My two favorite XM channels are 20 and 115: the "20 on 20" pop countdown and Radio Disney. I love the way pop music sounds (they've engineered it so I will), but there's also something comforting to the soul about it. The music styles and the production values are different than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but it's still the same 10 messages delivered by the same 10 high school archetypes. As long as America is the land of the free, it'll always be this way.
Another thing I like to do is look up the bands and singers on the internet. That's how I learn how they got their start, how they were "discovered," and how many fans disowned them once their public personas were styled after the peppy cheerleaders, mysterious rebel loner boys or doe-eyed heart-scribbling female diarists that the general public easily recognizes. I believe that artists don't sell out to giant entertainment conglomerates, they sell out to audiences.
Audiences, in general, are truly horrible groups of people. Audience members are usually too in love with their own individual power of choice and own personal uniqueness to get to know who it is they're consuming. The audience wants to know what's in it for them, how it all relates to them, what they're getting out of it. If the artist stops delivering what they want, or "branches out" into "new directions," they'll get what they want from somewhere else. It's not the singer or the song, it's the medium and the message.
If there's any such thing as a "good" audience, it's one you attracts and builds yourself, independent of the smart-bomb techniques of the Entertainment Machine. That's more possible than ever now, with this internet thing, as long as there's a willingness to let go of the vague and illusory idea of "fame" and the notion that it's possible to have everybody know who you are. Take, for instance, this guy, who you've never heard of. He's the world's most popular blogger.
If you can find 5,000 people to give you ten dollars a year in return for whatever it is you do, that's independent success, however modest. How they get it to you is dependent on the creative field you work in. Ten dollars is a cut of a record album and a concert ticket, it's a slice of a hardcover book, or a PayPal link on a web page. In about a month, it'll be two gallons of gas. It's not a lot of money.
"Only" 5,000 still seems like a mark of failure in a world of platinum dreams. But if one finds those 5,000 that are willing to give up an hour's worth of work in exchange for diversion of some sort, that's a decent living. Fifty thousand dollars is a nice gross annual income, well above the poverty line -- and with careful deductions, the government will only take about a tenth of it at the end of the year. You can be a functioning, non-cubicle dwelling part of a functioning family with that kind of money... or you could live comfortably by yourself.
On the other hand, five thousand people is a lot of people. More than you can fit in your house! It's well north of the average two-digit blog fan base, or the hit count on a MySpace band page, or the sales of a Lulu.com self-published book. But think of it this way: that's .000017 percent of the American population, or the number of residents in the tiny municipality of Cave Creek, Arizona.
But how to reach them? This is the excruciatingly difficult part, and the primary reason why there are entertainment companies at all. The ones that survive, that have grown large enough to consume and absorb other entertainment companies, have done so because they're the best at understanding what audiences want. What they don't want is you, the unique individual.
After an unofficial, indirect, multi-year survey on the topic, I'm of the opinion that one of the biggest problems that creative people face is the belief that they're selling themselves, which gets in the way of identifying and mining the relatively miniscule audience segment that will bring independent success. You have to know who you appeal to, what they want, and how to give it to them so they're satisfied enough to come back.
Me, my audience segment is cynical, disaffected, college-educated white males 25-40 who still cling to a scrap of hopeful idealism. There are more than 5,000 of those, certainly... but I'm still figuring out how best to relieve them of that ten-spot.
