Music Week – Issue 1383, 2023
English | 96 pages | pdf | 66.66 MB
Welcome at Music Week Magazine Issue 1383, 2023
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending Dolly Parton’s London press conference to launch her first ever rock album, aptly titled Rockstar. She was, as ever, wit and charm personified. “I don’t think I’m gonna lose any country fans, and if I do, it won’t be many and I probably won’t miss ’em,” she laughed, when discussing the prospect of alienating her core audience with the project. Things got more serious, however, when the notion was presented to her that she could live on as a hologram or disembodied AI voice after she’s left this mortal coil. Forget working 9 to 5, Dolly, how about eternity?
“Well, I’ve left a great body of work behind,” she pondered. “I’ll have to decide on how much of the high tech stuff I want to be involved in, because I don’t want to leave my soul here on this earth. When I’m gone, I want to fly with it. But I’ll be around, we’ll find ways to keep me here.”
The key word there is “ways”. Plural. The sheer amount of different paths successful artists must now plot is staggering. And some of them have proven to be incredibly successful. For all the scepticism surrounding hologram technology, few could argue against the power of what ABBA Voyage has achieved. Not only has their groundbreaking show passed one million visitors since launching in May 2022, it has also brought their music to younger generations: still the undefeated way of protecting a legacy.
“The music has reached a lot of people that it hadn’t reached before,” remarked Chris Dashwood of Universal Music Recordings about their joint win with Polar Music for ABBA in the Catalogue Marketing category at the Music Week Awards 2023. “When you go and see [ABBA Voyage], there are so many young people, so many children and so many people that are discovering ABBA for the first time.”
This really drives home that we’re now a long, long way past the point of artists just leaving a recorded catalogue behind and maybe being involved in the odd book or documentary. Indeed, when I interviewed Dolly Parton for Music Week Magazine a couple of years ago, I asked her about how she was approaching managing her legacy in her own lifetime. The dominant way in which that was being considered by her peers at the time was catalogue buyouts.
“As a business-minded person, you have a lot of things to consider,” Parton told me of her strategy when it comes to planning for the future. “Control is one thing, but being smart and being in control? That’s the real thing.”
I think the industry can learn a lot from Parton’s philosophy, especially one of her more unique approaches. She has an unreleased song locked in a box in her Tennessee amusement park Dollywood that will not be opened until 2045. Neither unreleased demo, nor hastily-assembled posthumous project without artist involvement, it’s a creative, distinctly human bid to defy mortality. As with most issues in life, Dolly Parton usually has the solution.
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