DISRUPTION How Spotify may beat big 3

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2018/10/is-spotify-already-too-big-for-record-labels-to-stop-it-from-competing-with-them.html

Indie acts

Some of the archetypes you might want to look into...

serious, sombre, dark themes

that serious tone extends to performance

B+W not uncommon
auteurs like A. Corbijn (Joy Div etc)
quirkiness though
some use of longer takes
colour correction (Joy Div eg), can be colourful (The Cure) or more likely bleak, nihilistic (JoyDiv). D Mode's early vids often featured the red Mute logo against B+W footage
Bleak, rundown settings

JoyDiv

Performance for credibility as musicians
- BUT look at johnmoule.com - the trend is moving away from this...because of falling budgets; its simply more expensive to gather a band as well as do a narrative (narrative can be done anywhere)
- John McMuria's research highlights that the big 3 conglomerates still dominate the new media outlets like YouTube
- Anita Elberse found the same, making mincemeat of the long tail theory

Shoegaze is a specific mode of Indie performance; bands like Jesus + Mary Chain played with heads down ... gazing at their shoes, not the audience. 6min doc; other shoegaze docs. Key bands My Bloody Valentine,

JMary

Low key lighting is the norm, but this low-budget aesthetic can also be seen with overexposure too:

Mary Chain

Gritty, rundown mise-en-scene

Mary Chain again

Layering is of course common

JMary

 This Cure vid shows layering, low key and overexposure (naturalistic), quirkiness...

Again, while goth as much as Indie, the dark clothing, dark tone, gritty (even post-apocalyptic) mise-en-scene...

More goths - Siouxsie and the Banshees with layering, darkness, some griminess (and the glamour of the purple curtain, like her painted face, deconstructed)...

Vid

Glamour and male gaze with the red lips...deconstructed and countered through the pale make-up and extreme colouring around the eyes

Vid

Indie self-acclaimed itself as right-on, its image being of liberal social attitudes - though actually its been very dominated by skinny white males. Morrissey evokes this with his effeminate body language, swinging a bunch of flowers while his open shirt could be female gaze or gay male gaze!

Vid

Indie avoids being glamorous; this duo certainly use their looks, but while brighter than many Indie vids we still have naturalistic lighting, frequent downwards looking, hair/fringes that go over the eyes etc

Honeyblood

Often credited as the 1st Indie single release, a real favourite of legendary DJ John Peel (doc), whose radio play broke many bands through to mainstream success...



Arctic Monkeys are clearly in the tradition: low key lighting, emphasis on musicianship (John Moule recalls their unusual determination to control their promos), dark clothing, hair's a biut shorter than older bands but still recognizably Indie...

Their narrative videos can have a social realist feel (mise-en-scene, handheld, underprivileged protagonist, social issues...), fitting the right-on, liberal ethos associated with Indie...

Sun Goes Down

Primal Scream went dance for a while, but they were and are and Indie archetype. Singer Bobby Gillespie played drums in the Mary Chain for a while. His look even now is pure Indie.

A miserable skinny white male - pure Indie look. The Verve made NOTHING from this huge hit, as the Stones sued them for the rights for plagiarism.

Vid

Britpop godfathers Oasis now - most of the Britpop bands are considered Indie.
B+W
grim mise-en-scene
hair, clothing
shoe gaze downwards looking
rule of thirds for emphasis on musicianship
quirkiness before this
low key lighting
...

Vid

Radiohead - miserable skinny male; some aspects of Indie clothing; emphasis on musicianship...

Vid

Suede - bleak mise-en-scene; like Morrissey, singer Brett Anderson is somewhat effete/effiminate, and certainly plays with sexuality.

Jesus and Mary Chain

Pixies

Joy Division eg1, eg2.


Primal Scream

Depeche Mode (dance/pop but Indie)

Beggars Banquet

Anything on 4AD

Suede

(Goth)
Siouxsie and the Banshees
The Mission
Sisters of Mercy
The Cure

Baudrillard's 'simulacra': Weezer's Buddy Holly eg

KEY TERMS: postmodern(ism)           meta-narrative        Baudrillard: simulacra      deconstructionism        intertextuality       Barthes: action codes        auteur theory         camp         queer/ed/ing       Mulvey: male gaze       feminist v post-feminist       countertype       stereotype      normative       hetero-normative       Hebdige: subculture          Bourdieu: cultural capital         Thornley: subcultural capital      McQuail: uses and gratifications

EG's REFERENCED:Weezer Buddy Holly
Depeche Mode It's No Good
Outkast Hey La
Beastie Boys Sabotage
Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball
Nirvana In Bloom
Charli XCX + Troye Sivan 1999
(+ auteur directors Michel Gondry + Spike Jonze)

Here we have a 2018 video heavily intertextualised with 90s/noughties references. The full preferred reading is unlikely to be accessible to XCX's primary audience 

And here we have 1 of the key influences on Rose McGowan's outfits - so, a signifier of a signifier of a signifer ... Baudrillard's simulacra

HOW THIS XCX VID ILLUSTRATES AUDIENCE TECHNIQUES

The original MTV awards pic from 1998.

Bourdieu's CULTURAL CAPITAL: We could argue that the XCX are knowingly suggesting those who can recognise or figure out the refs have higher cultural capital, though as pop culture references that only holds true within social groupings that value popular culture (Bourdieu analyses how the cultural preferences of economic elites is deemed high culture and more worthy, linking culture and social class)
Thornley - Hebdige's SUB-CULTURE: Thornley adopted Bourdieu to refer specifically to subcultural (Hebdige's term for distinctive social groups, especially youth) capital. Amongst young teen pop fans (not to mention the band's fanbase more specifically) recognition of this set of intertextualities would be seen as impressive (so: offering increased cultural capital)
McQuail's USES + GRATIFICATIONS: Discussing this also offers education, entertainment and personal interaction.
Reynolds' RETROMANIA: It further taps into what Simon Reynolds dubs Retromania in his book of the same name: our web 2.0, converged age offers up easy, cheap access to past popular culture that once required dedication and considerable expense (record collecting).
Altman's SET OF PLEASURES: The video offers an 'intellectual puzzle', one of 3 categories of audience pleasure Altman identifies as common strategies.

OVERVIEW:

A short post, just reflecting a discussion today on the postmodern philosopher Baudrillard's contentious (but ingenious?) concept of the simulacra, which argues that as we now exist in an endless sea of signifiers, or chains of signifiers with no concrete starting/reference point, we cannot claim to know of any actual 'reality'. So, Disneyland is the real America; the Gulf War, supposedly fought on our TV screens in 1991, never really happened, to take two of his most infamous proclamations.

Its a concept which often and readily applies itself to music video, with many videos influenced by other videos which may have been influenced by other media (especially TV/film) in turn. Weezer's Buddy Holly, directed by Michel Gondry, is an exemplar - it is a representation of a 90s band as part of a 70's TV show about 50's America, which heavily influenced perceptions of that decade (so, the long chain of signification in which any perceivable reality has been utterly lost, and is rendered unknowable)

Below the video I've uploaded a photo of p. 175 from the excellent Money For Nothing, Austerlitz's history of the music video; he describes the video, for example, as 'a pastiche of a pastiche'. We would later see Nirvana and other acts (see Outkast's Hey Ya at the end of the post) copy this idea of inserting the act into an old TV show (and the Beastie Boys, of course, created their own affectionate pastiche of the 70/80s cop show with Sabotage).

<sup>ANALYSIS:
Music video is both widely influential on other media and borrows heavily from other media in a 2-way dynamic flow.

In anything from Top Gear's car reviews through Guinness ads and Michael Bay films we can see the short takes, selective slo-mo, shot variety etc that are basic conventions of music video.

Likewise, we can see many of what Barthes termed action codes are common in music video, such as whip pans (especially common in performance footage).

The Weezer video illustrates the auteur theory: this is as much known as a Spike Jonze (the director) video as a Weezer video! Jonze's distinctive style is on display here.

Its a great example of the postmodernism that is also a basic, common feature of music video. That 'wide borrowing' from other media is intertextuality - and this example takes this to such extremes that it also neatly encapsulates Baudrillard's simulacrum theory.

The degree of irony, the camp representation, is also a common aspect of music video. The band are portraying themselves ironically as stiff, goofy - look at Depeche Mode's It's No Good for another great example of this postmodernist quality: deconstructionism. (Using conventions or cliches in a knowing, self-aware way to effectively critique them - they employ blatant male gaze with POV shots which cut to cleavage close-ups for example - just as Wes Craven did with Scream, whose characters discuss the conventions of horror films ... "I'll be right back...")

The postmodernist attack on meta-narratives (ideologies or systems that represent unifying ideas of how things do or should work) can also be seen with the rise of post-feminist critiques of feminist thinking. We can see a classic example of what Laura Mulvey termed the male gaze in GnR's W2TJ; Mulvey would be just as righteously angry at Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball video. Sinead O'Connor publicly warned Cyrus about male record bosses' exploitation. Cyrus' response was a post-feminist position: I have chosen to express my sexuality this way, I have agency (control), not the male director, manager or record label boss.

her queering of gender identity furthers this point, and is seen as a useful feature for attracting a 'woke' millennial (youth) audience, less accepting of normative representations than older generations.</sup>

Austerlitz on the Weezer vid

FROM THE WIKI:

Postmodernist French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. Where Plato saw two steps of reproduction—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".^[7] In Baudrillard's concept, like Nietzsche's, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which an accepted ideal or "privileged position" could be "challenged and overturned".^[8] Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance".^[9]

<sup>See the ProdEval blog for more on this and other media theories.


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MERCHANDISE pinball wizard swimming shorts

There are some really strange merch ideas out there, not least from metal acts...

MONETISING pay a grand to be on stage

http://metalsludge.tv/pay-to-play-jack-russells-great-white-offers-fans-a-chance-to-play-with-the-band-for-1000-00/?fbclid=IwAR2mTplv2BSG51_xvPDZlGcvqW6avH4htdu7ZtXm7Vkk3ec7hluG7R8IkW8

CONVERGENCE Metallica drones as effect

I've used the convergence theme heading as drones are an example.of how professional-level technology has entered consumer-level in affordability and general accessibility.

It's increasingly replacing still expensive helicopter shots in music video and TV.

This example is notable as it's also a neat, creative means of lighting effects - the drones Metallica use with their live song Moth into Flame.

http://www.metalsucks.net/2018/10/11/metallicas-stage-designer-talks-about-use-of-drones-on-bands-current-tour/

SPOTIFY male dominated playlists keeping women down

A range of interesting stats and details in this article reflecting on Spotify hitting it's ten year anniversary, but 1 is especially interesting, and maybe reveals one key means by which male dominance of the music industry is maintained.

Men dominate Spotify's own playlists, seen as key to modern success, leading to more user playlists which are male.dominated and so on.

Also intriguing because when I think of the biggest names in current pop and music generally its mostly female artists that spring to mind.

Spotify at 10: men dominate streaming service's most-played artists https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/10/spotify-at-10-drake-ed-sheeran-and-eminem-lead-streaming-stats?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

See also:
Has 10 years of Spotify ruined music?

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/05/10-years-of-spotify-should-we-celebrate-or-despair?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

ALT VIDEOS vertical version convergence UGC

Thanks to Simon for this one, which demonstrates another alternative to the traditional narrative/performance video but also the ongoing process of convergence. Its also a further demonstration of how artists are increasingly taking on formats popularised by fans as UGC and releasing their own official versions to better control the monetising of their recorded material.

Simon linked this eg by the world's biggest-selling artist of recent times, the ubiquitous Taylor Swift. She makes for an interesting digitisation/convergence case study already - she initially refused to allow her albums to appear on Spotify and Apple Music, forcing Apple to abandon plans for a free version of Apple Music with lower artist payments.



and here's the original


Think about why artists do this:

• primarily more control over monetising their work
• but also accessibility: creating the sense/brand image that they are to some degree at the level of their audience still (in this case shooting simple vids through their smartphone)
• standing out: multi-versions like this generate articles/news stories, thus more hits and more revenue
• for ultra-mainstream artists like Swift maintaining wide audience appeal through single narrative videos can be difficult, so these help to target specific demographics