The first thing I do when a band I've never heard of, or only know the name of, has outsized success is check the Spotify numbers.
"Apocalypse" has 1,233,307237 streams. How did this happen?
Well that's when you go to Wikipedia.
This is what I read about "Apocalypse" while I was listening to the track:
"It did not chart internationally until 2022, following its use in TikTok trends."
"Apocalypse" was included in the act's debut album, it was the second single, back in 2017!
The record didn't change, only the exposure did.
Now you've got to know that Madison Square Garden is a prestige play, despite being America's most famous arena you can't really make any money there, what with the unions... But you can say you played Madison Square Garden. You can win a Grammy, even in one of the top categories, and not be able to play Madison Square Garden. In other words, playing Madison Square Garden is the pinnacle of success, and now, more than ever, bands most people have never heard of are doing so.
Like Wallows. I've literally never heard of the band. But their Wikipedia page says the music video for "Are You Bored Yet?" was nominated for a VMA in the "Best Push Performance of the Year" category. What exactly is that?
I remember when the VMAs were a ritual. When you had to go, and if it wasn't in your city you got together in a group to watch it, it was a cultural rite.
We don't have any of these rites anymore.
Now Wallows is on Atlantic. But Cigarettes After Sex is on Partisan. Which is distributed by ADA, but it's not the same thing. If you're on a major label they employ all their relationships to get you on SiriusXM, to get you noticed by MTV, that's what you sign for. But when you're on an indie, even distributed by a major, those services are not lavished upon you.
Now the strangest thing about "Apocalypse" is it's really good. Wikipedia calls it "dream pop," which is not a term I've heard before, but it's accurate. And this is not usually the case. Normally something flies on the radar screen and you check it out and dismiss it, but not "Apocalypse," not even the rest of the work of Cigarettes After Sex, which has nine tracks beyond "Apocalypse" that have triple digit million streams on Spotify, and I'm not talking about de minimis streams, "Cry" has 457,140,733 and "K." has 600,943,764 and "Sunsetz" has 569,852,354.
I'm betting most readers have never even heard of Cigarettes After Sex. Yet so many with anemic streams are complaining they can't get paid.
Cigarettes After Sex was formed in 2008, when its leader Greg Gonzalez was already twenty six. The band has been in existence for sixteen years, its first album wasn't released until 2017. And you're expecting immediate success?
In other words, more acts are having success than ever before but it's taking a longer time to get there, at a point in the past where the act would have been dropped and everybody would be back at their day job, a footnote in history.
"Apocalypse" didn't change, it was the same song for five years after release before it blew up on TikTok.
Now I don't know how this happened, but I'm sure someone will e-mail and tell me, at the same time they insult me for being out of the loop, but that's the modern paradigm, one of narrow verticals, each of which are very deep, with dedicated fans.
Maybe there was a push on "Apocalypse," but I highly doubt it, five years after release. It was probably serendipitous, some TikTokker used it and then it went viral. In other words, the crowd was responsible. And this is exactly the opposite of the way it used to be.
Used to be the major labels were in control. They signed acts, picked priorities, got them press, radio and video play and they either connected or they didn't. Sure, there are some stories of tracks played years after the fact by some deejay that blew up, but those stories are rare, whereas they're de rigueur today.
Forget all the brouhaha in D.C. about TikTok. If it is closed down another platform will replace it. We've learned this over the past two decades, it's not like everybody's going to shrug their shoulders and move on. Turns out people want to create, and people want to see what the hoi polloi are creating. It's a completely different world from Netflix. Yes, Netflix's big competition is TikTok and YouTube, that's where the younger people are, for hours, every day! Its a Sargasso Sea of product, but if you rise above...you may not be known by everybody, but enough to have a career.
Then again, Cigarettes After Sex released the single "Dark Vacay" on April 16th and it only has 2,137,844 streams, indicating that the hard core base for the act is not huge and/or that most people don't even know the track is out. Cracks me up, trade papers will promote new releases, but the information never gets to the public, it's a circle jerk. The majors are still operating on an old paradigm. You don't convince the intermediary, you convince the end user, the public. And it's not about world domination, just finding your audience. And it's slower than ever before.
Everything above is hated by the powers-that-be. They hate that an indie has success. They hate that something was successful outside their purview. They hate that something succeeded organically. They hate that something is successful outside of the realm of music that they sign, which is extremely narrow.
Used to be record labels released a cornucopia of music. Today they release fewer albums than ever and it all sounds like stuff that's already been successful. That might work in a controlled market, but there's no control anymore, anybody can play, and the old avenues of exposure mean little.
This is classic disruption. And it's only going to get bigger. Almost all the major can dangle is money. And they can't make you successful, actually you have to prove your success before they'll even sign you! Which means we will have more and more outside successes. Furthermore, the major labels are categorically unable to break new artists, it's been the story of the past eighteen months. Because they want it fast when today it happens slow. Today everything is organic. The hard core music business, the active users that sustain it, seek credibility. I don't expect to see Greg Gonzalez on TMZ.
So we know less. No, we know more than we ever have, but there's so much more to know, and nobody can know all of it.
And music is not like television, where the amount of production is falling because the economics don't work. We keep getting more and more music, music is cheap, and exposure is cheap, but gaining traction in such a vast world? That's nearly impossible.
"Apocalypse":
Spotify: shorturl.at/lGT17
YouTube: rb.gy/sasl6v
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