JourneyHard wrote:None of Jon's solo albums or Neal's solo albums have been big hits. So, I don't know why Arnel's solo album has to be a big hit. Solo albums are just to be creative.
Not back then.
Perry was riding the 1980 wave of being "Journey's singer and frontman", most people back then saw Perry as Journey... he was the guy singing to them. The band was just in the background. This made Perry a brand in his own right.... lots of frontmen from 80's bands went solo and did well - John Waite, Lou Graham, Ric Ocasek, David Lee Roth, Mick Jagger, Dio, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Ferry, Phil Collins, Morrissey, Jon Anderson.. all who leveraged the notoriety they gained from having been frontmen for succesful bands...
The lead singer is always the most recongnizable member of a band. It also affords the a longer shelf life.
Perry's sales back then were pretty much guaranteed to be profitable. The label didn't have to spend much money to market someone people already knew.
Labels were about making money... if you were a nobody, you weren't getting label support.
These days - without any built in notoriety - its pretty much impossible to gain any traction, enough to move product.
Cain never had the same connection with the fans as Perry did, and was just "one of the band"... pretty much that's how it was for the rest of the band members too... the fact that Cain can't sing... and isn't pretty, makes it worse for him.
AP's commercial success as a solo artist remains to be seen. He will have to leverage his connection to Journey regardless.
Perry's notoriety, even with his long abscence is still greater than Cain or AP. He's in a great position to ensure he gets marketing support from a label, and that translates into sales.
JourneyHard wrote:It is impossible to listen to every song out there. Even if you did it every second of your life, you would only hear a small percentage of the songs written and recorded. This means Journey being a big hit is against the odds, and it was very special that they ever became a household name.
You are confusing "now" with "then"...
Journey's success is a product of a rockstar creation machine and a controlled record distribution system that existed in the 1980s and is now gone. The labels were the rockstar creation machine, marketing acts to stardom via payola and distribution control. Everybody knew that. The bands only responsiblilty in this was to make marketable music and have a pretty frontman. Herbi knew this, and the their label MADE him do it. Thats why he brought in Flieshman then switched him for Perry... Journey then figured out how to make music that was marketable yet didn't sound contrived, and they made loads of it. They made the "content", the label marketed the fuck out of it.
To think it was "happenstance" is fucking naive.
What has been the biggest change is the distribution system. Remember the labels controlled what was available, so it was very dificult to put out music without having access to distribution. Now, the labels don't own it anymore, that part of the game has changed. Its now a vast thing spread amongst dozens of companies that host songs, dozens of companies that help artists with web presence and analytics, and the stores that act as "front ends" where people buy music (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, etc..).
To distribute music thes days, the internet is all you need. Anybody can make and album and put it out, and they do. You can cheaply source your own distribution to the front ends. My distributor is $35 a year.
That is why there is so much music out there now. And why so much of it sucks.
The labels are now just marketing firms with deep pockets. The labels are no longer investing in acts long term. They only care about "sure things", or acts that they can find on shows like "The Voice, American Idol, etc..." because they come with market notoriety already.