John Smyth wrote:

>Dave writes on his neice's interest in N*SYNC:
>
>>This past year my 19-year-old niece has been living with us.  She has
>>over this time become a huge - I mean rabid - N*SYNC fan.  ...  What I've
>>noticed is that her involvement is almost completely emotional.  That is,
>>there's no intellectual basis for her feeling that this music is so great.
>
>If I understand you correctly, you observe your niece's emotional thrill as
>a sentiment which may have nothing to do with the quality of the music and
>a lot to do with market manipulation.

No, I wasn't implying that.  First, I believe (and I have a ton of
evidence for this) that her emotional thrill comes primarily from the
sexual aspects.  These guys are sexy and seductive, at least to a teenage
mind.  Their music is OK, for what it is, but in her mind it is the best
music there is.  She wasn't told this by any marketeer.  But she also can't
defend her judgement even superficially.  She loves it, and others share
her love, and that's all that's required.  It's almost more of a
quasi-religious sentiment than anything else as, for the believer, no proof
of quality is required.  Disbelivers have lost their way.

And this goes to a point I've been wanting to make for some time now.
I've worked in marketing and as a product manager at times in my eclectic
career, and I think I have some insight into what it is and what it can do.
Granted, heavily financed market blitzes can generate interest where there
might not be any otherwise, but only for a very short time.  For instance,
a heavily hyped movie with lots of slick, exciting ads and cross-promotions
might do an incredible first weekend box office, but regardless how many
ads they run in the following weeks, the movie will quickly sink into
oblivion, often within just a week or two, if there is no buzz.  In
marketing speak, hype is created by the marketeer, buzz is generated by the
market.  For example, a friend telling another friend about the great movie
they saw last weekend, or one listmember recommending a recording to
another, is buzz.

If marketing really could drive most of our musical tastes, then there
would be no need for hundreds of record labels producing tens of thousands
of new releases each year.  It would be far more profitable and efficient
to just release the few hundred CDs in each genre they wanted people to
buy.  They would tell them what they should like, and the consumer buys it.
Obviously this can't work, and it doesn't work, this way in the larger
sense.  In fact, if you have followed popular music over the last couple
of decades, it's clear that the emergence of every major stylistic trend:
punk, rap, hip-hop, new age, new wave, grunge, etc., all caught the
marketing departments at the major labels completely by surprise.  So to
say that marketing tells us what to enjoy, buy, etc.  is to have a rather
tiny tail wagging a gigantic dog.

What marketing is good at - if you want to call it that - is amplifying
buzz.  Hype generally dissipates quickly as people realize that's all
it is.  We see a lot of hype in the technology sector, and we've seen
products, and even companies, disappear fast when they don't deliver on
the hype.  However, if there is already some buzz, a skillful marketing
campaign can amplify that buzz considerably.  And that's what I think is at
play with the example of my niece and N*SYNC.  She'd probably listen to the
music and be attracted to the boys even if it weren't for the concerts, tee
shirts, DVDs, calendars, trading cards, magazines, TV special, on-line chat
rooms, clubs, and a dozen other things.  I doubt her level of involvement
would be quite so obsessive without the ability to immerse herself in the
world of N*SYNC, but I don't doubt she would be listening nonetheless.

Having said that, there's no doubt in my mind that if these guys were 30,
overweight, and ugly but produced exactly the same music, she wouldn't have
any interest at all.

>What comes first when a person is just getting hooked to a genre: the
>hyped, alpha-male endorsed chicken, or the evergreen, intellectually
>fertile egg?

Well, if I understand you correctly, neither and both (classic
chicken-and-egg, in other words).  It's a dynamical system, not one well
suited to static cause and effect analysis.  In addition, it varies from
person to person.  I know classical music lovers who won't buy a disc
unless it has a very positive review by a trusted critic.  They want to
spend time only with what has been deemed "best".  And in the classical
music world this can actually work sometimes.  We have enough history, and
the weight of judgement of several generations in many cases, to help guide
us.

But as to entirely new genres, I'm a little mystified as to what the
universal mechanism might be, even though I have explored new genres all
my life.  For instance, though I have from my teen years liked jazz, it
was mostly post-1970 fusion, smooth jazz, and new age.  This doesn't mean
I didn't know about Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny
Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Parker, Ellington, Basie, and so on,
but that I had never really explored them.  Last year I went deeply into
this genre, buying many Blue Note and Verve releases over a short period of
time.  When I first started, I bought the releases the experts told me too:
Blue Train by Coltrane, Kind of Blue by Miles, and so on.  I soon found
that some music that was strongly recommended wasn't to my liking, but by
taking a couple of chances I found others that I like better.  The experts
said Bill Evans was one of the greatest, so I tried and found it was true,
and proceeded to get complete sets.  They also said Charles Mingus was
great, but I found less to like there, and so moved on.

My point being that it seems that investigating a new genre, at least
with respect to truly serious exploration, is an iterative process.
You tap into the experts, gauge your own reactions, and then adjust your
direction and make your decisions accordingly.  And as most of us know,
these decisions may change over time.  I'm not getting rid of my Mingus
discs (or Messiaen discs for that matter) as I may very well change my
mind.  Likewise, music that strikes me at first, may have less and less
effect as time goes by.

>...  I bought Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" long ago not because of the
>composer's accomplishments, but because Telarc, the recording company,
>claimed to have captured the ultimate in earth-shaking bass drum
>thwacks.  Reviewers agreed. ... It was hype.  The only difference between
>Telarc's hype and IN-SYNC's is that the object of the Telarc's
>hype--Stravinsky's music--has shown itself to be lasting, but it was the
>hype initially that hooked me.

I think that's correct, and shows what hype combined with the buzz of
reviews can do.  Marketing certainly is not toothless, it's just not the
all-powerful scourge we sometimes think it is.  But I do have to wonder
if it's really hype when it delivers exactly what was promised.  Saying
N*SYNC is the world's most exciting band is probably just hype.  What
does it mean anyway?  But is it hype to say you have sonic fireworks,
and then deliver them?  You may have been lead to believe that solid
thwacks would enhance your experience, but in the end if you believed
that, whose fault was it?  :-)

>I've been listening "correctly" for so long now that I expect the whole
>world to love CM and be drawn to it *for its own sake* and with no industry
>mid-wifery.

Unfortunately, I believe the number of people who are true explorers is
extremely small - most people like what they already like, and can be
drawn to similar things by marketing.

>Unlike a fellow teacher's lament about needing athletes and rappers to
>endorse reading and increase young reading audiences, I want CM's own
>siren song to be sufficient to attract new listeners, rabid listeners -
>but is this naive?

Perhaps a little.  It is idealistic, and I like that.  It's been stated
here that people are told all the time that classical music is boring, etc.
My experience has been almost polar opposite.  Perhaps it's just the people
I know, but nearly everyone I've discussed music with tells me they like
classical music.

But there's something, or perhaps several things, that keep them from
following through with getting to know the music better.  One is simple
time.  How many of us would like to learn a new language, read some classic
literature, etc., and just haven't found the time to do it.  It takes
research, effort, and time that many people in our overworked society find
difficult to allot.  I think if we saw a dramatic increase in leisure time,
especially among the educated, rather than the gradual decrease we've seen
over the years, interest may well pick up substantially.

Then there's the barrier to entry:  this stuff is mysterious and complex,
so much so some of us devote our lives to it and still feel like we're
scratching the surface.  I've been at this for over twenty years, and I
know I know very little.  We're talking about more than a millennium of
music, millions of compositions by thousands of composer, complicated
by performance practice issues, and at times an overwhelming number of
interpretations.  What's the poor soul who just heard Beethoven's fifth
to do? Read all the reviews in periodically he's never see at his local
bookstore to find which of the more than 100 recordings to get? Buy a
couple of dozen different CDs and hope on is to your liking? And what is
this person supposed to listen for anyway? It's all very confusing, and
this is a tremendous deterrent for many.  And I think there is some social
pressure, not in the peer-pressure sort of way many people assume, which
is rather rare in my experience - but more of an uncomfortable feeling
that putting on or requesting classical music as entertainment in a social
context (which is where many people spend a lot of time listening to music)
would be embarrassing.  They might be seen as a snob, or as trying to
impress.  This doesn't often happen, once again in my experience, but
it is a factor that I think makes people reluctant to use classical
music socially.  Not a lot of people are willing do what most of us do all
the time, and that is to simply sit and listen for extended periods of
time.  For most, music is a background activity, a pleasant ambient sound,
or it's use for something specific like dancing.

>While there will always be those listeners who go for the egg and nothing
>but the egg, what about attracting those from the emotionally-driven
>market? Whenever the CM industry engages in manipulation, whether featuring
>women in seductive poses, youthful aberrations, "against all odds" artists,
>or ethnic artists, it could set this veteran listener's teeth on edge if he
>allowed it.

You know, this doesn't really bother me in the least.  Mutter, Hahn, the
Eroica Trio, etc.  would never succeed if there wasn't a certain quality
to their recordings.  Adding a seductive cover might not have much effect
on our purchasing decisions (actually a picture of an artist on the cover
in *any* pose is a big turnoff for me), but what about that poor sap
wandering into the forbidding territory of the classical music section at
the CD store? The marketing approach to employ seductive covers may help
drive him to the pretty picture, but once again that can't last.  If he
gets it home and find the music dull, or worse, all the pretty covers in
the world won't generate another sale.

>Then I remember buying Stravinsky for Telarc's famed bass drum thwacks.
>Did the hype hurt me? No.  It floated my interest long enough for
>initially inconceivable music to become conceivable, thus I was hooked
>and poised to enjoy much more music of the 20th-Century.

I see that as the upside to the relatively gentle hype this was.  And I
believe gentle hype is all that has any chance of working on most of us
here.

Dave
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