Chapter Ten: Success

Monday, October 13, 2008

Here comes success
Over my hill
Here comes success
Here comes my car
Here comes my Chinese rug
Here comes success

In the last ditch
I'll think of you
In the last ditch
I will be true
Sweetheart I'm telling you
Here comes the zoo

Iggy Pop
Success


I think Success is one of the hidden gems on Iggy Pop's “Lust for Life”.

When you isolate the lyrics, it doesn't look like much. But when you hear the whole song, with its driving rhythm, call-and-response vocals and beautifully edgy sound, it's an absolute killer. Funny, incisive, acerbic and exciting.

And like any good song, it has something to say about something important.

Measures of success, whether or not we're consciously aware of them, dictate our vision of the world and, more importantly, the impressions we have of ourselves. Knowing whether or not who we are, or what we do, is "good enough" - or even "good" - is of great importance to our lives. It quietly informs everything, from our personal relationships, to our jobs, to our possessions, to the way we act, even our hopes and dreams.

It's an all pervasive, invisible force that begins at school and mounts as we get older until such time as we either recognise what is going on, and take steps to remedy the situation, or slowly get buried in it, simply succumb to its insatiable demands to the point where success is all that matters to us, to a point where we spend our lives in a constant, brutal competition to reassure ourselves that we're good, that we’ve done well.

The music industry adores success and it absolutely despises failure. And until recently, the winners and losers were very easy to spot. Album sales, chart positions, massive advances, media domination, hype – all of these things were easy to quantify, to put a dollar value on. And the commercial end of the music industry is only and totally concerned with the dollar value. If it doesn't sell, it's useless. It has no value. It's no good.

But the value of an artistic endeavour is not something which can be measured so easily. How do you measure emotional impact? How do you place a dollar value on soul? How do you, as they say, account for taste? It's like putting a price on love. And even the Beatles (possibly the biggest earners of all time) will happily tell you that you can't buy that.

Yet, quantifiable success is still the major concern, not just for record companies, but also for artists. They need proof of their worth.

Bands fall into this trap all too often. They begin to believe that mass appeal is more important than niche appeal. That if you can temper your work to the point where it is so simple and inoffensive that everybody (or at least the majority) likes it, you can succeed. And more often than not, they are encouraged to think this way, especially if there is a large sum of money being invested in them.

And they'll do everything else that is required of them too, no matter how ugly. Because the money players will tell them flat out – baby, if you want to succeed, if you want to stay in the running for the glory, you have to play the game.

But now the game barely exists, except in the minds of those still playing it. The massive increase in downloading, in file sharing, and in the free movement of music through the internet has reduced music’s monetary value to zero.

This is why the industry is in such confusion. They don't even know who is a good investment and who isn't anymore! They used to be able to tell. They used to be able to plot it, bank on it, even make it happen through sheer buying power. But now, a lot of it is a mystery, and it keeps moving underground, keeps slipping off the radar.

Twice in the past two months I’ve read of bands rejecting record labels. Bands turning down six figure deals with majors! Are they for real?

Apparently so. Maybe those bands know something we don’t about the true value of their work.

Meanwhile, although the dollar value of the product has been cut to nil, the emotional value remains as high as ever. People still love music. And the ability of music to spread, not via forced marketing and favours and kickbacks, but of its own natural accord, as a result of its true value, is becoming a reality.

As a result, you don't have to appeal to the masses anymore. If what you do is specific, if it is particular, or even peculiar, if it’s different to the majority of currently popular sounds, all that is required is for 0.005% of the world's population to enjoy and support it.

This tiny sliver of the world’s audience is all you need to make the elusive living. And if you find that small group, and treat them properly and personally, and support them, and don't diminish their importance to troublesome statistics on a chart, they may just return the favour.

A lot of people have wished me well with the record and I can't fault them for it. I know they genuinely mean it. But it puzzles me that the good wishes are inevitably along the lines of mass sales, big record deals, popularity and money. Things that do not, in short, motivate me at all.

It used to frustrate me deeply, because I was young and angry and stupid and I took nearly every comment about my work, positive and negative, as some kind of personal affront.

But now, I just smile warmly and thank them, because I know they really don't mean any harm. They only want the best for me, they want the best for the record.

They just want to see it succeed.

So these days, instead of getting fired up about invisible insults, I just keep a close watch on what is happening inside my own little world. I get pleasure from the tiny, seemingly inconsequential achievements.

Like the Boston download.

The statistics and information generated by the servers which host the band’s website fascinate me. Maybe a little too much. From the web server, we can track where visits are coming from, which files are being hit, how long people are staying at each page, what they're looking at, the paths they take to get there etc.

And in relation to the free download of our album, this information is important - not to mention intriguing.

Look at this piece of apparent gibberish:


Host: 209.235.13.188
/Andrew%20Keese%20and%20the%20Associates%20-%20Desire.zip
Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 12 01:44:03
Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 61775373
Referer: http://andrew-keese.com/
Agent: Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0;)


Looks like junk, doesn’t it? Some geeky programmer might get all sweaty about it, but for the rest of us, it’s just uninspiring and unintelligible. And desperately un-sexy.

But look what happens when all the excess junk is stripped out and you run that little number to the right of the “Host” section against a locator:


/Andrew Keese and the Associates - Desire.zip
Date: Oct 12 - 01:44
Host: 209.235.13.188 - US - United States MA - Massachusetts Somerville


That technical junk is actually telling us that at 1:44 AM on the 12th of October, somewhere near Boston, USA (Somerville, Massachusetts to be exact) someone downloaded a full copy of Desire from our website.

Intentionally. For free.

And now that person has our record in their collection digitally. And if they happen to like it, they know exactly where it came from. And they could potentially pass the files to others, or post a link to our site somewhere. And maybe we'll get another download from the USA next week.

And if we get enough of them, maybe we'll start planning a tour of the USA. And maybe we'll kick off the tour in Massachusetts.

Yeah, OK, I'm obviously angling for dramatic effect and over-stepping my own mark. But you get the idea.

The point is, it's up to that one glorious person. It's about the individual. Nobody is dictating the terms to this dear listener in Somerville, MA, USA.

Not radio, not print, not TV, not advertising. I know, because we haven’t done any in America. We can’t even afford to!

Whoever downloaded that copy of the album either made up their own mind, or heard about it from someone who mentioned it to them.

And they were able to get hold of it. Instantly.

It gives me a great deal of satisfaction to know that this kind of tracking and mapping is not illegal, nor the result of some complex programming, nor is it expensive or difficult … and it thoroughly amuses me that it happens to be precisely the same base-level technology that major record labels have been using to locate and prosecute downloaders and file sharers.

But beyond all that, the idea that someone, somewhere in America, might be listening to our record right now fills me with wonder and warmth. This simple, single download has taken on an almost magical hue in my mind. Even if they can't stand it, even if it turns their stomach, at least they got the chance to hear the work we produced.

If the primary purpose of creating music is to communicate a message as widely as possible, we've done it. And, for me at least, that's important. It's something to hold on to. It's a genuine achievement.

I suppose you could even call it ... success.