They Eat Their Own
by Sean Carolan

For about twenty years now, I've been wrestling with the innate oxymoron presented by the term "Popular Alternative Music". Or, more specifically, with the idea of what it means to be a fan of, or a promoter of, alternative music.

The conundrum goes like this: if you like a certain kind of music, you want to bring it to other folks' attention, so they might like it too...

...right?

Wrong. Or at least "wrong" in the eyes of most alt-rock fans. There comes a point where, having participated in the nurturing of a particular band, or song, or style of music, a "true fan" gets tired of the fact that everyone else likes what they like, and moves on to something new. They eat their own.

Is this healthy? Is it dysfunctional? Is it anything anyone in their right mind would ever want to build a business plan around?

It's probably indicative that the audience is smarter than anyone in the music or radio industries think. Take the personal view: if anyone told you they knew what was good for you, wouldn't you, after a short while, rebel against that? It's a defining trait, maybe even the essence, of what it means to be human.

Which means it's important to said industries that their audience not be human.

Maybe that's harsh, because it doesn't take into account the ugly fact, to the music industry anyway, that a lot of the audience couldn't care less about music. So the bit of them that's human (and in most cases that bit's still there) focuses on things like career, or family, or sports, or car care, or whatever makes them happy.

A friend once remarked that popular songs get popular not because they are great works of art, but because they don't do much that annoys anyone. The degree to which one person feels that a song is great is an indicator of the likelihood that another person won't be able to tolerate it.

Given the current state of affairs in radio, it's easy to see that radio's more concerned with maximizing profits, and that the music that's least likely to annoy anyone is the music they'll choose to fill the spaces between the commercials.

Some alternative stations used to try to walk a fine line between obscurity and mass appeal. Ultimately, though, that tactic almost guaranteed that both audiences would tune out, and it never did find a healthy mix. Modern Rock stations now come far closer to a top-40 attitude, and while they're pleasing an audience that's turned on by mass appeal in the short term, they're likely to burn that audience out in the long term. And while that audience might look great on a ledger sheet, they evaporate quickly - fine for a ledger-driven business, who'll move on to the next big thing, but not so good for the audience.

Slowly, as that audience gets the carpet pulled out from under them by a radio industry that doesn't understand that reliability is important to their customers, they'll stop relying on radio to entertain them.

Radio will get the wrong message, though. They'll just keep switching to Talk Radio, because that's the only thing their audience can count on them to provide reliably.

Meanwhile the alt-rock fan, who has by now been motivated enough to load up a hard disk full of music and press "shuffle" to get consistently surprised by their own collection, has unplugged from the entire process. All they need now is an occasional update.

(Which, of course, ALTROK.com is happy to provide. Hi there.)

So go ahead, alt-rock fan...keep eating your own.

It's the only way to maintain the strength of the herd.

©2001 Sean Carolan