Commentary

Media X: You Can't Hear the Music

I wanted to write about how boring marketing has become, how even the Digital Age doesn't seem so exciting or even interesting anymore. How transparent is not only a term that connotes full disclosure, it can also mean that we see through your bullshit.

But in the earnest day-dreaming that constitutes content development for me, I mused about my son, who, as he often does, hijacked the column.

Feuer the Younger has launched a music management company called ASF Entertainment. He's got a Web site and a DBA. His friends are working for him, and his clients include a rapper, a folk singer, and a Jimi Hendrix impersonator, all of whom I'm told are "tight."

Gigs booked for this menagerie to date: none. Revenue generated: nothing. Funding provided by Dad: don't ask.

The young entrepreneur also has won an internship at a management company that handles assorted Marley brothers and White Zombie front man and film-gore specialist Rob Zombie, director of House of 1,000 Corpse and The Devil's Rejects.

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Youth culture? My kid knows it cold.

Now here's the truly depressing thing, my little media playthings: you don't.

See, I've bragged about the little shyster's internship to three of my best, ah, "sources," two who toil for agencies and one who reps a social-networking site. None know who Rob Zombie is, let alone that Bob Marley left siblings behind.

As Sam Rockwell says in Galaxy Quest, when he stumbles upon Tony Shaloub getting jiggy with a tentacled purple alien: That's just not right.

Granted, ASF Entertainment isn't making bank yet, but it will. And so I ask: How does my little pisher, who wouldn't know Martin Sorrell if he stepped on him, who'd think Paul Woolmington was an extraterrestrial if he ever met him, and that Irwin Gotlieb was the weird dude playing piano in the hotel lobby, get so far ahead of you?

He knows nothing about your strategies, your research, your integrations or your activations. And yet here he is, not yet 20, building "brands," he says, not acts. He's ignoring the big labels, building MySpace pages, negotiating download plans and ringtone deals, doing co-op programs with clothing companies and "a guy who makes bling."

Whenever I float an idea or a new communications channel even remotely connected to music I've discovered in my medialand excursions, he already knows about it. Knows its costs, its click-throughs, its track record.

And you, the professionals? You don't know who Rob Zombie is. With all your running around like hamsters with Blackberries, you still don't know the most basic things about the most important target market on the planet.

That's why you're boring.

For the record: with his band and solo, Rob Zombie has more gold and platinum discs than anyone else on the Geffen label. (Wikipedia says that, so you know it's true.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to fire up the Nano. There's this new track from a Jimi Hendrix impersonator I'm told is tight.

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