Bonus Post! My PopCon 2020 Proposal (Patreon)

While I contemplate the work of Fatman Scoop, here's the synopsis of the paper I'll be presenting at PopCon 2020 in Seattle this April. I might post notes and research findings here too in due course.

HOW DO YOU DO, FELLOW KIDS? HOW MARKETERS REMADE THE GENERATION GAP

“Music is powerful” said tech site Mashable in 2014, “Because it is content.” If this sounds banal or sinister to you, you’re hardly alone. But for marketers, these homilies are the currency of “insights”, circulated through conferences, seminars and blogs.

The stories marketers tell each other about music become the stories brands tell us about it - trap beats behind a perfume ad; looped video in a sports shoe store of crowds at anonymous festivals; a decal of headphones on a drink can. Music is powerful. 

But something has changed - where brands used to seek out megastars, or court outrage by borrowing beloved songs, now they present music as leeched of specifics, of genre, of tribe, of artist. Music is content.

To justify this and other culture shifts, marketers had to create a new, more abstract kind of consumer, one defined not by race, class, gender, or location, but by “generation”. They had to invent the Millennial.

This paper is the story of how they did it, told through the lens of pop. It tunnels into the ways marketers in the 00s and 10s talked to one another about music, and the way their brands talked to customers. It is not, however, a story of a grand conspiracy - but of a patchwork of panic, hubris, snake oil, wishful thinking, and mostly-bad ideas that still managed to invent pop’s present.

Why am I the one to tell it? I’ve descended into this particular underworld often, having worked in marketing for 20 years, as long as I’ve been writing about pop. At previous PopCons I’ve talked about the charts and protest, Eurovision, and British private schools. This will be my usual mix of wild ideas, new research, enthusiasm and jokes.