SOME LIKE IT OTT · @shallowrewards
20th May 2014 from TwitLonger
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The Needle Drop Reviews Kyary Pamyu Pamyu
So this is a very conflicting review for me personally. First, the negative…
To this point I’ve avoided addressing Anthony Fantano, “the Internet’s busiest music nerd,” but he’s become an instructive signpost for content creators (nee artists), who find themselves inundated with “recognition” yet starved for profit in a media-mature Internet.
Lots of people make fun of Anthony, or pretend to be better than him in physical or intellectual ways. Most of this reduces to a particular dismissiveness made possible by the Internet. For the many antisocial .com behaviors pop psychologists and sociologists have cataloged, this impulse to get things behind one’s self—to be “over” some social phenomenon, or pretend it is less significant than its ubiquity or reception might indicate—is the fucking pits.
Lots of people say they don’t read Pitchfork. They do. I’ve been hearing that one since 1999. The site is so ubiquitous that hipsters today will delude themselves of legitimizing behaviors that allow them to say they don’t read Pitchfork. “I never go to the main page, EVER.” “I mean if somebody links me to something that’s actually worth reading, MAYBE.” Maybe. Maybe you don’t visit the site every day, but you visit it. You read it when someone reblogs or retweets them; you follow “attribution” back-links to understand why every other site on the Internet is shitting out second-stage coverage of Something Pitchfork Did.
Anyone who follows ground-level music culture while proudly proclaiming they avoid the preeminent gateway for that culture has far more to be embarrassed of than the object of their phony disregard. Fantano is overtly guilty of this, of pretending he exists “alongside” Pitchfork, when the bulk of his renown is down to giving part of the site’s audience something Pitchfork still hasn’t delivered: personality.
Anthony and I publish self-produced talking-head commentaries about pop music. I suspect we have little else in common, but we’ve never met, so who’s to say. Ten years my junior, Anthony doesn’t appear to have many real-world constraints preventing him from showing up for things, and he lives near-enough to New York City that he can take advantage of every opportunity. Fantano went to SCSU and is originally from Prospect, which is sort of the Connecticut equivalent of being from Farmingdale and watching fuckheads from Oyster Bay cut through your town in color-coordinated 458s whenever the LIE goes harsh realm.
With these oft-unrecognized but significant temporal advantages, Anthony has worked the indie PR circuit very successfully for the last two years. In April, his efforts culminated in a brand-marriage with MTV’s excruciatingly condescending Weird Vibes. This show, in a torturous effort to appear “self-effacing”—a repellent character trait that presumes your audience might otherwise be intimidated by you, or your celebrity—shows so little comprehension of prevailing trends in art, humor, and communication between human beings in 2013 as to fall beneath reproach.
Lots of people say they don’t watch Weird Vibes, and they don’t, yet Anthony might be the one person to fix the show for MTV, because self-effacement is part and parcel of his work. What he does is inherently ostentatious—a goofy sort of egotism—and to acknowledge and defuse that impression, he rightly pokes fun at himself, using characters, self-deprecating edits, and the like. Anthony recognizes himself as a character here, closer to a stand-up comic than academic critic, and has smartly honed the loudest aspects of his personality into a persona.
What fascinates me about Anthony is not his popularity, the quality of his thinking or his show’s production values, but rather his place in the scheme of music and culture dialog since the Internet became a stable rich-media platform. I’ve been fuming for years whether we’re doing anything “new” with the Internet and to this point, I still don’t really think we have. Most creative types are still holding back online, treating the Internet as some kind of demo reel for an imaginary Real Media windfall where they get their own sitcom or development deal. Elliot Aronow and David Shapiro are about the only people I can point to who’ve managed to wring classical NY Media ladder-climbing narratives from digital anarchy, but both were well-bred for their station, and pretty much threw boxcars for five straight years.
For the rest of us, diving headlong into the independent content creator model, as per Anthony and “Carles" before him, delivers predictable results at this point:
1) A show on Sirius satellite radio, which has de minimis penetration with the Under-40 demo. A massive waste of time that subjects you to terrible brand dilution. You might as well drive a Chevy Cruze.
2) Co-option by an already-established digital media titan. Joining a stable; becoming a link buried somewhere in a forest of flat .html frame pages with ten grafs of legalese in the source-code header. Be warned: in this world, bullshit magically flows up. “You won’t know who to trust.”
3) The last option, and the most sensible for any ambitious, self-contained content machine, is to take on advertisers. The simplest answer is to become a YouTube Partner and/or Channel.
Last summer, significant information about YouTube’s pay structure hit the net. The claimed mechanism for Partner sites is $3300 per million views, with the catch that, until you hit a million views in aggregate, YouTube pays nothing for your content (this isn’t a problem for Anthony, as his two most popular clips alone get him across the line). With give-or-take forty videos cracking 100,000 views, the Needle Drop has almost-certainly raked better than a middle-class income for a single man in central Connecticut. Anthony can probably even afford his own health care plan.
YouTube is, however, in the midst of a massive pivot toward paid subscriptions, looking to partner with existing talent and brands to take on cable channels. The content creators’ stake in this plan is a mystery, but if the subscriber pays $1/month per channel à la carte, or shells out $7.99 to access a basket of curated channels, that seems a markedly worse deal than $3300 per million views. The Needle Drop has just over 160,000 convenience subscribers at present. How many are legitimate, and how many out of them would be willing to pay $1 a month for the show, month over month? What percentage of that would Anthony see? How will he be taxed on this income?
Some presumptive and very optimal math: let’s say YouTube pays 5¢ on the dollar per direct subscriber. If Anthony maintains a steady base of 25,000 Needle Drop subscribers per month, and gets a more diluted share (2¢) of 75,000 subs who pay $7.99 for a prix fixe set of channels, he’s looking at $2750 a month, pre-tax, pre-health care. Any freelancers reading this are probably drooling right now, and they should be. If your options are dealing with puffed-up “editors” with no experience outside the digital sphere, who make $65,000 a year, calling you one of their “kids,” giving you bullshit assignments they can use to curry favor with PR firms without deigning to associate their name with some fucking nothing gang of rich kids, paying you $40,000 at best to literally fuck or walk, the self-brand sweepstakes is decidedly worth it.
Happy Independence Day, fuckers.