MADE

There’s a HUGE disconnect somewhere. Everywhere I went for the last 2 weeks, somebody was talking to me about Michael Jackson. It’s died down in the past few days. But for a while, I was hearing about the tremendous surge in album sales after his death. All of a sudden, there were all these people at places like CNN analyzing every aspect of Michael Jackson’s life to fill up dead time. Everybody all of a sudden is a Michael Jackson expert and acts like they care about him. It’s like he was the soundtrack to everybody’s life. I say, where the fuck were you 10 years ago?

If you loved him so much, why weren’t you buying his albums? This whole Michael Jackson thing reveals a lot about people. It really reveals what types of people there are in this world. A lot of people have talked to me about their feelings towards MJ’s death. I’ve begun noticing a pattern.

On one side are the people who are totally affected by his death. One girl I spoke to the day after he died had just finished crying when she came up to me. She felt devastated. On the other side are the people who acknowledge his death and feel bad for the kids and family, but aren’t all that emotionally vested in all the MJ brouhaha. What I’ve noticed is that the people who are all caught up in the MJ saga usually don’t have much going on in their lives. They’re usually not creative, original, ambitious types of people who produce useful things for society. They’re usually consumers. The people who come home every day from their 9-5 jobs and plop their fat asses down on the couch to watch reality TV.

The people who aren’t really caught up in the MJ stuff are usually people who are doing things with their lives. They’re too busy to sob over his death. These weren’t the people swarming around the Staples Center to catch a last glimpse of the King. They were at home or at their places of business creating things for the rest of us. Things like music, Things like new web apps. Things like new vaccines for people in poor countries.

But the consumers are always far more numerous. Granted, there’s a bit of consumer in all of us, but the hardcore consumers always outnumber the hardcore producers.

This brings me back to the first line of this article. There’s a disconnect somewhere. I checked out a clip of “Billie Jean” on YouTube. It had 22,859, 150 views and close to 90,000 comments. And most of the comments I looked at were heavy. People expressing profound love for the man.

But the views on YouTube don’t square with MJ’s post-death album sales. Through July 5, for example, the King of Pop sold an unremarkable 422,000 albums, Now, that may sound like a lot, but we’re talking about MJ here. We’re talking about a man who had 19 Grammys, 22 American Music Awards, 12 World Music Awards, and was named artist of the decade, generation, century and millennium. And not just that, but of that 422,000, about 225,000 were digital sales.

The real killer though is that he sold 2.3 million individual tracks. So the moral of the story isn’t just, “Fuck CDs!” It’s that the market has changed profoundly. People are cherry picking what they want to listen to and put on their iPods. And they’re using the Internet and sites like YouTube as filters.

What does this mean for indie music artists? It means that you need to shift away from making albums and instead make singles for your core. People don’t want albums anymore. Albums are based on the bundling concept. People don’t really want bundles anymore. So stop basing your revenue strategy on bundling. Few people have the time or desire to consume bundled media. I don’t buy CDs. I don’t subscribe to any magazines. I get everything online, where I can pick and choose what’s good. I’m sure you do the same. So what makes you think your fans aren’t the same?

The Web has irreversibly segmented the world. Focus on high impact singles, shows and merch. And execute it creatively.

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