This never happened before. At least since the sixties and seventies. You know, act percolates in the marketplace and starts to sell beaucoup tickets sans hit. Since the eighties at least it’s been all about the hit. You know, getting the track on MTV, on the universal Top Forty radio, reaching the masses and then having the piñata break so the money rains down. But growing from the bottom up, the long-lamented “artist development,” that’s been history. Until now.
Yes, Noah Kahan has been at it for years. And not alone, building his audience on social media, but supported by a major label, Republic. Today the major usually skims the cream, it doesn’t start from zero, and it finds one track and pushes and pushes and…
If you’re paying attention, and you either are or you’re not, you may still think we live in a monoculture, dominated by Taylor Swift and the Weeknd, as if we all were exposed to the same stuff, knew it and liked it, a paradigm that evaporated over a decade ago. Noah Kahan was happening long before the collaboration with Post Malone, that’s just icing on the cake. But even stranger, the music Kahan makes has been considered niche for eons. Sure, Jewel broke through three decades ago, but her music was remixed for radio and her face was plastered everywhere and you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing her performing. Personal music, a variation on what we used to call singer/songwriter? That was for AAA, that was a backwater, a slice of the market that existed but the mainstream gave up on nearly completely.
Yes, Noah Kahan was selling tickets, in prodigious numbers, before the Post Malone number. Somehow the audience knew. People were not beaten over the head, it wasn’t about publicity, exposure, it was about the music. The audience embraced it and needed more. It was not manipulation, it was organic.
Selling tickets. They say Noah Kahan can now do arenas. And having built his name over time, with the music, he can now sell tickets for the rest of his life. This can happen in country, but it does not happen in Top Forty. Top Forty is all about the low hanging fruit, the streaming numbers, the recording revenue, whereas today the business is more holistic (I hate that term, don’t you?) In other words, it’s about the vaunted 360. You’re a musician, not a recording artist. It’s about everything, not just the hit. And the avenues of remuneration seem to be endless. For those bitching about streaming payments…the joke is on you. In the old days your music would have been unavailable to the masses unless they bought it. Sans radio play there was no exposure. Word of mouth was much slower. As for today…everyone can play. But rising above? That’s nearly impossible.
We keep hearing how the industry can’t break new stars. But what do you say about Zach Bryan, never mind Noah Kahan and Morgan Wallen? This is not the music that people want, right? They want hip-hop, overblown pop, not this personal, touchy-feely stuff from weak boys as opposed to macho boasters. And one thing about the foregoing three, it’s about the songs. To use the Grammy distinction, not the record. In other words, if you’re a fan you can sing along.
But all the news is about Doja Cat. The rest of the TMZ acts that populate the Spotify Top 50. The train-wrecks. Fighting with each other, getting in trouble. Many are cartoons. It resembles the WWE more than music. And my point is not to criticize them, but to point out there’s a whole ‘nother world out there, that we don’t live in a monoculture, that the audience is hungry for more, and if it hits a nerve, the public will spread the word.
Furthermore, the music is not made by the usual suspects. I love and respect Max Martin, he’s more talented than the acts he works with. I’m not as big a believer in Jack Antonoff, nice guy, doesn’t have the same magic as Max, but Jack’s fingerprints are all over the records of the supposed household names. But Noah Kahan co-produced his album with Gabe Simon. Oh, you know Gabe, from the Kopecky Family Band, a ubiquitous outfit if there ever was one… Ha!
Zach Bryan’s right hand guy is the well-known Eddie Spears, who doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page!
And another thing Kahan and Bryan have in common…they write their own material, alone! What a concept! Directly from their heart to yours. No collaboration, no writers camp, no trolling the wares of the writers du jour, no top line, no nothing except the artist themselves. What a breakthrough! Well, a return of what once made this business triumph. Their music is not worked-over, homogenized, burnished, willed into a hit, it just is.
And I mention Morgan Wallen, the biggest person in recorded music today, whose only true competitor is Bad Bunny, because you can sing his music too. Yes, Wallen started off on a TV competition show, which he did not win. Yet even though he’s a pariah for employing the n-word when he was drunk, he keeps dominating the charts. I loved the story of the Black NFL player who rallied his team by playing a Wallen song in the locker room. Forget Usher, Morgan Wallen should have been the Super Bowl headliner, but everybody involved is too inured to the past. You get the most modern teams, the ones who won that season, in the game, but during halftime you get acts long in the tooth, on a victory lap to sell tickets. What do they say, throw the long ball? The NFL can’t do it, it’s the establishment. And the greatest music, the most successful music, the music that has resonated most has always been anti-establishment. And that means anti-NFL, anti-low hanging fruit, anti all the crap promotion that we have had for the past decade, if not longer.
Yes, the above three artists are white. So that brings up the issue of race. I’ll just go to the heart of the matter. Not everybody likes hip-hop, some people abhor it. Meaning there’s a whole ‘nother market in existence, that for a long time has been ignored. And Noah Kahan is speaking to that market, as is Zach Bryan. Both of whom have been at it for years.
Now I’d never heard of Noah Kahan until June. I was out to lunch with Jim Guerinot who spontaneously told me his girlfriend had turned him on to Noah Kahan, that he’d never heard of him before, but he liked Kahan’s music, more than liked, and he got tickets for them to see Kahan at the Greek.
I’ve been paying attention to Kahan ever since. First, I could hardly believe it. An act I’d never heard of before was selling out the Greek? Used to be if you were in the music business you knew everything, felt everything, even if you hadn’t heard it. But today that’s impossible, there’s just too much in the landscape.
The audience has broken Noah Kahan.
And he won’t be the last.
