By way of preface, for the kind few of you who stopped by to comment in last week's SNLC, I finally did reply to your comments, in a fairly extreme case of 'better late than never'. Having said that, here's a follow-up to said SNLC, not that you asked for one, but I thought one seemed appropriate, because of this response on the website of the UK classical music publication Gramophone. This got 40 comments, a shockingly high # for a Gramophone blog post. However, upon closer examination.....
.....35 of the 40 comments were from just 2 respondents, "flutefan" and "John Sebastian". This burst the bubble of my initial reaction to seeing that many responses, because as a quick cursory examination will reveal, most Gramophone blog posts get no comments at all. 1 or 2, if the blogger is lucky. They get read, to be sure, as you can witness by the number of FB likes in a given article that generally number more than 1 or 2. And in the case of the particular back-and-forth between the two correspondents, I had the nagging feeling as I was reading through the comments sequentially that it might degenerate into a name-calling e-war, but fortunately this turned out not to be the case.
That aside, getting into what the guest blogger, Henry Norman, a student at the University of St. Andrews, wrote, he's obviously generationally diametrically opposite to Zimerman, in that HM is clearly used to using YT as a primary source for learning about music performances. He admits as much at the start:
"When it comes to my classical music viewing habits, however, YouTube is the primary medium through which I access the genre. This, I believe, is not an uncommon state of affairs, representing reality amongst many of my fellow 20-something student colleagues. If we are honest, most young people will not take time to go to the opera or see a recital, instead responding well to things that are accessible, cheap and entertaining."
When in cities like Chicago or NYC, I do actually see a decent number of 20-somethings in the audiences, sprinkled amongst the sea of oldsters that still comprises the great majority of classical concertgoers. It helps that in cities like Chicago, NYC, or Boston, public transportation is readily available for young folks to get to concert halls. That's not the case where I live.
HN also mentions the classic "rags to (relative) riches" story of Valentina Lisitsa as someone who used YT to market her way out of obscurity. I once saw Lisitsa in concert years back, with the Prague Chamber Orchestra, as soloist in Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1 (for nerdy compleatists, the solo trumpet was the young Russian virtuoso Sergei Nakariakov). VL has also worked with Hilary Hahn in concert and on recordings, so clearly she's no slouch. Yet until she decided to go for broke on YT, she hadn't really broken out into the big time. Her self-promotion activities via Amazon and YT obviously changed that. But she clearly is the exception rather than the rule, as I don't know of any other classical artist who has successfully promoted her/himself the same way.
Interestingly, a musician from a totally diametrically directional genre from classical music, the hip-hop artist Hoodie Allen, as profiled here, took a seemingly similar to approach as Lisitsa (though obviously before her), and one thinks that Henry Norman would sympathize:
"Like many musicians trying to build a following today, [Allen] concluded it was better to give his songs away rather than charge for them."
So how to make a living this way? Obviously it's not just trying to make money from recordings, since in a sense, he isn't, based on this model, but through touring the country and giving live concerts. Besides getting fees up front and a cut of the box office, he can sell his swag at each venue and pocket the proceeds more directly than he were operating through a major label, with loads of middlemen taking their cut.
The article points out that Allen (born Steven Markowitz) is using old-fashioned marketing with new technology, in essence:
"He signs autographs and poses for pictures, a smile always on his face. Within minutes, as Hoodie knows, many of these photos will be posted on Facebook and Twitter, reinforcing, in a way, his own viral marketing campaign."
To the older generation of classical, this sort of thinking might seem antipathetic to how they were trained, where it's all about the artistry and not really about promotion. The catch there is that even if you're the greatest instrumentalist in the world, unless someone promotes you or you promote yourself, no one will know about you. The younger and more e-media savvy generation is presumably less worried about this, and recognizes the need for this kind of promotion. I'm exaggerating and oversimplifying (not to mention writing this in a hurry), but you get the point.
Norman posits at the end of his article:
"The moral of the story, for me, appears simple. Treat YouTube with hostility and you risk missing the party you so desperately need to attend. Far from destroying classical music, YouTube has given me the unparalleled freedom to discover new music without having to break the bank."
The question left hanging there, however, is whether after Norman is done with university and hopefully has landed a job, will he take his musical interests developed from YT and actually go to live concerts? Nothing beats the live event, which not even the most faithful electronic reproduction can match. Or is it going to be just YT-ing it for his whole life? We'll have to wait and see.
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week.....