BLACK TIDE: A LESSON IN WHY THE MAJOR LABELS ARE DOOMED
By now you’ve no doubt heard of Interscope Records’ latest priority, the teenage metal band Black Tide. You may have missed their Ozzfest fiasco, in which they got bumped from the Jagermeister-sponsored second stage because they had members under 21 (their youngest is 14), only to be added to an early spot on the main stage. Either way you’ll be hearing a lot about them very soon; Interscope is making sure of this by spending an assload of cash on them. They bought the band a pricey spot on Ozzfest, they’ve sicked high-powered publicists on us for months (10 press releases to date! — no disrespect meant to these good folks though, as they’re great people and we know they’re just doing their job) and even FedExed us a watermarked CD that we can’t even play (these are themselves expensive to manufacture) a full month and a half before the album’s release date (Priority Overnight! what’s the rush, dudes?), all for a very, very young band.
It seems as if Interscope is pushing an old-school campaign to new-school fans. And when it boils down to it, the square peg won’t fit in the round whole.
I don’t wish to get involved in slagging Black Tide because of their age — not only is this fruitless (they certainly seem to be apt musicians), but plenty of extremely talented and successful bands started off young. In fact I’m not even going to talk about Black Tide’s music at all in this piece. But here’s the problem: Interscope is spending big money to run a positively old-school marketing campaign for a band whose target demographic — namely kids the same age or younger than the band members — won’t respond to this kind of bought popularity. In a crumbling record sales market where the name of the game is moderation and niche, Interscope doesn’t seem to be embracing either, instead hedging their bets that the carpet-bomb/scorced-earth method of marketing (to quote the honorable Bob Lefsetz) will saturate enough media to make an imprint. In a climate where freshly signed established bands can’t even recoup, how is a brand new band expected to make anyone, including themselves, any money?
Today’s teenagers are smarter than ever before. Their bullshit detectors are set to super-sensitive, and they can smell it coming a mile away. They want interactive content, direct contact with the band, cool videos, and social networking, not coverage on MTV and in Revolver. When that big budget Black Tide video by a big name director shows up on MTV, kids’ bullshit meters are going to rocket into the stratosphere. What’s more, metal is a genre whose participants and fans pride themselves on grassroots success; nothing garners more respect from the metal community than a band who rises to domination through relentless touring and hard work from the ground up, and in turn nothing draws more ire than popularity that doesn’t seem to be earned. I can think of exactly one metal band ever who rose to true, lasting, multi-platinum superstardom on a major label, and you better believe that band paid their dues in the underground for a looong time.
The handling of Black Tide is the kind of thinking that is going to bury the record business even further, all the while destroying the credibility of 4 young kids who are surely, and understandably, really fucking amped to be given a shot at success, the way any sane person in a signed band would be. If this project ends up being a flop, no one at Interscope can claim they didn’t see it coming. This kind of economic model just doesn’t hold up in today’s music business.
In short, I don’t see any way that this project can be successful. At best, the band members will have some fun touring and pretending to be rockstars for two years while the record company swindles a few clueless teens into buying records, tickets and merch (if I were a betting man I’d say Interscope has these guys locked into a 360 deal). At worst, they’ll squander their advances and be all the poorer, two years older and without a shred of money, credibility, or a clue of what to do in life.
If I were Black Tide I’d run for the hills. If I were Interscope I’d cut my losses now before more hard-working label folk lose their jobs.
-VN
