So You Wanna Be A Popstar?
by Sean Burke

Then read this…

I'm sure we have all dreamt of super stardom as a pop idol at one point in our lives, right? For some of us the fantasy refuses to go away, and we've embarked on this epic journey to make our wildest dream come true.
Ultimately, it's your choice as to how you want to go about doing it. In this, first article of a new series on the music business, I will share my experiences as a music refugee, idealist, philosopher and revolutionary.
HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS

In order to understand your place as an artist in the System, you first have to understand the System and it's inner workings.
The System is the media industry.

The core function of the System is to sell advertising space in the different mediums in which it operates:

The purpose of television is not to provide you with quality programming as your constitutional right, but to give you good programming in order to seduce you to sit in front of your television set and watch the adverts in between the quality programmes, the quality sport events, reality shows, news and documentaries. This is the core function of a television broadcaster, radio station, newspaper, magazine, etc.

The purpose of the daily newspaper is not to uncover the truth, but to uncover the dirt that will provide the most shocking, brutal or sordid headline. We rush to buy the newspaper in order to read the print ads in between the horror stories. CNN needs wars, disasters, political upheaval to gain profits from advertising revenue. Guess who has shown consistent growth in audience ratings since September 11, while other programming ARs have decreased.

We are seduced to click on a website link to open up a new hi-tech world driven by the advertising banner.

We have become a species which has been programmed to worship the new media gods, to such an extent that even the churches are forced by dwindling numbers to spread the Word through the system of pay per view!

Our entire lives are devalued to the point of being compressed into a 5-minute insert on Jerry Springer and Oprah, neatly fitted in between ad breaks.

The media industry gods cannot fully depend on members of the public to provide the stories that will generate consistent profit turnover for the System, so it has cleverly created its disciples in the form of celebrities.
The media selects someone from obscurity, and elevates him/her to the status of the new Messiah, celebrates his/her achievements for a while, and then systematically proceeds to break him/her down when he/she exceeds the sell-by date.

When a celebrity like Julia Roberts appears on the cover of a magazine, it generates more magazine sales, which in turn draws more advertising revenue. Have you noticed that Julia always seems to be doing cover shoots and interviews just before her movie premieres in our country? These neatly packaged interviews and photos arrive on our shores prior to the release of her movie, and you are already told how good it is before you've seen it. The magazine therefore sells the movie, the movie sells the magazine, the movie sells the soundtrack and the soundtrack sells the movie on radio! When the System works in sync (pun intended!), it's sickening to behold. To this end, an artist's best chance of success is to sell out to the System, let it embrace you, use you and abuse you until it has no more need for you. Shows like Idols and Popstars will guarantee success, but it definitely comes at a price! I will discuss this process at length in a later article.

The System is driven and ruled by the Media and all its affiliates. Music is one of its affiliates, and music artists are the dispensable commodities. In the next article, I will look at the music industry.