• by Tom Hespos , October 24, 2006

Last week, fellow Spin writer Cory Treffiletti explored the notion of what constitutes a "hit" in today's fragmented music landscape, where personalization and niche interests now rule over a marketplace that was once dominated by artists with mass appeal.

Some of the forward-thinking folks on the fringes of the music business see a label-less future coming for music artists, in which the majority of revenues and profits are not derived from record sales, but from touring and merchandise sales. It's an interesting concept, especially considering that labels are less apt these days to place a significant chunk of promotional dollars behind niche acts, and that bands have historically made a good deal of money from their live shows.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, particularly when I'm walking home from the office toward Penn Station and I see throngs of people standing outside Avalon and Madison Square Garden hoping to score tickets to see their favorite bands. I often see an artist's name on the marquee outside MSG and mumble to myself that I would have liked to have known about the show a couple of months ago so I could have made arrangements to see it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Bruce Springsteen, The Killers or Barenaked Ladies, but I'd really enjoy seeing one of their shows. In order to figure out where bands are touring, though, I probably need to sign up online at the band's Web site and hear about every little thing they're doing between now and the time they get around to scheduling a show in New York City. If I'm interested only in finding out where they're playing, I'm probably not interested in all of that. Multiply that by the hundreds of bands I'd likely go see if I had some advance warning of when they're coming to town, and it seems like an all-or-nothing proposition--either become a fanatic or risk missing the show.

What the music industry seems to lack is a way to get fans of live music to shows when those fans don't want to be bombarded with inane news items about every single act they declare a marginal interest in. I don't need to know about Billie Joe Armstrong's hotel party in Topeka, but I do want to know about the next time Green Day plays in the area.

Sound like a problem we have today in the marketing industry in general? We rarely allow for multiple levels of engagement. Instead, we'd rather treat everyone like a hardcore brand loyalist who wants to know anything and everything about a product or a brand. As Rishad Tobaccowala has said, "I want my headache to go away. I don't want a relationship with Tylenol."

We all have content preferences, and those preferences all suggest differing levels of engagement. Thus, we have to accommodate not only the slobbering enthusiast, but also the casual fan who wants just the basics.

I think there's something that we can all learn from this, whether we're in the music business or the business of promoting laundry soap. While brands and bands can be low consideration or high consideration, we need to understand that different people can desire different levels of engagement, and we need to accommodate that.

Perhaps one of the reasons why we don't have "hits" like we used to is that people expect us to be able to accommodate their expectation of involvement, and we can't. Who's to say that a new band couldn't pack MSG like the glory days of arena rock, with a base of hardcore fans filling the floor, and casual fans around the periphery?