An Exercise In Branding
Carrying on from the comments a few comments on the old blog, I've been thinking about Branding, both of bands and of record labels. An anonymous person pointed out that on {Fermat's Femmes'} new single for {Liverlust Records} the logo of the record company was far bigger and more prominent than either of the bands' names, let alone the actual names of the tracks on the single!
I'm actually more genuinely amused than pissed off. (Too many other things to be angry about.) But what I find funny is that one of the first conversations I had with {Lou Liverlust} was all about how he couldn't listen to bubblegum artists like Britney Spears and Girls Aloud because, quote unquote, all he could hear was "marketing". Yet this record looks to me, for all the world, like an exercise in branding, to the exlcusion of any actual music. The ironing is delicious!
You know, I've looked through my record collection, both alternative and pop, indie labels and major labels. With the exception of a couple of anonymous dance records which have a standard design, and some 60s records which have tiny logos in the lower right hand corner, modern releases just don't display the name of the record company on the front cover. Nope, neither Creation Records, nor Pete Waterman. The logo of the label is usually on the back of the cover, sometimes the spine in the case of CDs, and on the actual label of the Vinyl or CD.
Even back in the golden days of the bubblegum hit factories, the brand identity was disguised in made-up bands like the Ohio Express and the Archies and the 1910 Fruitgum Company. The brand, visually, certainly wasn't Buddha Records or Kasenetz/Katz. That's what I find intriguing about them, the idea of the songwriter/producer as eminence gris.
So what has happened, with indie record labels in the past 10 to 20 years that the label brand has become more powerful than the bands brands? Much more so than these "major labels" that the indie boys hypocritically despise for their "sound of marketing"? I don't know anyone who buys an EMI record or a Sony record. But I certainly know people who will buy Constellation Record or a Warp Record on the strength of the label.
So this puts the idea, perhaps, into the heads of people like {Lou Liverlust} that this Indie Lable Brand is far more important - and therefore more symbolically important on the cover itself - than the bands involved or even their music.
And I'm sorry, but that makes me feel for more effectively like a Product, whose Art is being subsumed into a Brand Identity than any Girls Aloud or Sugababes record ever did.
Maybe it's a power struggle - *I* created the {Fermat's Femmes} brand, and I'm just not having it subsumed into someone else's Tony Wilson act. But what amuses/pisses me off the most about it is the hypocrisy of these indie boy types, slagging off bubblegum for marketing, while pushing their own personal brands so heavily. It's like slagging off Witchcraft while privately running a discount counter for the selling of souls.
I'm actually more genuinely amused than pissed off. (Too many other things to be angry about.) But what I find funny is that one of the first conversations I had with {Lou Liverlust} was all about how he couldn't listen to bubblegum artists like Britney Spears and Girls Aloud because, quote unquote, all he could hear was "marketing". Yet this record looks to me, for all the world, like an exercise in branding, to the exlcusion of any actual music. The ironing is delicious!
You know, I've looked through my record collection, both alternative and pop, indie labels and major labels. With the exception of a couple of anonymous dance records which have a standard design, and some 60s records which have tiny logos in the lower right hand corner, modern releases just don't display the name of the record company on the front cover. Nope, neither Creation Records, nor Pete Waterman. The logo of the label is usually on the back of the cover, sometimes the spine in the case of CDs, and on the actual label of the Vinyl or CD.
Even back in the golden days of the bubblegum hit factories, the brand identity was disguised in made-up bands like the Ohio Express and the Archies and the 1910 Fruitgum Company. The brand, visually, certainly wasn't Buddha Records or Kasenetz/Katz. That's what I find intriguing about them, the idea of the songwriter/producer as eminence gris.
So what has happened, with indie record labels in the past 10 to 20 years that the label brand has become more powerful than the bands brands? Much more so than these "major labels" that the indie boys hypocritically despise for their "sound of marketing"? I don't know anyone who buys an EMI record or a Sony record. But I certainly know people who will buy Constellation Record or a Warp Record on the strength of the label.
So this puts the idea, perhaps, into the heads of people like {Lou Liverlust} that this Indie Lable Brand is far more important - and therefore more symbolically important on the cover itself - than the bands involved or even their music.
And I'm sorry, but that makes me feel for more effectively like a Product, whose Art is being subsumed into a Brand Identity than any Girls Aloud or Sugababes record ever did.
Maybe it's a power struggle - *I* created the {Fermat's Femmes} brand, and I'm just not having it subsumed into someone else's Tony Wilson act. But what amuses/pisses me off the most about it is the hypocrisy of these indie boy types, slagging off bubblegum for marketing, while pushing their own personal brands so heavily. It's like slagging off Witchcraft while privately running a discount counter for the selling of souls.
posted by Masonic Boom | 10:50 am
11 Comments:
Everything is marketing. Everything. Marketing is an observational sport. Advertising is provoking, though.
OTM.
Oh, that was me. Marianna. x
Oh! I mean, OTM re your post! I really should just fall asleep in the corner. :(
I know that everything is marketing, and everything is branding. I'm not against it, I find it a fascinating artwork in its own right. I just want to control my own Brand.
I'm just amused by the hypocrisy of these indie dickwads who have maybe heard some of the ideas in "No Logo" and decide that Marketing Is Bad!!! and then market their own brand so aggressively.
You know, it's not the stance that I object to. And I NEVER said that I objected to Branding. It is so important WRT establishing and maintaining an identity in an oversubscribed sea of music.
I see your point WRT indie labels, and agree with most everything that you say, about many many different indie labels. What I disagree with is the HYPOCRISY of this case in particular. Hence why this post is about {liverlust records} in specific.
When talking about Girls Aloud (or other bubblegum acts) it's one thing to say that you don't care for the music, or that you find them problematic on an aesthetic or political level. {Lou Liverslust} didn't say this, he said they "just sounded like marketing".
What does marketing sound like? I don't have a clue. But I know what it LOOKS like, and what it looks like is that single sleeve.
I wonder if Fermats would be more comfortable being marketed in the way that Girls Aloud are?
Sorry to be so crass (not to mention flippant), but if they paid me the same amount of money as Xenomania earn for their songwriting and production, they could market them any way they liked!
OK, not really. But one of the biggest reasons for a band to choose the indie path rather than whore themselves for a major is to keep more aesthetic control over their own music, and, yes, brand. That's what the band get in return for the pitiful amounts of money involved when there is substantial investment on *both* sides. (Being in a band is just as expensive, if not more, as running a record label.)
The Fermats release you're talking about here is part of a series of 7s by bands who are not yet well-known - right?
Well, this is where it really starts to smack to me of paternalism and almost colonialism. Especially as it disregards the immense amout of experience, contacts, network, and yes, public and internet profile that {Fermat's Femmes} and the individual members of the band bring to the table. They're not exactly an unknown band that he's discovered and I resent the implication that they are. I'm not being entirely arrogant when I speculate that, if anything, this record will be doing as much to raise the label's profile on our effort as they do to raise ours.
But I also must admit that much of my annoyance in this case is not directed at the world of indie labels in general (there are equal numbers of incompetent egomaniacs and saintlike devotees of music at all levels) but more my intense personal and business-based dislike of this person in particular. I think he's a nasty piece of work on so many levels.
Add to that, that I don't actually personally *like* his brand and don't really see us fitting in, either aesthetically or otherwise. But that's neither here nor there, I was bullied into it, we're doing it now and it seems too late to back out, no matter how uncomfortable I am with it.
Also, no, I absolutely don't see anything wrong with buying a record from a particular label on spec. There are many labels from whom I would probably buy almost anything that they put out (Kranky, Rocket Girl, Rainbow Quartz to name just a few I've done this with, in the same way that in the old days it would have been 4AD or Creation).
However, it is really the BAND who is producing/creating the product/music. It's important not to lose sight of that, in the indie fetishisation of objects. A label is a doorkeeper, maybe even a tastemaker. The gorgeous sticky psychedelia coming out of my speakers was created by The Asteroid #4, not just a "Rainbow Quartz Band".
It's just interesting to me, just how much this sort of approach to music bears in common with the hit factory type stables of 60s bubblegum, though the resemblence would never be admitted by the Indie Dickwad in question.
My idea of heaven!
Gimme indie rock!
A DIY umbrella organisation for the promotion of new bands bears absolutely no relation to any kind of "hit factory" past, present, or future. Becuase there are no hits, and no factory, for a start. The label name is used simply as a device or reference point for people to pick up on, and if the name of the label is considerably more widely recognised than the name of many of the bands the label releases, as is definitely the case here, then the inclusion of the name on the cover is simply good sense, and might encourage a few people to buy the record.
As for the comments which attempt to illustrate a hypocritical stance, this is basically you projecting your own pet hates on to the "indie dickwad" in question and putting your own words into the mouth of said "indie dickwad". I would say this is a case of either wilfully misunderstanding or completely misconstruing or oversimplifying complex points.
Marketing "sounds" like a piece of music designed primarily to appeal to a certain demographic, rather than to be a piece of music. A piece of music created to be marketable, rather than a piece of marketing designed to sell existing music. It's a simulation of music. Recognised the same way you recognise the moment in the Hollywood romcom when the scriptwriter reaches into your chest and trying with clumsy fingers to pluck away at your heart strings with some banal seventh-hand plot device. And instead of allowing them to do it and responding as you are expected to, you recognise what is being tried, and laugh out loud at how lame and worthless the attempted manipulation is instead. Because it has no roots in reality or gravity or texture or real experience - it's just a tool wheeled out to manipulate you and produce the desired response. Just to mix up some metaphors even more - like something that looks like food, and smells like food, and even tastes like it, but is completely free of any nourishment - commercial pop music is very shiney and bright and distracting and wonderfully packaged, but contains absolutely nothing beyond that most glancing, fleeting kind of appreciation.
So, basically, the kind of parallels you draw between the inclusion of an indie label's logo on the packaging of a singles club single and a personal distaste for the processes and methodologies behind contriving and creating commercial pop music are... nonsensical. There is no clash there whatsoever.
"commercial pop music is very shiny and bright and distracting and wonderfully packaged, but contains absolutely nothing beyond that most glancing, fleeting kind of appreciation."
I disagree with myself here. I only mean some commercial pop. I understand that pop is equally capable of capturing the universal sometimes, and that's partly why it is commercially viable - because it contains things that many people can relate to.
But obviously, wilfully attempting to create lowest-common-denominator appeal massively limits the scope of what's possible in music. And there comes a point at which attempts to appeal to everyone just sound jaded. And I guess that's the crux of my problem with a lot of the pop music I hear.
I have spent way too long replying to this blog. I just don't like being misinterpreted and then judged by others based on a misinterpretation.
ENOUGH.
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