The Null Device

DJs vs. rock stars

According to this piece (a response to the question of whether DJs were meant to be the rockstars of the new millennium), the age of rock stars is over:
In actuality the economics of the dance music scene make any kind of real rock star virtually impossible. rock stars were actually a product of the corporate hegemony that controlled the music industry before punk and disco made independent labels significant. you should read "the long tail," it's an essay or a Wired article or something, I don't recall, but the nub and the gist is that sites like Netflix and Amazon sell the usual mainstream crap that big physical stores sell, and in roughly proportionate quantity, but Netflix and Amazon both sell MUCH more material which comes from outside of the mainstream, in substream clusters essentially, than they do of the actual mainstream.
The DJ is actually a product of network economics as much as of postmodernism and technological change. the rock star is a product of industrial-revolution factory economics. that's the crucial difference. the economic mechanisms powering the distribution of music are no longer sufficiently hegemonic for true rock stars to exist.

There are 1 comments on "DJs vs. rock stars":

Posted by: onekosama Fri Jul 1 00:01:02 2005

This review of Tiesto in Concert expresses the opposing opinion: http://www.ishkur.com/reviews/tiestoinconcert.php