“In my opinion, Robyn’s music is generally more accessible to a much, MUCH larger group of people than Joanna Newsom, whose music I personally struggle with a great deal.”
I think this is an interesting idea to look at.
The only reasons I commented before is because you asked a question, I have a strong opinion about both artists— And someone (I think it was Bro-aud..?) said to me that he was sick of hearing about how Robyn doesn’t sell many records, and I realized that record sales comes up literally whenever someone mentions Robyn on the Internet.
(The number that stood out to me on the table was Erykah Badu’s. (Perhaps getting a shout out on “A Milli” helped her sales.) I know she’s a mainstream artist, but other than around the time her albums come out, I rarely ever hear her discussed. She probably has a “long tail” of fans, or something. But her album is to me fairly unaccessible. The Sufjan album is basically chillwave done correctly, and it went Silver. Very strange. I do love these tables.)
Getting back to the thing, I’m not sure that Robyn is more accessible for an unexpected reason, which relates to Katy Perry: The brand of music she makes is very similar to what’s popular on the radio, except it’s not as popular-sounding. Therefore, she is competing on the same field as Katy Perry, but with weaker armaments.
Perhaps that’s debatable. At the very least, mainstream acts have a much larger organization with much more money backing them. Playing on the same turf as Katy Perry et al. almost automatically relegates Robyn to a low-level status.
Someone like Joanna Newsom has created her own market by being singular. Since there are fewer acts (and as she develops and gets better, increasingly fewer acts) to set the context and compare her to, she has a relatively more wide open base to get sales from. The millions of people who are buying Katy Perry’s latest masterpiece aren’t necessarily going to buy Have One On Me, anyway.
This is just some off the cuff thinking on the subject. The main thing I wanted to say, of course, is self-serving, and that’s to say that I’m sorry if I came off as yelling at 30 Dollar Project, since that’s not what I was trying to do.
(via thirtydollarproject)
