Yesterday we reported that McDonalds reversed it’s decision on paying the bands in their SXSW showcase after indie rock outfit Ex Cops posted a open letter criticizing McDonalds for asking them to play in their showcase but only offering them a tweet and FB post as compensation. After some heavy backlash, McDonalds announced that they will pay the bands of their showcase after all, satisfying the Internet and ending the story on a happy note.
The original situation with Ex Cops was another entry in the “exposure” debate, and the Internet chatter following the story was lively and passionate (as usual). Part of the outrage was in response to the fact that it was McDonalds, of all things, saying they didn’t have money in their budget for musicians. People rightly pointed out that McDonalds is a multi billion dollar industry, and for them to claim they couldn’t pay Ex Cops was grossly hypocritical and inexcusable. But even if hadn’t been McDonalds, there’s a legitimate question as to whether or not the “exposure” card was legitimately playing in the case of Ex Cops, or if its even legitimate to play the card by itself at all.
Although we live in the information age, the amount of data and information that we can juggle in our minds at once remains about the same. When we are being bombarded with information about anything and everything from multiple sources, the odds of something sticking in our minds decreases significantly. Think about your drive home yesterday – how many advertisements or billboards did you drive by, and how many of them did you consciously notice and think on? We are so used to information being everywhere that we have learned to tune out most of it without even knowing it, and this applies especially true to the music we consume.
The argument goes that exposure to a huge audience will generate revenue for the band being exposed, but that argument is only as good as the number of people who actually pay attention. McDonalds promised a tweet or FB post to their multi million social media fanbase, but that doesn’t mean millions of people actually got the message. McDonalds may have a gigantic social media following, but it has to compete with thousands of other accounts “exposing” or chatting about thousands of other bands, and we cannot legitimately process all of the information being shoved in our faces. Often we end up scrolling past most of it without a care in the world.
I remember arguing in one of my mass media classes a few years ago on behalf of exposure. I’ve since changed my stance. There was a point in time where exposure legitimately made careers and changed history (think The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show), but the actual power of exposure diminishes significantly when everyone is doing it. Yes, artists need to be seen and heard, but at this point exposure is tantamount to exploitation when legitimate compensation is lacking. The debate on exposure and compensation has often been seen in terms of either/or, when in reality it should’ve been both/and all this time. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills or buy new equipment. It doesn’t put gas in the tank for the band to travel around or even afford the McDonalds dollar menu. It promises an audience, but it cannot guarantee one, and at some point there won’t be many new bands left for audiences to be exposed to because they couldn’t keep afloat.
In short: we have overexposed the “exposure” card. If every artist is being “exposed”, no artist is actually getting exposure – at least, not enough to make it legitimately count.
The Closing Track 