Modern Baseball have made their way onto our blog several times in the past month, usually as a tie-in with the release of their most recent record (Holy Ghost), but this post is different. This is a story about a band recognizing an opportunity to not only further engage with fans, but help them, and how practically every other artist working today should follow their lead.
Modern Baseball is currently preparing to embark on their North American headlining tour with Joyce Manor and Thin Lips. With the tour start growing closer by the day, the band has announced the creation of a help hotline that fans can text during shows for assistance if they are feeling unsafe. Maybe this means they are being verbally harassed by fellow concert-goers, or perhaps they are worried about the possibility of assault. Whatever the case, Modern Baseball is taking a proactive approach to ensuring everyone is able to enjoy their time seeing the band.
To get word out about the hotline, Modern Baseball has paired with Screaming Females singer and artist Marissa Paternoster and artist Perry Shall to create a brief animated video explaining the hotline. Fans at shows feeling unsafe are encouraged to text (201)731-6626. MTV News has a great interview with singers/guitarists Brendan Lukens and Jacob Ewald today explaining the creation of the hotline and the importance of safe space. You can view the video below:
The alternative music scene has been overwhelmed by stories of assault and harassment over the past two years, but Modern Baseball are one of the few bands we’ve found that are taking a direct approach to making fans feel safe at their performances. A hotline like the one mentioned above is not expensive or all that hard to setup, so maybe this move will inspire others to do something similar.
Despite what the proliferation of streaming services may have lead you to believe, exclusivity in the music business is alive and well in 2016. Regardless of whether you’re discussing sales, streams, video content, or even written editorials, the demand from companies and blogs alike to lay claim to something no one else can offer has never been higher than it is right now. Even artists are in on the game, with Kanye West proclaiming Tidal as the only place he will ever allow The Life Of Pablo to be made available to the public online, or with Drake having his “Hotline Bling” video financed and premiered by Apple. The idea behind these moves is that it draws everyone’s attention to one place where the conversation is controlled by the party, or parties, responsible for the content being shared. It’s a concept known to many as windowing, and in theory it’s a real game-changer, but in reality it’s a process that ultimately devalues whatever content such activity is intended to promote.
“Windowing” is a term often thought of in relation to film, but in recent years it has become increasingly popular in conversations based around the music industry. The word refers to the idea of releasing a new piece of media in a select number of locations or to a select user set at first before later making the same content available in more places and to more people as it begins to age. In digital music, a windowed release would be one that is only available on Spotify or a similar streaming platform at first. Then, after several weeks or months has passed, the album is made available on Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube, and/or any other streaming platform you can think to name.
Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton recently suggested that in future, we will see music releases being windowed like movies, with new music being made available exclusively on paid subscription services first, and only on free services later. Companies want to offer something their competition cannot, and as that trend continues the amount of money services will be willing to pay for exclusive access will rise. This mean labels and artists alike will be able to cash in on new material with a big payday up front as opposed to pursuing a traditional release and the uncertainty that comes with it. Windowing guarantees some return on investment, at least up front, even if the material isn’t all that great. After all, companies are paying for content, not quality.
The problem with windowing, especially in music, is that it assume consumers will change their behavior based on a corporate sponsorship that does not benefit them in any way whatsoever. Consumers have grown accustomed to having everything ever released available on demand, often for free, pretty much whenever they wish to access it. They have likely already chosen a streaming platform, or have at least used several free trials, and they have established a routine when it comes to new music consumption that they rarely deviate from. If they buy vinyl, a streaming exclusive won’t get them to use Tidal. If they pay for Spotify, a physical release of something might not find its way into their collection. This isn’t to say music fans are stuck in their ways, but they do tend to know how they prefer to engage with music and they rarely change their behavior without somehow finding it absolutely necessary to do so. Promises of better quality might work, which I suppose is the hope of hi-fi services such as Tidal, but the only people who care about such things are those who feel what they already have is not good enough.
Take Kanye’s latest, The Life Of Pablo, for example. The record, which was released exclusively on Tidal, reportedly helped the fledgling streaming platform more than double its total number of subscribers (from 1.5 million to 3 million), but it also lead to a boom in online piracy that quickly outpaced Tidal’s growth. Within 72-hours of the album first appearing online several torrent trackers reported the record to have already been illegally downloaded more than 500,000 times, and by the end of the album’s first week of release that number had already doubled. Kanye may see some return on those downloads in the form of praise from fans received over Twitter or another social network, but the real winners in this scenario are the pirate sites promoting the album’s illegal availability. Their pages have ads, often many, and they gain a few pennies for every click they receive. Times those pennies by a million or more and you begin to see real money, which will never reach Kanye or anyone he may be indebted to as a result of creating TLOP.
The short term gains of windowing releases in music is only a good thing when one does not consider the potential lost income and engagement that will arise from consumers forging their own path to your content. Instead of limiting access to material, artists big and small should be doing everything in their power to make their music available everywhere under the sun. Make it harder for people to find illegal links to your music by supplying them with endless legal options instead. Don’t limit yourself or your fans to just one service when you can use them all and have your content available anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice. You might not receive a big check overnight, or even have the immediate press blitz you desire, but in the long run you will develop a more dedicated and engaged audience that is willing to put their money where their tweets are and financially support your efforts. That should be the ultimate goal for any artist, and it’s only possible by allowing your fans to be themselves and make their own decisions.
The only thing more annoying than bandwagon fans may be bandwagon haters. People who feel it is their duty as fans of a particular sound or genre to tear down whoever is currently dominating the charts because they believe it makes them unique or edgy in some way. We who embrace the hitmakers know better, as we understand there is a reason certain artists see their star shoot into the stratosphere while others must work incredibly hard for every tiny bit of success they achieve. The reasons for this are as numerous as grains of sand on the beach, but one thing that is almost always true about real music stars, and by that I mean those who are able to hold the public’s attention across multiple albums, is that they always find a way to connect with people in a way that feels personal.
To be clear, what I just said is far easier to grasp than it is to recreate. We all follow our own paths in this life, experiencing practically every aspect of existence in a way that is wholly unique to ourselves, yet for some reason there are certain songs and/or artists who have the power to make us feel as though we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Call it a community, or a culture, or a way of life, but there is something to the biggest material in history that connects with people in a deeply personal way. You may have never experienced the situation being described in the song, and you may never know the story that inspired the lyrics, but something about the way emotion is being expressed cuts through the noise and strikes you right in your soul. It moves you, as it does others, and as soon as it’s over we long to feel that connection again. That is the sign you’ve found something truly great in music, and it’s something that is completely achievable by pretty much every artist working today. That is, if they work hard enough.
The big star of the moment is Adele, and by now you’ve no doubt heard her single “Hello” between one and one-hundred times in your daily life. Her music is everywhere right now, and her new single “When We Were Young” seems poised to push her exposure even further. The production on these tracks is undeniably gorgeous, and Adele’s powerful voice is something that will be praised for decades to come, but what makes these songs work at Top 40 radio and beyond has little do with those factors and far more to do with the feeling you get when the music plays. Adele, like Drake on tracks like “Hotline Bling” or “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” has the power to make you miss people and situations you have never actually known. Something in the way the music compliments the lyrics, which are typically pulled from a deeply personal place, creates an atmosphere of turmoil and heartache that listeners take upon themselves to connect with events in their own lives. It doesn’t matter whether or not the events that inspired the song are the same as the events the lyrics are being applied to by the listeners, and it never will. All that matters is that the performer is able to capture a feeling, or perhaps a better description would be a sense of being, that translates on a massive scale.
What I’m trying to say is that the reason these artists skyrocket into the music stratosphere while others fight over lower chart positions is because people feel like the know them. When you hear the music of Adele and Drake, or even smaller acts like The Hotelier or Modern Baseball, you feel as if you are hearing an update from a close friend about what has been going on in their life since you last spoke. It’s entertaining, yes, but it’s so much more than that as well. You long for those updates, and when they arrive you click play with all the hope in the world that you and this person or group, whom you’ve never met, have been experiencing similar situations in life. You hope there is something in there story that relates to your own, and that kind of connection is incredibly hard to break. Even if the quality of the music begins to suffer, and the radio songs can’t crack the top 10, people who have connected to an artist on an emotional level will continue to follow them for as long as they are able.
I cannot tell you how to create songs that connect with people the way the latest singles from Drake and Adele do, but that is okay because writing material like that should not be your goal after reading this post. Writing music that would work for Drake or Adele is not guaranteed to work for you, at all. Your goal, or better yet your mission, should be to find a way to create the music you want to make in such a way that it connects with people like the material released by your musical peers. It’s not about copying someone else’s formula, but rather finding a way to tap into the same set of relatable emotions that has established countless artists as household names over the last hundred or so years of pop music. Even if you’re writing metal, the goal remains the same. You want to create something that is both personal and universal, which shares a part of you in a meaningful way while still allowing others to add their own meaning to the material. There is no recipe for that kind of creation, nor are the any guides I would suggest you spend time reading. The best way to make material like this is too simply keep creating, and in time you will learn to refine your skills. As your songwriting improves, so will the reach of your music, but you cannot allow yourself to get lost in thoughts of what a song could potentially be or do for you. As soon as you take your focus away from creating great songs that actually mean something to you, the artist, your chances of connecting with listeners begins to drop. Stay true to yourself and people will notice. It might take time, but that’s perfectly okay.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also a professional entertainment critic, covering both film and music, as well as the co-founder of Antique Records. Feel free to tell him you love or hate the article above by connecting with him on Twitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
