Cause Marketing

How do you make it in the music business? Use to be you were an ‘overnight success’ discovered in the clubs by an A&R guy from the record company after living in your van for 12 years. The record companies would promote you and if you sold millions, you got rich and died drunk in a tragic airplane accident. In the last few years, you could try out for American Idol (or its many extensions worldwide) and be humiliated by Simon Cowell on national TV. Now, you can open a Myspace page for free. Shoot your own bare bones music video for maybe $10 and post it on YouTube for free. And if it’s authentic and unique and it somehow speaks to an audience, you get millions of downloads and appear on national TV! That’s what happened to Tay Zonday, erstwhile PhD student and Internet impresario, who’s hit it big with ‘Chocolate Rain.’ Zonday… a stage name for Adam Bahner… looks like Urkel and sounds like Barry White. And the lyrics make just enough sense that they pass for profundity. The video q...