SmoothViews - Keeping Smooth Jazz in Sight!

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Shannon West

The music business is fueled by hits. Even in types of music that might be considered elite and above it all. Business is a numbers game – how many units got sold, whether it's CD's, concert tickets, or songs. If a song or album sells a lot of copies and gets a lot of exposure it's a hit. If not it can disappear into the world of cult favorites or bargain bin oblivion and take the artist out of the spotlight in the process.

So what is a hit? Is it a pop artist selling a million or a niche artist getting to #1 on their genre chart? It's both and it's neither. A hit is a song or album that media considers worthy of coverage and promotion then by that process it gets exposure, becomes popular, and finds an audience that is willing to put their money where their ears are. At a pure grassroots level that would mean radio people would discover it and play it enthusiastically and listeners would pull out their wallets with equal enthusiasm. In that process the song or album would climb the chart and become a hit. In the real world there are a lot of gatekeepers and bumps in the road. The payola scandals in the fifties are pure history now, as are the stories of arm twisting, manipulation and underworld influence that were the dark side of the sweet ride during the music biz boom in the early eighties. The process has gravitated toward a middle ground where promotion and politics are a factor but not as much as they used to be when trade publications, big retailers, and powerful radio stations ruled the music world.

Over the last few decades promotion has become a huge factor because it filters which music you will hear in the first place. First, the record company would pick the song, which narrows the focus, then decide how much money to spend promoting it, which narrows the focus further. Promoters would pitch the song to the radio stations that had the most influence, again narrowing the focus to include mostly bigger cities. Radio stations would play it, but not very often until they had some assurance that people liked it through their testing process. But how do you know you'll like it if it is not played often enough for you to hear it? A lot of weird power mutations occurred in this process like the radio station's relationship with a promoter and the record company's willingness to invest in the song over a period of time. Timing itself could be a factor. There are stories in most musical memoirs and biographies about albums that came out the same day as a mega-hit like Michael Jackson, and were totally eclipsed. Sometimes a record company would even try to draw attention away from a song either to focus on a bigger priority or because their relationship with the artist had been unsatisfactory. The essence of the process, though, was that it was top-down. Executives picked the priorities and used a fairly small, select group of media entities to get the word out. The audience was forced to choose only from what was already on the menu.

The amount of music that listeners didn't get a chance to hear over the years is astounding. Very few songs made it past the filters of industry politics, promotional priorities, and radio format requirements. Letting people who don't really know your personal tastes control your music discovery process is never a good thing. You flat out miss too much in the process. Fortunately it is also a thing of the past. Those of us who are boomers remember when people discovered music, spread the word about it, and turned songs into hits. When radio stations and record companies found musicians because they had developed a fan base on their own. It happened without the technology we have now too. There was the "underground" passing of the word about bands and concerts, and albums making their way from dorm room to dorm room, or people in record stores turning you on to the newest stuff. Now we have the internet: social networking, iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, LastFM and all kinds of other places to share playlists and discoveries. No more "it's too exciting for the format" or "it's not a promotional priority." If enough people discover it, enjoy it, and share it, it's going to become popular, which is the essence of being a hit. Maybe not on the scale of whatever is riding high on the Top 40 chart but within the realm of less hyped genres there is a lot of room for something to spring from the grassroots and bloom.

I think about this while watching Ken Navarro start to use FaceBook and his website to build a fan base for his new release. I hope for this when I listen to Jeff Lorber's new one. Both of these are the kind of albums that excite the people who hear them. There are a lot of adults who still want music that doesn't fade into the background or cater to nostalgia, they want something innovative, substantial and (dare I say) progressive. I also think of "Double Face" - Deodato's collaboration with Al Jarreau. Recorded for a small label in Europe, it was stunning song that sounded like the vocals contemporary jazz stations used to play. It started to "leak" into the US via a YouTube video that got media people buzzing all over the country. Music writers reviewed, blogged, Tweeted, and shared it. Independent radio and internet stations jumped on it, fans did too. It ended up spending months in the top 10 and even went #1 on some genre charts. Then, most of the remaining ultra-conservative corporate stations ended up giving it at least token spins without the help of big money promotion. The internet has become one big living room and we can invite our friends over and play our favorite songs for them, just like we did in the dorms back in the day. When you hear something you love, let everyone know and when someone else shouts out about a song or an artist, give it a listen even if it isn't in your normal safety zone. Prefab hype is out, grassroots are in. You are the grassroots so let your ears take you to interesting places then invite others to join you on the trip.