JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum So Where Does Your Song Rank On Ourstage?

The reason that people like your song and they like Gangsta Rap is because most people under 30 years old have little concern for genres. It's not at all unsusual to find Faith Hill and Kanye West on their iPods and they don't find that odd in the least. In my own case, I like all but a couple of the 100+ genres of music we have in the awards this year and have artists I like across all those genres. And now that such a massive amount of music is available for free or nearly so, kids are free to pick and choose anything they like without worrying about listening to a formatted radio station for example.

The real reason radio has always been so format strict has never been to please the tastes of their audiences. It's always been so that they can control the demographics of the most likely listeners for advertising. Now that kids and most everyone else for that matter are rarely listening to terrestrial radio to find new music or to listen to music at all, they've been freed from formats. That's not to say that even those who love all genres don't like to HAVE genres... because one day you're in a Classical mood.. another you're in a German Death Metal mood. And when you're in a particular mood, you want to easily be able to find that type of music. Genres have always been about making it easy for a consumer to most quickly find something they want. It doesn't mean they'll only like acoustic American traditional music... it means when they're in the mood for it, they want to be able to dial it in quickly. The younger the listener, the less they discriminate against any type of music. So don't be shocked at all.

As for MySpace.. that's a different thing. Those random "Be my friend" requests are simply to build stats and nothing more. The entire "friends" phenomena was a great idea for MySpace to build networks and numbers, but it means nothing. I know artists with well under 1000 friends who sell a LOT of CD's and get a LOT of people out to shows.. I know people with literally 50,000 friends who can't sell a single CD to any of them or get anyone to ever see a show. MySpace is a useless waste of time and as I predicted, the MySpace Music scam has finally exposed itself for what it is. They built it on the activity surrounding Indie Artists so they could have FREE musical content on the site.. and now that they've hit critical mass, they are pissing all over the indie community to kiss the ass of the majors. If all the indie artists pulled their stuff off tomorrow.. the site would collapse and disappear. But they won't. Musicians rarely do what is really best for them. They prop up scam artists and those that abuse them and they tear down their best friends and their best resources and would stab them all in the back if the "industry" ever batted an eye at them. It's always been that way sadly enough.

Brian