Most Recent Blog »

Thriller….

On Saturday’s Michael Jackson gabfest, ABC’s GMA opined that ‘we may never see the likes of Michael Jackson again’.

Well, putting aside personal opinions about the quality of his music, they may in fact be right.

They may be right because the whole notion of a ’superstar’ may have been obviated by technology.

The rise of Internet, Youtube, iTunes and God only knows what will come next have fractionalized the audience and shortened our already short attention spans.

Andy Warhol’s missive that everyone in the world would be famous for 15 minutes in the future might one day seem like an inordinately long amount of time to pay attention to anyone.

In 1982, Jackson’s Thriller album sold an until then unheard of 100 million copies and sat at the top of Billboard’s top 100 for 31 weeks.

That kind of stuff just doesn’t happen anymore.

It doesn’t happen because record stores went away, with their limited shelf space and were replaced by a web that inundates us with groups, music, videos and personalities in a tidal wave of content. And we are only now at the very beginning of the process. It is only going to get worse.

When The Beatles came to the US for their first American tour and performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, they were seen by an estimated audience of 70 million people. One-third of the entire country saw them at the same time.

Those were the days of 3 networks.

Even Michael Jackson rode to fame and success not only in a world of limited pressed vinyl discs but also in a world of linear, truncated cable music.  MTV, which became Jackson’s platform for his music videos, played only music videos and in linear real time. In other words, you had to sit through one after the next after the next until you heard the one you liked or wanted to hear.

There were no iPods, no downloads.

And there was only MTV and nothing else.

MTV long ago gave up on the idea of music videos in real time.  Today they prefer reality shows.

Music and music videos can be gotten elsewhere.

Everywhere, in fact.

Part of this is due to the explosion in the number of platforms that can deliver video content for free, or almost so.

Part of this is due to the plethora of very cheap, very good and very easy to use video and audio recording equipment.

Suddenly, music and video is really in the hands of the masses.

We may find other musicians or performers as talented as Michael Jackson.

But it is unlikely that they will ever again command so large a swath of our media for so long.

No matter how good they are.