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In the case of the Smashing Pumpkins, for instance, we have a band who officially ended their career together by making their final album available only on the Internet. While their retirement occurred more than a year ago, their Web forum contains, at a recent glance, nearly 64,000 messages. This is the section devoted exclusively to the band. The "Non-Smashing Pumpkins" portion of the message board is nearing 100,000 messages with discussion devoted primarily to religious issues. The Pumpkins' lead singer/songwriter, Billy Corgan, recently penned a message of encouragement and gratitude to his audience, whose interest in maintaining the conversation and energy generated by his music is, in his view, an ongoing inspiration to keep on keeping on. He was reluctant to speak too specifically concerning what some listeners had identified in his work as a summons to revolution, but he did note the presence of a kindred spirit in Radiohead's Kid A while mentioning that some might find much of worth, as he has, in the novels of Philip K. Dick.
While talk of revolution might be premature, it surely isn't too much to say that there is a spirit of resistance taking root within the music-buying public, especially among young people. And Corgan's reference to Philip K. Dick is particularly telling. For many, the most convincing metanarratives of our age are films like The Matrix and The Truman Show, whose protagonists discover themselves in carefully scripted, immersive environments which create the illusion of freedom while using inhabitants to fuel their own death-dealing machinery. Dick perfected such parables of intense paranoia in the sixties and seventies, but he might have had trouble overestimating the power of MTV to create demand and move product.
As the music business becomes more connected to the online community, it's probably not overly hopeful to predict that the painstakingly manufactured pop of Eminem, Britney Spears, and the Backstreet Boys will appear more contrived to more people. The disenchanted may even begin to see through the disguise of a band like Limp Bizkit, whose sedulously cultivated image of authentic rage against the machine is the brainchild of lead singer Fred Durst, a 30-year-old vice president of Interscope Records. He could just as easily be directing a campaign to re-brand Ford trucks.
For the time being, it's true, downloads of bands like Limp Bizkit and 'NSYNC are proportional to their CD sales, but this owes more to their easy perpetuation through radio and television (especially via MTV) than to any Internet-specific momentum. Their image-driven success will doubtless continue for some time to come, but in the long run the Internet won't lend itself to those tried and true marketing strategies. A message board dedicated to Christina Aguilera can't indefinitely sustain discussion of her clothing, her hair style, and who she's dating.
But the Internet will reward the artist whose music embodies a movement that makes of the listener more than a consumer. As Alderman points out, it's no accident that it was Grateful Dead fans who first saw the potential of the Internet as a site for a music-centered community. And the most recent Internet success story is certainly Radiohead, whose aforementioned Kid A reached number one on the Billboard charts without providing any pre-releases to news organizations or music magazines. They simply made sure it was available on Napster long before its official release, and their Internet fans took care of the rest.
Appropriately enough, Radiohead's music describes (among other things) the terror of waking up in a purely commercial reality where your imagination has been hijacked and the consequences of your spending and the forces that guide your consumption are hidden from view. It should come as no surprise that many of the band's fans are the type of people who protest G8 summits. As a visit to their Website makes clear, they assume that their listeners are at least as intelligent as they are. And by answering their fans' questions themselves, they supplement their appearances in the media with their own means which can bypass the hype altogether. It's also interesting to note that Radiohead's last two albums have been available in the slightly more expensive format of ornately illustrated books (one hardcover) that also include the actual CD. It could be that they're anticipating a time when, in order to make a profit, they'll be forced to offer a product that can't be downloaded.
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