Connecting with fans is very important to me and useful, too! It's almost as if I have my own focus group. If I put up one picture that gets 1,000 likes and one that gets 15,000 likes, it gives me a big clue as to what people like to see.
Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.
I've spent 10 years checking my analytics on my end to see what people were talking about and what they like.
Just because you have star power and a huge marketing budget, you can see from some professional web series, it doesn't equal views.
A lot of times I play my music at shows based on the views and the streams.
To have a No. 1 with 130,000 copies sold is, you know, I remember when we first started selling records, in order to have a No. 1, you'd have to sell at least a half a million if not more, for the rock side of things.
I will be the first to admit that getting votes and getting an audience are two different things. For example, a politician really can't be elected if he's hated by half the people. A talk show host, however, can be an overwhelming national phenomenon while being hated by half the people.
Unfortunately, as far as the music is concerned, what defines relevance is whether you are on the radio or whether you are on the cover of a magazine or whether you're winning MTV awards, and so on and so forth.
Yes, Justin Bieber is a contrivance. Yes, Justin Bieber's lyrics are insipid - worse still, disingenuous. Yes, his tattoos stink. Yes, he's lousy at skateboarding. But what does any of this actually matter? In case you missed it, Bieber won.
