How to Get a Record Deal Without Playing a Show: Mailbag
Thanks for submitting questions! This week we dive into questions about Taylor Swift's Grammy eligibility, the best swan songs, and songs about doctors, among other things.
I’m always impressed with the breadth and depth of the questions that readers pose each month. This month covers things as mundane as Grammy eligibility to things as complex as the cultural lifespan of hit songs to things as wacky as a history of songs about doctors. If you have a question for next month, feel free to send it my way. If your question is selected, you get a premium subscription to this newsletter, which includes additional writing each week.
For decades, it was always said that a new band needed to play shows to gain a fanbase. Is that still true? - Richard
In the last few weeks, there has been an intense bidding war to sign the R&B singer 4Batz on the strength of his viral single “act ii: date at 8”. Billboard’s recent article on the singer captures many of the ideas you are getting at in your question.
Four years ago, it was routine for previously unknown artists with viral singles to score big record deals in a matter of weeks. But that path slowed to a trickle in 2023, and some label executives started to worry about a stagnant climate for new artists.
That helps explain why many A&R executives are now eager to sign 4Batz. One executive calls the singer’s rapid ascent “the most exciting thing to happen in the last six months” in the music industry …
While he has released just two songs to date, they are already earning more than 9 million streams a week in the United States … Due to this upward momentum, two sources familiar with the label negotiations say they are all but certain to end in a robust seven-figure deal for 4Batz.
I can’t be sure, but I would bet that 4Batz does not have extensive experience performing live. He just has two songs that Billboard describes as “hypnotic and loop-able, with feathery come-ons.” And that’s all you need today.
The article goes onto recall how artists like Lil Tecca, Arizona Zervas, and Ant Saunders got deals in a similar fashion. In fact, I remember speaking with someone at Republic Records right around the craze surrounding for Zervas’s smash “Roxanne”, and they told me that before Zervas was signed, he had never performed live. His fanbase was built entirely online.
Is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? The honest answer is that it’s probably neither. I will say that if you go see someone in concert who hasn’t paid their dues on stage, they are usually awful. They can get better, but the only way to do that is the same way things have been done for decades. Go from city-to-city and play as many shows as you possibly can.
After re-listening to Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl this week, I started thinking about great swan songs. What do you think the greatest swan song is? Mystery Girl makes it into my top five. - Matt
First, let’s define what a swan song is. For the purposes of this discussion, a swan song will be an artist’s final album before they die, break-up, or retire. The album can be released posthumously — as was the case with Mystery Girl — but it must be largely completed before death.
We’re not counting things that are put together by an artist’s estate years after they died. We’re also not going to count artists that have fewer than four albums. It feels odd to call Grace by Jeff Buckley a swan song when he only has one album. With those parameters in mind, here are some of my favorites ordered by release year.
Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel (1970): If this album only had “The Boxer” and ten other horrible songs, I’d still put it on this list. But then when you consider that “Cecilia” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” are on the same record, it becomes an undeniable classic. The only misstep is the uninspired cover of “Bye Bye Love”.
I Got a Name by Jim Croce (1973): On many days, if you asked me who my favorite songwriter of all-time was, I’d say Jim Croce. When I Got a Name was released just a few months after his tragic death in 1973, he was still at the height of his powers, able to conjure characters vividly with just a few words. The lead guitar played on this record by Maury Muehleisen — who sadly also died with Croce — is also criminally underrated.
Doo-Bop by Miles Davis (1992): The fact that Miles Davis collaborated with hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee on this record is proof that he was pushing his music to its limits up to the very end. Though the record received negative reviews upon release, I think it sounds fresher than ever decades later.
Icky Thump by The White Stripes (2007): Though I would love if we got another album from The White Stripes, it looks like this is remain the last given Meg White’s aversion to publicity. It’s not my favorite record by the duo, but it still has the primal power of their best work.
You Want It Darker by Leonard Cohen (2016): In 2016, both David Bowie and Leonard Cohen released albums shortly before dying. Both were heaped with praise, but I’ve found myself returning to Cohen’s swan song more frequently than Bowie’s. The album deftly juxtaposes both darkness and humor.
How much longer will we have to labor under the weight of Boomer-era nostalgia eating up so much space and discourse in music culture? Now that hedge-funds own the catalogs of classic artists are we condemned to the immortal corporate lifetimes of those asset-vehicles before we're free again? - Shaggy
From my perspective, I don’t think we are destined to live under the hegemony of music of the Baby Boomer era forever. In fact, outside of certain circles, I think the cultural clout of that generation is already quite diminished. Let me explain why with two examples.
The Evolution of Classic Rock Radio
In 2014, my friend Walt Hickey wrote one of my favorite data-driven music essays called “Why Classic Rock Isn’t What It Used to Be”. In the piece, he used data from radio to show how bands that fall under the classic rock moniker change over time. I can see this if I look at the recently played music on my local classic rock station, Q104.3. Of the last hundred songs played, only seven were from the 1960s:
“Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf (1968)
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by The Rolling Stones (1969)
“Hello, I Love You” by The Doors (1968)
“Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison (1967)
“Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones (1969)
“Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles (1966)
“Foxy Lady” by Jimi Hendrix (1967)
You’ll notice something else about those songs from the 1960s. They are all from the late-1960s. Rock’s early years have effectively been excised from the classic rock canon. As time marches on, the late-1960s will also be excised from that canon. In the aforementioned piece by Walt Hickey, Eric Wellman — a classic rock brand manager for Clear Channel — notes this is exactly how things work.
Wellman said release years have nothing to do with what makes a song “classic rock”; the ability of the genre to grow based on consumers’ tastes is one of the things that’s given it such longevity …
“The standard in the industry these days is an online music test or an auditorium music test where you just gather a sample and have them rate songs based on the hooks — the most familiar parts of the song — and you just get back a whole slew of data,” Wellman said. The stations find a cluster of people who like the music that makes up the core of classic rock, and then finds out what else they like. They like R.E.M.? Well, R.E.M. is now classic rock. “It’s really that simple,” Wellman said.
In other words, 20 years ago we wouldn’t have called Nirvana or Red Hot Chili Peppers classic rock bands. Now, they have entered the canon while artists from the 1960s, like The Rascals and The Byrds, have fallen by the wayside.
The Declining Value of Classic Rock Catalogs
As you noted, we’ve seen eye-popping amounts of money thrown around in the last few years to purchase the publishing rights of legacy catalogs. Given that those investors want to turn a profit, you will likely see those songs repackaged, remixed, and resold one hundred times over. The problem is that turning a profit on old intellectual property is not easy. Here is the stock price for Hipgnosis, one of the largest music investment funds to appear over the last few years.
This song investment craze aside, it is hard to continue to make money from long-dead musicians, even if they were wildly famous because younger people just don’t care about those artists after a certain point. In 2020, Rolling Stone reported that the Elvis Presley estate had seen revenues fall 30%. Elvis-related memorabilia was also only selling for a fraction of what it was just a few years before. In other words, you can rest assured that everything will fade away. By the end of the 2020s, we’ll probably be more tired of hearing about stars from the 1990s than the 1960s.
Has the average time a song remains on the Billboard charts changed over time? In other words, is music popularity more short-term now than before? - Paco
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