05.01.07
Tequila Trouble
Bob Leftsz, in the music world, has incredible reach. His newsletter not only is straightforward and laced with insights but it commands the attention of major music industry movers and shakers. The best posts are those that spur responses from those he’s questioning.
Recently Bob openly asked if online ’stars’ could really sell music. He used Tila Tequila (her MySpace homepage link probably NSFW unless your workplace encourages Pussycat Doll-like ambiance), one of MySpace’s more popular members, as an example (he’s referring to Tila having nearly 2 million MySpace ‘friends’ but only being able to sell 13,000 singles of her new album on iTunes):
Code doesn’t manipulate. And Web statistics don’t lie. Oh, the ones on YouTube and MySpace can be manipulated, but is iTunes hiding pressing reports?
And the fact that social networking numbers can be faked only speaks to the underlying point. Is what is being exhibited any good? So, Tia Tequila is a massive star online. Does that mean she’s going to sell records?
Apparently not. Some hypothesized that the reason the sales were so dismal was because most of her online entourage was of the autonomous sort:
Anybody with the cash can get a lot of “friends” but it doesn’t mean squat if the quality of the music isn’t there. So the next time you visit a page, you have to wonder are these really fans or were they just bought? Somebody with some deep pockets is backing Tila, but they forgot about good songs sung well.
In the following comments was this little gem of an insight:
I recently worked at an indie where interns sat at computers all day, every day, on myspace and “friended” people for the label’s bands. The company didn’t shell out money for it though, since the interns were unpaid! Why pay lots of money when you’ve got an endless supply of people willing to work for nothing doing menial tasks?
That being said, I also worked at another indie where interns managed bands myspace accounts and accepted friend requests, never sending any out. The bands on this label weren’t huge but they had talent and a core audience, and were certainly not at a loss for myspace friends. (The interns were a lot happier there too.)
Other’s posited that it wasn’t a matter of fake friends but poor usage of those friends she did have:
Brian L. Klein:
I was asked to put a proposal in to Renshaw’s office to promote Tila’s single online. It was designed to set up the release in a “super distribution” plan that I came up with. I’ve been very successful with this technique with the artist I manage named Joe Purdy. We’ve sold over 250k single downloads worldwide this past year and a half with no label. I’m doing this with all of the artists I manage. I’ve been working with majors and indies for years. I’m done with them. We are actually making money on record royalties this early in the game and reinvesting it!!
Renshaw’s office decided not to hire me. They f*ked up. With the traffic Tila gets every day and her reach she should have done much better. Her music isn’t amazing but neither is a lot of s*t that sells. They had one tiny buy button on her front page leading to itunes. NOTHING viral besides the video.
The reason I was excited to work on the project was her reach. 1.6 million “friends” should have had a bigger impact if executed properly. It was embarrassing to see what happened. They ended up hiring the same old “new media” marketing company every label hires. Her traffic should have been used to create thousands of front doors to her Itunes page. There was NOTHING forward thinking or exciting about what they did.
The whole discussion raises a slew of mutednoise talking points:
- Are ‘management’ an artist’s number of friends manipulative or just necessary way of establishing legitimacy?
- Does prove that MySpace is or isn’t a good place to launch a music career?
- Is this a validation that it still takes true talent to succeed online? Or was it just botched marketing?
- Would any of this have come to light if Bob hadn’t thrown the topic out for debate in a public forum?