Rafting Down the Mainstream - The GloBELL ROAR

The biggest audience for the music industry would probably have to be teenagers. We have the most disposable income to spend on their records and merchandise, and a huge part of teen life is music. Teenagers just want something to relate to and music can often provide that—and hey, even if it can’t, everybody digs a good jam. There are three different types of teenagers in my mind. There are the ones who strive for complete independence and individuality and the others who jump on the nearest bandwagon in order to fit in and then of course the last group who will get mad at me for breaking everybody down into two groups.

Let’s just assume you aren’t hip to the jive and you don’t know all of the lingo -- I’ll break it down for you. There is a bit of a grey area around the term mainstream. Different people will have different definitions… but for me, I classify a band being mainstream when their song(s) get multiple plays on the radio and when almost every single one of your facebook friends changes their status to a line from the chorus (cough Fireflies by Owl City cough). “Posers” usually classify as people who jump on band wagons just because the band is popular/attractive and don’t really listen to the music for the music. The term “sell-outs” refers to a band that goes mainstream and gets caught up in the fame and shifts their priority from music to money.

Now that we have that all cleared up, on to my point. Going mainstream can have, a lot of influence on a band, both positive and negative. If a band handles it properly there can be a lot of positive side-effects, I’ll start with those. Firstly, the band can expand their fan base by getting radio play and be able to share their music with a larger audience. Secondly, if the band gets very popular, they will make more money which in turn means they can buy better equipment which could help improve their music or they could even afford to schedule more concerts and go on tour. Finally, if a band you love becomes really popular— don’t get all depressed that you aren’t an individual—it just means that you have good taste in music.

But as I said earlier, there can also be some really negatives things associated with becoming a mainstream musician. A lot of bands that become mainstream tend to ‘sell-out’ and will forget about their music and focus on the money, sometimes that can even go so far as to mean that they stop writing their own music. They’ll get a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon who don’t really like their music but instead just listen to it because it’s the popular thing to do. Becoming mainstream might make a band so full of themselves that they no longer feel they have any time for the fans that got them to where they are in the first place.

So, I hope you can make your own decisions to whether or not a band becoming mainstream is a good thing or not but when you think about this I want you to put yourself in the band’s shoes and see how that affects your decision.