poptimists | Seemingly Intractable Questions In Pop, No.1 in a Series

freakytigger.livejournal.com posting in

poptimists

How do you make pop work on TV?

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From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

You put it over an advert. How many songs have become hits because they've appeared in adverts? (That's a rhetorical question, rather than an invitation to start listing songs.)

Srsly, I don't think pop does work on TV, but then I don't think TV works any more. Why would I watch a TV show containing half an hour of music that I may or may not like, when instead, I can spend the half hour creating my own half hour music show online by watching video clips of my choosing? Exclusive content is the answer, but since no-one has yet developed a way to prevent TV items from appearing online, there is no real solution to this problem.

From:

katstevens.livejournal.com

I disagree here. Where telly comes in is giving popstars the opportunity to tell us there's more to them than this bunch of noises, which may/may not affect how much I like those noises and thence my inclination to give them some money.

I watch Popworld* not because I want to hear new music, but because I want to see popstars doing ridiculous things in order to plug their new single, e.g. the inspired Pop A Cap On Yo Ass, where Brian Harvey or someone had to pin a hat on a picture of a donkey...

*Only I have stopped watching Popworld in the last 2 months because a) the telly is no longer in the same room as the bed b) it's increasingly full of rubbish personality-free buskers eg The View, in whom I have no interest.

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

Where telly comes in is giving popstars the opportunity to tell us there's more to them than this bunch of noises, which may/may not affect how much I like those noises and thence my inclination to give them some money

Yes, but there's nothing to stop artists either
a) taking advantage of this opportunity by posting videos of themselves doing ridiculous things to plug their new single online (either as a standalone video, or as a trailer before the video for said single begins playing)
b) ensuring that their appearances on such TV shows as Popworld get uploaded onto ver web as individual clips. That way, if I am a Fergie fan, I don't have to watch 25 minutes of The View and James Morrison to see the Fergie segment of the show, I can just pick to watch the Fergie segment and then segue into something by another artist of my choosing.

From:

katstevens.livejournal.com

But what if I'm not a Fergie fan YET? How am I meant to know where her website is or what the video clip of her dressed as a giant pineapple is called on youtube?

Also getting artists to do this off their own back is v tricky (unless you are Britney Spears, hahahah), they're too busy touring/recording and worry about their respectable/badass image. Popworld had a dedicated team of dudes thinking up ridiculous stuff for their guests to do in order to get them to relax a bit and show their true personality (for better or for worse!).

This is why websites like Popjustice are enjoyable - I know where to look for regular popstar piss-take entertainment. However despite plenty of video clips and audio samples, it's not the same as seeing Fergie in a pineapple costume.

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

Hmmm, point taken, although from my experience, the format of TV pop music shows has always been 95% artists I've heard of to 5% artists I haven't. I think most people hear new artists on the radio, but don't see new artists on TV until they've already heard of them. When do you ever see unsigned artists on TV? You don't because TV show makers are worried that their viewers will channel hop if an artist comes on that they've not heard of. On radio, the same is true to an extent, which is one of the reasons why radio has daytime playlists.

Are you telling me that Fergie and the like don't have entire teams of image experts advising them? Artists spend ages recording videos, and there's no reason why inventive artists couldn't fit in time for a video shoot to do "something silly" to promote their music.

From:

katstevens.livejournal.com

> entire teams of image experts advising them

If they don't then they definitely should. A popstar's image makes such a difference to whether I am happy to fork out cash to support said artist or just ~~steal their musics off the interweb~~ er ignore them. That sounds quite shallow but DUDES this is ENTERTAINMENT we're talking about here. I want the full package from my pop.

> When do you ever see unsigned artists on TV?

Rarely, because unsigned artists are usually not on telly FOR A REASON. To make a reasonable impact on telly takes £££-a-plenty. Employing a good plugger for a start: £10k for 3-4 months' work; choreographer: about the same; hair/makeup/clothes budget:£400-£1500 depending on how many tv shows you do/no. of band members; promo video budget: £2000-£20000...I could go on. Remember, I'm talking about Entertaining Pop artists, not the next big indie singer-songwriter who only needs her guitar and a hairbrush to make it big - they can use the internet to stream their music & radio to reach a wide audience, and wouldn't really benefit from the investment required to exploit telly as a means of publicity.

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

Exactly. 'Unsigned artist' was a bad choice of words, but your comment was "what if I'm not a Fergie fan yet?" The point I was trying to make is that if you want to see artists you've never heard of, mainstream pop TV is not the answer, because they fill their airtime with artists people have heard of and want to hear again i.e. successful ones. A segment on ~~Evil Twin~~ Silver Springs dressed as pineapples is pointless. How do you find out about an act that you're not already a fan of? I imagine that the answer is very rarely "on pop TV" unless you basically ignore all radio, TV, print media for a year and then watch some pop TV.

From:

katstevens.livejournal.com

> they fill their airtime with artists people have heard of and want to hear again

Perhaps that's where mainstream pop TV is going wrong!

But I see what you're getting at. However just because I've heard of Fergie doesn't mean I'm a fan of hers. I might have ignored all previous reference to her and her music. Then whilst waiting for my favourite established artists Silver Springs to come on screen dressed as pineapples, I catch a glimpse of Fergie being interviewed about her love of small dogs wearing hats. I realise I was wrong to dismiss her without giving her a chance & go and seek out her album...

I realise that not everyone's opinions on popstars can change so wildly as mine can, and this is probably the actual reason music telly doesn't work.

From:

alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

I don't like seeing popstars do ridiculous things though! I think I would like Fergie a little bit LESS if I saw her wearing a pineapple costume.

I like it when popstars are guests on things like Have I Got News For You and read scripted jokes.

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

I should point out that I have completely stopped watching TV*. My viewing now consists of:

- YouTube and equivalent videos
- Downloaded TV shows of my choosing
- An occasional burst of Joost channel hopping
- DVDs

If I see something in the schedules that I would be interested in watching, more often than not I'm too busy to watch it at the time that it's on. But I can download it and watch at my leisure.

*

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

One thing is that TV is fully aware that it'll get broken up and YouTubed - this isn't really anything they can do anything about, but it means that the old Top Of The Pops model, with lots of discrete bits, doesn't work. The qn is how can it get round this by making the various elements in the show actually interplay. X-Factor, as Mark says below, does this in a very crude way - even if you have a favourite you're going to watch the whole thing anyway. Same with Eurovision.

Turning it into a game seems to work, but how to do this in a way which allows a blend of music styles, formats etc?

One obvious thing is to turn the Top 40 into a game format - the charts already is a kind of weekly listener-participation contest anyway. Take the top new entries and highest climbers each week, put in last week's winner, they perform (or show videos as schedules permit), there's interview and chat too, the "winner" each week gets prime spot on the Radio 1 or 2 playlist (making it worthwhile for acts to join in!).

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

Hmmm. Doesn't this depend on the presumption that the charts are still relevant? I know Rihanna is currently making history, but I honestly feel the charts are totally meaningless, because they don't take into account illegal downloads. And I know that the charts never used to include the number of times people had copied a song onto a cassette for their friends, but the difference is the scale. The charts are a statistical measure, and statistics are only as reliable as the sample size. And in the case of pop music, the sample size has become too small to be meaningful.

I honestly feel that TV is on its deathbed, and no amount of innovation in reality TV and gameshows will fix that. Sky+ and its peers are leading the way, and I foresee that within the next 5 to 10 years, there will be no such thing as daily TV listings, merely a list of "new shows added to the available program list" on your tellybox. This list will be fully searchable and of course, you will be able to set alerts to notify you when the next episode of your favourite show appears. News channels are probably exempt from the death of TV, but other than that, I can't see how the TV economic model works any more. If everyone is skipping through adverts, why would anyone pay to advertise?

The integration of the YouTube model with your home TV is the next step. I fully expect Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to be providing rival set top boxes within the next year or two.

Don't worry, ORGAFUN will still exist. It's just that the viewer will have a far greater say in how it works.

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

I think we're at slightly cross purposes - what you describe as the "death of TV" still sounds like TV to me! Death of a SCHEDULE maybe but not "of TV" - shows are still getting made and watched, the qn is - is there a viable way for music shows to be among them.

(I think as with most "deaths of" you exaggerate somewhat but this is a different conversation)

I think my idea DEPENDS on the charts not being taken particularly seriously any more, though I don't think I explained it too well - I don't see "new entries" and "highest climbers" as being purely sales determined, for instance.

Anyway, for the charts to not work as a representative sample you'd need to argue that the tastes of illegal downloaders are significantly different to the tastes of legal downloaders (whose purchases make up something like 70% of the Top 40). Of course his COULD be the case but I don't see why it would be.

As for sample size, let's err on the side of caution and say that a No.1 is 20,000 sales in a week, and that 5% of total buyers buy the No.1 single in that week (I would guess these figures are slightly low and very high, respectively), That gets you a sample size of 400,000, which any panel or poll in the world would kill for!

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

Bad choice of words, I accept - when I refer to the death of TV, I really meant the death of the traditional TV format of scheduled shows with ad breaks in the middle and at the end of shows.

Is there a viable way for music shows to continue to be made in the "new world"? Yes, there probably is, but I don't feel that anyone has come up with it yet. As has been said elsewhere on this post, the most successful recent examples (Pop Idol and X-Factor) are really shows about the production of music rather than the music itself.

Audience participation is clearly essential to any successful future shows. As I've said elsewhere, why would I watch a music show of which 90% of the content may not be interesting to me, when instead, I can watch clips (of music shows) of my choosing, that are interesting to me? I think that this is the key problem facing programme makers (and this is no different to the existing model) - how do I make the show that has the widest possible appeal without alienating too big a portion of my potential viewers?