Fame...

...doesn't exist. Not anymore. Not in music anyway. Sure you have your Bieber's and your GaGa's, but that's it. Popular music is crap. It's all about micro-markets now, small niches of people who support artists through rabid technology use and word of mouth.

Movies are different. We still have superstars of the screen. Bogarts and Grants gave way to Cloonies and Pitts who gave way to Ledgers and Blooms and all the while nobody has figured out how to effectively deliver free, high-quality movies to the public and destroy the business model with free content on the internet. Sure you can stream movies for free on the internet, just like music, but it's time consuming and the quality is questionable. Our ears can hear a quality difference between digital formats up until a certain point, higher than the 128k/s standard for MP3's to be sure, but not much higher. Movies look surreal at 1080hd and once you've experienced that, anything lesser looks grainy.

Netflix knew this. They also know that all the movies I REALLY want to watch, are on DVD only and come in the mail (an extra two whole bucks a month!). They took what they knew to be the future of distributing content and owned it, made it profitable.

In comparison, the music industry looked like a fat man drowning in a lake, weighed down by his physical inventory and cash requirements. If only he could have just let go of the money bags to rise to the surface where he would have gotten a breath of fresh air and fresh perspective. But he didn't, the fat lardy music industry refused to recognize the new internet horizon and fought pointless legal battles and still, to this day, takes sweet old grannies to jail for sharing a couple thousand songs with their bridge group.

I'm not saying file sharing is OK or even that granny shouldn't go to jail if she steals music, but what are you going to spend your time doing?

It's like the drug war. People are going to do what they're going to do. You can spend your time putting people in jail, or come up with a system that is more beneficial and less harmful for society as a whole.

So as the movie industry protected it's system, and improved on it, the actors and their perceived "fame" were protected. Not so in music. File-sharing became a reality and artists who were looking forward to retiring on their recorded catalogue saw album sales fall off completely.

When Phish or Sting Cheese Incident or Blink 182 or Sublime or Styx or any other group that has announced retirement (or should have) need money, know what they do? Pile into the bus and sell some concert tickets baby!

I don't know about you, but Blink 182 seemed a lot more "famous" when they dominated the radio waves in my teenage years, versus now when the same, exact, song, is still being played on the radio. Phish was a lot more magical when they didn't need to take a hiatus to cure a lead guitar player's drug problem, only to return touring as what many have dubbed Phish Lite.

I think a lot of the destruction of fame and mystique came with the rise of the internet in different ways, too. As soon as you know every detail about an artist, available at any time of day, unmitigated by Rolling Stone but exposed for all to see on Wikipedia, where is the mystique? A blogger named Bob Lefsetz put it eloquently when he wrote: "You used to have to go to the show".

It's probably for the better. Fame is destructive and ultimately annoying because we as humans weren't programmed to be exposed to millions, it's not in our nature. Being an artist today is about sustainability, finding a way to produce and sustain off something that is not easily marketable or even describable. Fame is not the reward. Making art a career is about finding a balance between entrepreneurship and worldly knowledge, capitalism and community-building. That is your reward.