[FA Worldmusic] a post from anonymous on entrypoints, tokenism, and art

[Ian Menzies]

> the better question is how to keep the career moving forward.

As someone on the management side of things, this is really the crucial
issue to me. More than any other genre - I would suggest - world artists
have a sort of glass ceiling that far too often limits their long term
career development. Ian Anderson (belated happy b'day BTW!) calls it the
butterfly collector mentality. Because of their "otherness" many artists get
lionized as a new discovery, but once they have been around the circuit a
few times, they face a real struggle in building their careers further from
there. While this is likely most pronounced in the festival presenters world
(for obvious and logical reasons), it is also true with recordings and in
the media. It's like a fad mentality, so it can and does happen in every
kind of music, but it seems most pronounced in our world.

One of the clearest examples I have run into myself was in a discussion I
had a couple of years ago with Jyrki from the Kaustinen Festival in Finland.
I asked him how things had gone for Kiran Ahluwalia whom he had programmed
the previous year and he said that Kiran was perhaps the best artist he had
ever booked for the festival - we are talking over the top enthusiam here.
But, upon suggesting that perhaps we could organize a return visit for her,
he quickly pointed out that it was his policy to never repeat a booking with
an artist....(of course ths is not true of many other festival presenters
and certainly Jyrki has every right to program however he sees fit - but the
story does make my point nicely :-)

There are a couple of things that I think can be done to try and mitigate
this problem. Trying to build a touring base in as many territories as
possible, consistently releasing new albums (and perhaps using special
guests or "concepts" to make each release a bit different than the last) and
most importantly, trying to return to a market after you have had your first
play there through a festival presenter - with a "hard ticket" show. This
last one is most important, because ultimately, it is the best way to build
a touring/fan base that can be built upon over the long haul. It is also
probably the most difficult thing for most artists to achieve.

That said, there are two other crucial things at play in building a
successful career that have not been mentioned yet - luck and timing. In the
case of R&G, I would suggest it was likely one of the biggest factors in
their success to date (and please correct me if I am wrong on this Todd). Of
course the strength and effectiveness of the team around them has been what
has helped them sieze their moment, but there is no replicating the
confluence of events like a YouTube explosion, a celebrity endorsement, an
act that is ready and able to tour, etc, etc. All of this "luckily" came
together to create a "tipping point" of sorts, from which they have been
growing ever since.
Ian M