’s calmed down a bit), it seems reasonable to assume that a screamingly small percentage of those 1,800,000,000 people are music journalists or record label minions. It’s much like real life in that respect, only in real life you’re still far more likely to be in the right place at the right time. Stepping up to the internet and hoping you’ll be noticed is like taking a piss in the Atlantic and hoping it gets to Boston. Two years ago Google announced that it had found and cached one trillion unique urls, and the indexable web as it stands has a minimum of 25 billion pages. It’s a big place.
At this point you might be thinking “Shit. I’m going to need to stand out in some way”. You would be right. In my personal opinion this boils down to one of two things, either:
a) A gimmick, which you create, send to your friends, post wherever you can and which, you hope, will go viral and get you noticed, or:
b) Being really fucking good.
Guess which one of these is most popular. Now guess which one works. Hint: it also works in real life, too.
Any number of bands have gone online with their music and their gimmick and had a crack at winning the hearts and minds of everyone who sees it. Well done them. Every time I get an email with the subject line “OMG you HAVE to see this band video!!” I know I’m about to have an encounter with a group of wannabe rock stars and the things they’ll do to their dignity in order to make it. It will be buried under a ton of After Effects ‘magic’, and it will probably feature some attempt at humourous self-deprecation, which I guess at least cuts out the middle man. Even the best gimmicks rarely work, the classic example being Ok Go. They’ve released two excellent YouTube videos, one featuring a treadmill dance, the other a Rube Goldberg device timed to the song’s beat. These guys are clearly bright and creative, but did it benefit their music? No. The first video helped Here It Goes Again to creep into the bottom of the top forty, the second is widely considered to have had a negligible effect on the sales of both the single itself and the album it came from.
At this point you might justifiably be thinking that some successful bands have gimmicks. To some extent I would agree with you. I would, however, point out that none of those gimmicks were created for, or based on, the internet. They also tend to belong to those who also fall under the category of being really fucking good. Kiss dress like tin foil wizards on stage. Is that their gimmick? No: their gimmick is looking like Hogwarts Vice and being really fucking good. David Bowie used five or six different personalities in the seventies. Was that his gimmick? No: his gimmick was a slightly cracked mind and being really fucking good. Gimmicks work if, and only if, they are part of the character of the band and backed up by genuine talent. Kiss are show-offs, and it works, because they’re very good at what they do. Bowie is a chameleon, and it works, because he took that side of his personality and used it as a channel for his musical gifts.
Back to the internet, then. What happens to the average gimmick? If you’re lucky, it does go viral. People pass it on, watch it, are entertained by it, and then forget about it. If you’re unlucky, well... Remember those 1.8 billion net users? A significant proportion of them will delight in your inadequacy. I know. I’m one of them. And either way, you lose, because the entertainment value is all right there in the gimmick itself. Whether it works or not I don’t need to click on your homepage and listen to your music, because the gimmick gave me all the amusement I needed and it didn’t cost me anything. Why should I pay for your product when I can just wait for the next viral video to entertain me instead? The internet has plenty of advice on how to create your own gimmick, so I can reasonably assume I won’t be waiting long.
I don’t understand where this desperate ‘look at me’ style of internet marketing has come from. I genuinely believe you are no more likely to be noticed on the internet than in real life, and significantly less likely to be noticed at all unless you fulfil the really fucking good clause. There are constant references to the Arctic Monkeys being the start of a period of internet discovery, but they weren’t. And they didn’t need a gimmick. They just put their songs online and enough people thought they were really fucking good. If they’d turned out to be a fifty-something man who liked the adoration of teenagers we might be telling a very different story, of course.
None of this means that I’m in any way against the use of the internet for musical purposes. I just don’t think it’s being used properly. By all means maintain a website and have your songs online to listen to, even to download if you want. A free song for your new fans isn’t going to hurt you at all. Just don’t go online expecting to get discovered, and definitely don’t go online with the intention of ramming your gimmick down people’s throats. I hate that, and by extension, so does everybody else. The internet has opened up a million useful possibilities for your new band: you can create band merchandise, get your records duplicated and packaged, get your recordings properly mastered, and get in touch with venues and promoters much more easily. The internet has given every band the advantages previously only available to the wealthy or to those on labels, and it has had the added bonus of increasing competition and thus lowering prices. This means you can get out there gigging, making real fans, and attempting to beat the real competition of other bands by doing the one thing you can do that makes you stand head and shoulders above the 1,799,999,999 other people online.
Being really fucking good.