Why upload and download but keep going nowhere?

It’s been questioned and criticised and analysed for around three years. Now, during these Groundhog days of social distancing and surviving instead of living, being on “social” media just might not be, as some used to say, not where it’s at.

Those who have suddenly seen clutter instead of substance are either closing their online accounts or else are being more selective about how they use their time.

Those who heard those warning bells ringing from as far back as the days of Napster and MySpace are saying, “We told you so”. They mention some things kinda similar from back in the day: the pointlessness of sending chain letters to keep away bad luck and the similarity of slam books and Facebook.

As fate would have it- or karma or dogma- the women with whom I’ve had long-term relationships never ever showed any interest in being on these platforms for personal use. They didn’t see the need for it, had self confidence, and quietly watched from afar how something like Facebook had changed many of their friends- intelligent adults with nothing to prove to anybody, but who suddenly embraced a carefully coiffured and manicured second life.

Me, I’ve had an on-off relationship with social media, something not attracted to personally, but needed as a branding exercise to help market my work and that of my companies. If used with the right content, and strategies in place, these online channels can, of course, be effective to any consumer driven business.

Twitter certainly works for James Blunt as he uses it with clever humour by taking le pissoir of his rep for producing gawd awful bland music. Smart.

The key is to use social media without social media using you.

Social media grew out of the need of Gen Z, or X or Y or whatever it was and is today, wanting somewhere to be seen and heard and with the savviest amongst these channels feeding this need.

This need ballooned into something no one saw coming. It was a different kind of pandemic.

Like that memorable scene in Godfather 2 where Michael Corleone wants to leave the family business which keeps dragging him back in, once sucked into any social media platform, like any other addiction, it can take over, and the tail starts to wag the dog.

Twitter, for example, is the most popular online platform for quick news bites. The problem occurs when these bites become a voracious appetite for anything and everything that’s tweeted.

This then manifests itself into a multi-headed monster feeding off one’s “interest” in randomly scrolling down and pressing that “Like” button, often for tweets with the largest numbers of “Likes”, or anything with cute cats. Either that or answering questions like, “Which song was playing in the background when you first had sex?”

Like Little Red Riding Hood picking up crumbs that lead her to Grandma’s house, these questions are answered with no second thoughts given about why one is bothering with something this random. Boredom plays tricks with your mind.

One can walk away and switch off from this dumbed down click bait.

What’s tough to accept are those who take out their anger on Twitter with foul, hateful and moronic tweets replete with bad spelling and gawd awful grammar.

Proven to be a trigger for mental health problems, new online laws have been talked about for almost two decades. Where are they? Maybe they’re not here because this is how everything is being choreographed by those manipulative puppet masters...

Getting back to Twitter- did we ever leave it?-though there’s really no need to mention how this has been used in politics.

Twitter is where, for over four years, America was pretty much guided by whoever was tweeting what and from where and to whom and which gave birth to every kind of hashtag. This was led by the #fakenews clarion call and spilled over in Washington with the events of January 6th.

Though not there at the time, this day brought back memories of the storming of Le Bastille.

From time to time, these online platforms are forced to get on the back foot to appease their critics with promises on how well they are policing everything not in line with their Codes Of Conduct And Practices, but these are not working.

They have never worked because “social media”, and all the data it collects is a business that’s financed and controlled by even bigger business.

We should know all this by now, but the constant feeding of egos and providing a showcase for this content shows savvy marketing at work.

One particular platform aimed at a younger demographic sells its visitors with a buffet of choices. The focus is on the “fame game” and the importance of numbers. It might look bright and breezy, but it’s dark and dank. Everything a visitor shows interest in is noted and used later.

It’s also where porn has been creeping in for the past few years. Reports of this happening have been dismissed by the platform, especially in the past year.

The relevance of social media has been troubling me for almost two years- the need for “social media experts” and the importance placed on those KOLs- Key Opinion Leaders- and overnight social media “influencers”.

All this reminds me of why, when in the music industry, I stopped the practice of us aimlessly hiring expensive research companies to tell us what we should have already known.

It also reminds me of how and why every major music company embraced “digital marketing” overnight just to seem relevant.

Brought in to keep up with the tech companies who had hijacked our relevance were armies of “digital marketers”.

Most were from technology companies who had zero knowledge of music or, well, marketing. But they knew the buzzwords needed to bamboozle those at the top and became untouchables. This was until the novelty of these hires very quickly ran its course.

How and why and when did things change where EVERY business today needs to be on every online platform?

What’s the strategy? Where’s the beef? And who are these hires?

What do they bring to the table that’s truly relevant other than a nice smile and the ability to be agreeable to anything?

Knowing that my current tenure on social media was coming to an end or might have even ended, I have remembered to exhale. When banging away on my computer and lost in the excitement of my thoughts, a now ex would always remind me to breathe.

I am learning to breathe- properly- all over again. I feel more relaxed and even want to dance with the sugarplum fairies.

I have more time to THINK things through, write, read, create music and keep learning, especially about the human condition.

When I go out these days, it’s with my phone off. I enjoy my meals without the urge to photograph them, and share these online. My time is with whoever I am with and nothing else.

I am more selective about who I spend quality time and am becoming more productive...but by working on projects I believe in and not to follow whatever might be “trending”.

Personally, I think this neediness to be part of what’s “trending” and mention algorithms and analytics is what has crippled and devalued the purity and natural flow of music.

Music has never ever been an exact science. It’s not something that’s push button formulaic doodling that nearly anyone can do.

Right now, music is going nowhere. “Streams” are hardly going to make anyone rich except for Taylor Swift and a handful of others major artists.

Unless owning deep back catalogues by major artists or big labels like Motown, Island, Interscope, Def Jam etc and dumping these onto a music streaming site for hundreds of millions of dollars, there’s nothing else of value in Old Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard. That cupboard has been bare and bankrupt for years.

More importantly, it’s about not being emotionally bankrupt and bereft of real feelings.

Getting back to the real world is long overdue.

Live a little. Love a lot. Enjoy life. Be choosy in every aspect of life. Less is more.

Kung Hei Fat Choy and make The Lunar New Year a, yes, roaring success.

#socialmedia #marketing #reality #keepitreal #music #bechoosy #clickbait #relevance

The meaningless of awards shows

As a wide eyed kid and watching television with my parents and also when first married, there was a certain excitement in knowing who the winners might be. There were even office pools with odds to guess the results of the Oscars.

Times change, however, and social media has changed everything and most people I know. Amongst my “life changes” is that, thankfully, I’ve stopped being the rabid fan of television talent shows, notably the early seasons of “American Idol”, and, most definitely, music awards shows.

If these were already starting to lose their appeal decades ago when they became turgid and cornball karaoke competitions for a middle age audience wanting to see a kid bellow out a Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey hit, they’re now as irrelevant as hula hoops, Vanilla Ice and what’s called “chart success”.

Precisely which chart? There are so many around these days for every music genre and sub genres hiding in sub genres.

The other question is this: Even if topping whatever chart, was this achieved through buying one’s way up there or through real sales and popularity?

I guess one has former host of the Golden Globes- Ricky Gervais- to thank for finally taking a pick axe and killing off pretty much every tiresome and hypocritical awards beast with some much needed Truth serum.

It was wonderful television- all those award winning faces having to ad-lib for the cameras and look au fait with what Gervais was lobbying their way like mega grenades. He was a better goodfella than Joe Pesci.

The first time I saw the inner workings of these awards shows “up close and personal” was when with the Regional Office of Universal Music Asia and being, er, entertained for lunch by MTV Asia executives.

The music video channel with its superficial VJs and overnight cool senior executives had been launched as part of STARTV.

For us in the music companies, we bought into this cow patch because, well, it was a hugely successful and ultra hip brand. We so wanted to be part of the Great Hip.

The fact was that the channel hadn’t done its homework. Perhaps so wrapped up with its image, there was the belief that in complicated Asia one size fit all. Like that singing, dancing Bollywood videos would attract audiences throughout the region, and that music videos by artists singing in Mandarin would attract non-Chinese audiences etc etc.

All this from senior executives supposedly in sync with the tribal habits of hip young Asians?

This went on for a while until everything came to a screeching halt. The American Music Television station had to backtrack, regroup and eventually be made available on three different satellite beams for three very different groups of viewers from different parts of the region- India, China and Southeast Asia- mainly Indonesia and the Philippines.

Somewhere along the way, and to keep the interest level in the channel from not tanking completely, along came The MTV Asia Music Awards.

This is when I realised just how easily duped those of us in the music companies could be- and how it didn’t matter. We had no shame.

MTV Asia needed some mouth to mouth resuscitation and damage control and so approached each of the major music companies to see which international artists we could deliver to them for their awards show.

Depending on the popularity of the artist or artists available, and in return for us flying these artists over on our dollar, perhaps- just perhaps- they could win a certain award. It was a good carrot to dangle in front of us.

Winning was everything and something that would make us look good with Head Office and artist management.

There was also the opportunity for any artist who supported this MTV awards show to be owed something in the way of a payback like being named Artist Of The Month, something especially important if there was a new record and an accompanying tour to promote.

Here’s the thing: None of us saw anything wrong with any of this.

Did we think about the music fans and that perhaps the awards they were receiving were fixed? No.

For many of us, it was about surviving and moving up the corporate ladder.

If our bosses agreed to what we were negotiating for our artists and for our company, why should we worry? Ignorance is bliss.

These days when music has been devalued and is listened to in bibs and bobs with there being so much of everything to watch and listen and taste at that buffet table of content, whether the Grammys, the Grannies or the Oscars or the Tonys, winning one of these awards might be nice for the mantelpiece, but how many care about who, for instance, has been named New Artist Of The Year or is the winner of any category?

Did the Beatles ever win a Grammy? Or Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Led Zeppelin or the Stones? Think they care? Do you care?

There are so many Lifetime Achievement Awards being hurriedly given out these days to “legacy acts” so as to render them meaningless.

Personally, it’s an insult to some great artists.

It’s almost as if the jury of some of these awards shows might be suffering from guilt pangs for ignoring these artists when in their creative prime. Could these almost token awards appear to be about making up for lost time. Really lost.

Earlier this week, a colleague mentioned that boy band BTS had “done it again”. I had no idea what he was talking about. Still don’t. He was, I thought, talking about the K-Pop phenomenon having won their second Grammy. Really?

Knowing something about the money that’s gone into making K-Pop go global, here’s someone still to be convinced that a Korean act can be such a mega success in what appears to be a xenophobic America. But wait: Just maybe the party’s over? And not a nanu second too soon.

https://variety.com/2021/music/news/grammy-snubs-surprises-jon-batiste-bts-lady-gaga-1235118618/

More interestingly, a friend who loves her music and I were talking the other day about the “Get Back” documentary on the Beatles when she mentioned about the “anti awards awards”, or The Tribute Awards.

Though still to be forty, and with nothing to do with the music business, she certainly knows her Bob Dylan from Dylan Thomas and all the greats who have come before and are now gone and sadly forgotten.

Her idea is not some awards show, but how here’s a concept for a documentary that salutes the musical past and introduces a generation who don’t know about some of the greatest musicians and music that’s been lost in the Lido Shuffle.

Smart lady. This just might be the spark needed to re-start the fire and interest in music, at a time where often, everything old is new again.

Fingers crossed that someone makes this happen.

#awardsshows #grammys #bts #rickygervais #legacyacts #MTVAsia #socialmedia #relevance