Fairly Symmetrical

Via Instapundit:

Charles Dodgson writes about "plastic puppet" musical artists:

The nightmare scenario for this sort of music marketing is that what is actually turning people off isn't the dressing du jour on the industry's plastic puppets, but just that they are in fact plastic puppets, poured into a commercial mold formed entirely by record executives who are completely out of touch with their audience.

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I think that's essentially correct. And thanks to today's information-rich environments, it's impossible to hide the fact that artists are plastic puppets. When you have MTV interviews, E! articles, and thousands of web pages dissecting a star, it's impossible to maintain whichever facade the star's handlers have stuffed them into, and once the public figures out that they're completely fake, two things start to happen. First, that star starts losing popularity. As an example, take Milli Vanilli. As soon as the public found out that they weren't even singing their own songs, they were dead. They weren't technically doing anything wrong, but they were so fake that nobody could really like them. The second thing that starts to happen is that the public loses a little bit of interest in similar bands/artists. The reason boy bands don't succeed these days is because once the public figured out the first few were completely manufactured (helped along by reality TV shows that actually show the process of manufacturing), the rest lost credibility. The problem compunds itself; as soon as one seems fake, people start looking harder at the other bands, and the more they turn up fake, the harder people look.

On the other hand, if you look at the artists who persist through the sea changes, who continue to make music year after year, they're not fake. Whether you like them or not, artists like Madonna, the Counting Crows, R.E.M., Aerosmith, and Dar Williams persist precisely because they really are good artists, and more importantly because they are (or do a very convincing job of being) genuine.

Obviously this revelation is going to make the record companies very unhappy -- acts like the above are much harder to find (and presumably to deal with) than your average pretty 18-year-old who can sort of sing but hasn't an idea in their head. You can probably manufacture 30 or 40 bands in the time it takes to find and develop a Real Band/Artist, and as long as the fake bands make even a tenth as much as the Real Band, you're ahead. So they'll fight this development tooth and nail in order to preserve the ease with which they make profits on manufactured bands.