Let me tell you about Little Voice by Sara Bareilles, my favorite album of 2007.


Well, that's not entirely true. If a gun were held to my head and I had to pick one album from 2007, I would probably pick The Boy With No Name by Travis, simply because as a student of music I want to analyze Travis' sound. But in reality, the two albums should not be compared, as both are necessary.

Anyway, one of the things I'm eagerly anticipating is to see what "rock star 2.0" will look like. By "rock star 2.0" I simply mean the rock star that is created by the Internet. For a parallel, think of how Michael Jackson and Madonna became the music icons during MTV's hey day, when the video age was just dawning upon us. Now that the Internet age is dawning upon us, what will the Internet star look like?

I think Sara Bareilles has some of the key characteristics of "rock star 2.0." Namely, she is web friendly, as she has a YouTube channel with music videos and reality videos, and writes on a blog and on Twitter. Being extroverted and charismatic enough to do all this stuff will I think end up being the big difference between Internet-created rock stars and television-created rock stars, the latter of which just needed to do the occassional, formal videotaped interview and formal music video. The recluse is perhaps the big loser of the Internet revolution.

Jason Mraz is another artist that demonstrates how the rock star is changing. He uses his YouTube channel to create interesting live performances. More importantly, he uses design contests to engage his fans in co-creating his brand -- something we recently discussed in our post on music distribution. I am a big Mraz fan, he's a very innovative songwriter.

The Missing Piece: The Killer Digital Destination

The missing piece to truly creating rock star 2.0, though, is the digital destination -- the ultimate web site/social network centered around the identity, and one designed to enable them to maximize their influence. This site, KidMercuryBlog, is sort of an example of how I think identity-centric social networks will operate, and how they can ultimately be used to monetize the influence of the identity.

Sara Bareilles is using Ning, 9/11 Truther Marc Andreessen's company, for her community. I think it is a pretty good community as I like Ning quite a bit, though I obviously favor a more portal-esque approach that aggregates and reclassifies media from around the web on the community subject, as that is the approach I am taking with ActoWorlds. In any event, niche social networks, especially those used to promote artists, are going to evolve to incorporate storytelling and gaming elements. Along those lines, one of the things I'm most looking forward to seeing is an artist that releases a concept album and promotes it via an online social network/game. That, I think, will be really cool and really profitable.

I doubt, though, that "rock star 2.0" -- the next Michael Jackson or Madonna, if you will -- will come out of a big label. The real Internet revolution is in learning to monetize open licensing, not in monetization through sales of digital content. That is a big, non-negotiable concept that runs counter to everything the big labels are designed to do.

Sara Bareilles, You've Been Truth Tagged

My favorite Sara Bareilles song is "Fairytale," a song about a girl who doesn't want a fairytale romance. While it would be amusing, it is also kind of weird for me to be walking down the street singing this song given the lyrics, so I wrote my own version of Fairytale, and changed it so that it would be about the 9/11 Fairytale (you know, bin Laden from the cave, we all need to give up our rights to be protected from this all powerful cave dweller, etc). Here is Sara's version of Fairytale; here's my version with Sara's lyrics; here's my version with 9/11 Truth lyrics.

This is, of course, a part of Operation ThoughtCrime, where we remix the songs from within the matrix, transforming them into 9/11 Truth songs -- thus turning them into a weapon in our quest to shatter the fairytale matrix of lies. It ain't like the big record labels are going to allow a 9/11 Truth song, so that is where Operation ThoughtCrime comes in, to fix that problem by remixing songs and marketing them on YouTube towards that artist's fan base. After all, the big record labels are too busy trying to sell artists on the global warming hoax. Such a bummer, it really is. The good news, though, is that this entire system is collapsing, and that the record labels that emerge after the meltdown won't try such silly tactics.