Rock & Roll is Not Dead, It’s Marketed!
Billboard works very hard to market Rock & Roll in various ways.
Billboard is one of the best known music magazines of all time. But with the decline of the record industry, they’ve had to rebrand themselves into something more. They have pushed the limit when it comes to The Charts.
So many charts! Rock & Roll, Country, Hiphop, R&B, you name it, they have a list or “Chart” for it. It is truly a market driven rating system, as over all grosses in sales of albums and concert tickets very much rate an artist.
Some may find this disdainful. Money does not make art. It does help though.
If there was no money in Rock & Roll, then we would never get Artists like the Beatles or Jack White, but to balance out that rush of musical genius, we have to suffer through commodities like Justin Bieber.
Anyways, I got to work a live event for Billboard at the beautiful Roosevelt hotel. It was their Touring awards, and I have to say, that may be their best award. It’s a brilliant use of “the tour” as a marketing device.
Most people would think that a band goes on tour because it sells a lot of albums, not that it goes on tour to sell more albums. Smaller bands, sure, but household names like Journey?
That’s pretty amazing. Rock& Roll artists don’t really read off the prompter, they improvise. But MTVs Matt Pinfield definitely reads off the prompter. He was our Rock & Roll MC for the evening. He did a fine job.
Working in teleprompting isn’t always that interesting, but this time around, I felt like a Rock Star.
Billboard takes numbers and turns Rock & Roll into quantifiable data.
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